course (the prognosis of social disability: the worse occupational and
social outcomes based on the diagnosis) Astrology used the stars to
guess at a person's future.
Psychiatry is psychopathology. It looks at what people perceive is wrong
with a person's mind or personality or behaviour. Psychosanology is a
word for the opposite science. If it had developed the same way as
psychiatry it would predict a person might do better in life based on a
cluster of symptoms. Had the concept been understood within psychiatry I
think the most important thing - the relationship between bad and good -
would have been noted.
The psychosocial understanding of mental ill health says that much of
mental illness is a product of environmental factors. It's a product of
a person's childhood, where they grew up, the negative experiences and
the moments that changed their life irrevocably. But many successful
people and people who have never had a diagnosis of mental illness also
go through these shitty things in life. When people start investigating
the lives of geniuses, heroes and significant people in history they can
easily find many examples of bad life experiences.
It interests me that there is little study into the science of wellness
of the mind compared to science of illness. It is assumed the opposite
of a depression scales s a measure of happiness (certainly the Harvard
prof who put out the "happiness is infectious study" felt it suitable to
use a depression scale as a measure of happiness however he was forced
to use a healthcare measure available in the Framington Heart Study data
rather than chose one suitable for his research). Does psychiatry need
CBT to see the glass half full?
Looking at life crisis psychopathologically or the extremes of human
consciousness and the human condition is a poor science. Life crisis can
bring about change if the circumstances are right. It can bring growth
if the person can understand it as growth. Instead anyone who
experiences life crisis sufficient to be hospitalised is called ill.
There is no attempt to understand their experience or seek the good.
They are drugged to end the experience and make them 'normal' and
passive or like a robot that doesn't go through these extremes.
This is dumb. I'm grateful that there are organisations and smarter
thinkers who are helping people to see these experiences as something
positive. The Hearing Voices movement represents a psychosanological
perspective on expereinces which once were pathologised as madness. One
of the perspectives is that the experience is a gift, albeit one that's
hard to understand and live with in the mad times we do. They lack the
science but it's sort of like what psychiatry was like 200 years ago.
They don't have the backing of the pharmaceutical industry nor any sort
of funding anywhere near the level of what the psychiatric profession has.
Helping people to see past the label and the stigma is essential to
better outcomes in my option. But understanding that life crisis is part
of life for some people is very important in the understanding of the
human condition. Psychology is far more complex than biology and that's
clear from the tiny effect sizes seen in all mental health research
compared to real healthcare and science. A review of 1000 papers on
psychological therapies (which wanted to look into publication bias
rather than the effect size of all PT research) published earlier this
year n the British Journal of Psychiatey found a total effect size of
about two thirds once publication bias had been compensated for. Anyway,
I think there are many successful mentally ill people who may be able to
help psychiatrists understand what people like Jacqui Dillion are trying
to explain. Or We is are least.
It may be thought necessary that if a person is sad for two weeks then
they need to stop being sad because otherwise too much productivity is
lost. We are thought to be slaves to the machine that creates GDP but as
science and technology progress our need to be robot-like is less and
the value of what is truly human becomes more significant. Just look at
the car industry where manufacturing has been taken over by robots that
can bang the same piece of metal into the same shape all day long,
rarely miss a day of work and can be treated like shit. Cars still need
creative designers.
Our lives would be nothing without the great writers, artists, musicians
and other people who made things that don't contribute to GDP per se but
are gold for Gross Domestic Happiness or any measure of humanity that
doesn't simplify us into how many cars and phones we produce. Psychiatry
rislss bankrupting humanities capital in this area by labelling things
far too simplistically. Things that need to be understood through the
interrelationship between good and bad rather than seeing just bad or
just good. It's very hard though. People seem to like easy answer rather
than complex things closer to the absolute truth.
No comments:
Post a Comment