Diversity and mental illness (and learning difficulties) (a rambling rant)

Diversity is a complex concept. It's not just about race. It's about gender, religion and ultimately individual diversity on many measures.

The mental health system fundamentally works against diversity in its aspect as a system of enforcing temporary cultural or social norms. The hospitalisation of black activists in the 1970s using the diagnosis of schizophrenia is as potent example of this as the overdiagnosis rate of black men with schizophrenia today (very high rates of overdiagnosis in the UK and US but not in the Caribbean.

I wonder how many essential human experiences are incorrectly lost because of mispathologisation based on the system as a from of socio-political control.

Psychiatry's greatest failing in the aspect of diversity - true diversity - in the treatment of mental illness is the treatment of the individual, i.e. by choosing to treat individual in reduces diversity of the human experience, condition, behaviours, emotions, choices and ways of being. I think that covers everything the mental health system chooses to define.

No. Wait. I've made a mistake. I forgot about learning disabilities. These are often let out of the definition of mental ilness but they're mental illnesses as much as any other is. The social model is disability is the only unifying concept for the spectrum of things in my opinion. The biomedical model of illness is not true in clinical practice nor modern use of diagnosis. The biomedical model may not justify the medicalisation of behaviour, emotion, experience of consciousness or IQ.


Anyway, by treating the individual psychiatry fundamentally reduces the diversity of the human race and attempts to produce automotons (human beings that are like machines). Many constructs do, for example much of formal education is to mould a human being into a robot ready for the factories (which means all work and education establishments which follow the factory mode of work invented as part of the Industrial Revolution). None apart from psychiatry calls itself healthcare so none but psychiatry have the privilege of medicine (which allows the use of dangerous treatments such as ECT to treat what is considered a biological illness and allowed because every dotor used to take a Hippocractic Oath at the moment they graduate to become a doctor which says something along the lines of "first, do no fucking harm to your patient, you twats." OK. I added the last two words. Not sure Hippocrates would be so forthcoming but I think even he would be outraged at what the medical profession embodied in psychiatry has become.

Treating physical illness is different from treating the outcomes, the prognosis according to the social model of disability and the occupational/social outcomes psychiatric research, of mental illness. Making people more 'normal' and making society less diverse...may be a necessary evil. The paradigm of medicine should be applied though. The paradigm of socio-political controlling forces that work to make humanity into a thing for the value of the 'machine' (the society that needs robots rather than humans) needs a different sort of analysis and one without the privilege of 'do gooding' that comes with associating this paradigm with the medical profession.

It is not the only route of compassion in seeing that certain types of behaviour can be treated by considering a person's individuality a biological problem. Society can be changed and the diversity of the human race preserved for future generations who will need to exploit the value of the severely mentally 'ill' for the benefit of a society far in advance of what shit we live amongst in 2010.

After all, any advanced society is a more equal society. But perhaps that's just my bias. To see the individual as equal to any other. To see our potential unrealised to be something we all have in common. To see our humanity in our difference rather than our similarity, but to see this most of all as the strength of the human race I have to put up with being a member of.