There is something real to it but it is not a real illness. It just
happens to be treated that way and there are good and bad things which
come from it.
As science took over from religion as the power of truth and progress in
Western societies there became a new problem: the problem of the mad.
They were unwanted and didn't fit in with the new shape of society and
culture. In fact the category was broader than madness. It included dumb
people and other types of people who were unwanted or didn't fit in.
As with the problems of mental disability today these people were
outcast, disadvantaged and excluded by the masses. They ended up poor,
alone and homeless. Or worse. In an act of compassion the old leper
houses and other buildings were used to create the asylum system.
There's more on the history of this social ill on Andrew Roberts'
fantastic website.
http://studymore.org.uk/
(Andrew Roberts is one of those amazing and little know heroes of mental
health. He has toiled throughout his life for the lives of survivors.)
When the asylum system was created there was no psychiatric
establishment. There was just the problem of the people who ended up in
the asylums. These human beings who once roamed free were incarcerated
in the confines of these buildings across Europe. At this point there
was no concept of "mental illness". Madness and dumbness existed. Other
labels could also get a person into the asylum.
This is a very rough sketch of what lead up to the creation of the
asylum system and the reasoning at the time for the incarceration of so
many. What is the important thing is this period removed the mad and
dumb from society and from view for generations so people forgot how
diverse the human condition is. The demarcation between sane and insane
were arbitrary. There was no hard and fast rule. Nonetheless this
construct had a very real and damaging impact on the history of the
development of developed world society, one which may take centuries to
heal. To understand how arbitrary it is it is worth remembering the
history of homosexuality.
I assume many paradigms were applied to those incarcerated in
psychiatric wards. Some of the caretakers of these establishments may
have kept with religious interpretations. Others might have used the
concept of mental hygiene. There may have been other labels and
paradigms of explanation applied to those in the asylums and I'm sure
there would have been heated debates about which was correct.
In the end, and in a way sort of rightly, they decided that behaviour
had biological cause just like the symptoms of dementia. This is a
classic organic mental illness. Applying the paradigm of medicalisation
used here to the new mental and behavioural disorders which were being
classified by the likes of Emil Kraeplin made sense and so psychiatric
as a field of medicine was borne. There was little concept of social
disability though it was understood that many of those in the asylums
would do worse in the world outside these institutions. They were
abnormal, after all...
Psychologists as a movement were lower in the hierarchy. Though their
model had value to psychiatrists their primary faith was the biomedical
model. The likes of Freud and Jung battle against the psychiatrist to
gain foothold in the codified textbooks - the psychiatric manuals or
textbooks which were the bible of the replacement for religious
interpretations of behaviour and emotion.
This biomedical sense is why mental illness is an illness however it is
a false construct. It came about as a convenient explanation using the
new dogma of truth: science. The history of homosexuality should be
enough for anyone to see how false this construct was. Other diagnoses
will follow a similar path once the public are ready to see things
differently. Sadly many are neither interested nor entertained nor
willing to be entertained by the possibility that mental illness is not
an illness.
What it is is many things which serve a purpose but these are unrelated
to anything which the medical profession should be allowed to have
purview over. The assumption of illness allows 'treatment' without
question...but that is enough for now.
No comments:
Post a Comment