A biological problem causes most physical and mental disabilities. It is
the biological problem of blindness that creates the disability. But
there is nothing wrong with being blind. Some humans are blind. They're
still human beings. Two hundred years ago the blind would have been
problematic and most of them wouldn't be able to work. The same is true
of a person with no legs. It's a problem for other people. But a human
who's got no legs is still a problem.
In mental health it's the idea of social disability and problematicness.
The most well established true illness is dementia praecox,
schizogruppen or the severe mental illnesses. In my belief there is
nothing wrong with this phenotype. They're still part of the human race.
They're not ill. I have symptoms of behaviour and emotion that have
biological cause, just as I have qualities of behaviour and emotion that
have a biological cause. The symptoms are just the problematic ones.
They're what annoy other people such that 200 years ago they could have
called me mad. There's the psychosocial caused behaviours and emotions
that are problematic too. My biological makeup and my life experiences
created the phenotype. Psychiatry judges the phenotype ill. But the
illness is often really problematicness rather than true illness. There
is no normal level of neurotransmitters by any scientific definition in
the "chemical imbalance" bullshit. There is a problematicness
regardless, a problematicness that makes for poorer social and
occupational outcomes. This prognosis is the social disability and why
all mental illness and personality disorders should be termed mental
health problems: because it's accurate rather than any bull shit
political correctness reason.
It's pretty horrible to call myself problematic, to understand that it
is my self, my personality, my being, my mind and my phenotype that is
pathologised and judged unwanted by others. It is the truth though.
Anyone who is gay will understand this I hope. At least anyone who
experienced their sexuality judged illness and problematic until society
changed.
It is my belief that there is nothing wrong with me or anyone who is
mental health problematic. We're creations of genetics and environmental
factors. No more. No less. Always human. No less and to never be treated
as less. But the judgement of the psychiatric label relates to the
prognosis of the diagnosis. It identifies a type that will do worse in
life because we are a problem to society, a malformed one just as it was
a malformed society that called gay people ill.
In this aspect - diagnosis and prognosis - psychiatry leads the way in
telling a person's future. Thomas Szasz likened psychiatry to astrology,
a pseudosceince but one that attempts to predict a person's future. The
prediction of the label is always a negative one. It means a person is
more likely to poorer life outcomes. The extraordinary thing about the
cluster of symptoms approach and the scientific methods applied by
people like Robert Spitzer and many others means psychiatry has an
ability to predict a person's future which is more reliable than
guesswork. Even Bentall's criticisms in Madness Explained and my own
criticisms of the problems of diagnosis and application of research in
clinical practice must be tempered with the respect of just how
extraordinary the achievements of psychiatric science are.
Science aside, what modern psychiatry does is attempt to change
individuals so they lose the symptoms or emotions that make them a
problem. The symptoms are adjudged to be the reasons why people will do
worse in life. I've always had the perspective that society could change
instead. The people could change. Through antistigma mental health
promotion and the healing of the illness in society and the rebuilding
of the informal mental health care system (people looking after each
other and caring for the excluded and unwanted) and workplaces accepting
people as they are rather than despising them for their disability the
prognosis could be changed.
I'm totally with Martin Luther King and his "I have a dream..." speech.
http://www.mlkonline.net/dream.html
Imagine endless.
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