There's a thing which could be the solution to the problem of mental ill
health.
This thought comes not from considering the idea as an illness. It comes
from recognising that the idea of illness is a mistake and a mistruth. I
prefer the term "the human condition" because it is a step closer to the
absolute truth of what mental illness is describing. A quick flick
through the history of psychiatry and some of the information which is
outside the biomedical paradigm, e.g. Foucault's Madness and
Civilisation, quickly eludcidates that the idea of illness is a construct.
The consideration of the problems covered my the mental health system as
problems of the human condition changes the persepctive in a way which I
hope produces better answers.
Tolerance is one of them. Psychiatry seeks to change individuals. It
used behavioural modification or drugs little different from illegal
narcotics in their purpose. It seeks to remove and hide behaviours so
people do better in a society which sees a blinkered view of the human
condition. Society accepts psychiatry's method because it allows the
ever tightening of what is normal so individuals become homogeneous and
easily function in the modern work and social environments. Psychiatry
seeks to reduce diversity in a time when this is an aim accepted by
society as a good thing.
Tolerance comes from a different angle. It seeks to see the problem as
complex as the human condition. It sees problems in individuals like
psychiatry does but with a different lean. It sees people first, not
illness which are automatically a negative thing. It sees the value of
phenotypes rather than attempts their extinction like a doctor would do
if it were a virus. It's not a virus and it's not an illness but there's
no replacement system. I've chosen the idea of human condition because
it makes sense to me and this idea means there's no perjorative
immediately assumed. There is with mental illness and that's why there's
fundamentally a stigma.
Tolerance for the symptoms of the human condition, for the spectrum of
behaviours individual's express when distresses or whatever else comes
under the massive umbrella of the human internal experience. This is one
of the reasons why people with supposed mental illness - or behavioural
and emotional disorders as the psychiatric textbooks refer to them - do
better in developing world nations. People in those nations are tolerant
of diversity. They still have the social and cultural knowledge that
human beings have a variety of expressions. We're not always happy and
we're not always peaceful. We're not always docile nor quiet. We go
through crazy times and show crazy behaviours. That's normal.
People in the West forgot what normal was after crazy was confined into
the asylum system. Inadvertently in an act of compassion this redoubled
the problems of the human condition and society. All that were mad
disappeared into these asylums for generations, an era known as The
Great Confinement in Foucault's insightful work in the area (which I've
still not read properly but have gleaned a lot from people who have and
used it to inform my thinking).
A part of the human condition became hidden so people forgot the human
condition is pretty weird at times. The confinement of madness hasn't
ended. Medication allowed many of the mad to leave the asylums where
they were incarcerated but they remained incarcerated using chemicals to
restrain and hide the madness. The behaviours of madness had become so
intolerable by this stage that the partially mad became the new mad as
slight divergence from this false idea of a robot-like normal became
considered an illness which should be removed. Step by step, generation
by generation the idea of illness allow the significant reduction of the
diversity of the human race and the blindfolding of the people to a part
of the human condition, a part which is not a negative thing except in
psychiatric thinking which has become enforced upon the people through
subtle means they themselves don't realise (Hanlon's razor is seen here).
Western society lost the ability to tolerate the wide and beautiful
expanse which is the human condition. It is beautiful because of it's
diversity but psychiatry, like some painter who judged the colour red to
be a sin, saw some of it should be pathologised and seen as ugly. They
allowed the tools which allowed the consensus of society - the largest
tribe - to be less tolerant. They allowed the greater exclusion and poor
social outcomes which aren't seen in nations where the psychiatric dogma
has had little influence.
If we can relearn to tolerate the human condition in it's fullest then
we heal mental illness. We also have a far greater concept to apply
science to: the true exploration of the human condition.
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