What is mental health and mental illness?

I've spent so long thinking about this question it has driven me mad.

It is easier to say what it isn't and communicate this than it is to say what it is.

It isn't something doctors should have purview over. Its not an illness for a start. But that's not the important reason. The important thing is the privilege and protection of the medical paradigm.

Doctors are seemingly untouchable. Their profession comes with a high degree of trust and respect from the public. Decision makers, I.e. politicians, don't understand much about doctors and medicine but trust the profession to get it right.

It is, after all, the expectation that doctors always do the right or positive thing. This is why there is little oversight of psychiatry except by lay people who've either been through bad experiences or know someone who has. There is no oversight or checking in the same way there is for prisons where it is assumed that bad things will happen.

Human rights campaigners often fight for the oppressed. They lobby for monitoring and aginst coercive or inhumane actions. And yet so few of the mainstream human rights organisations pick up the banner for the rights of the mentally ill. But of course why would they need to? Doctors look after the ill and doctors do good things....right?

No. It my opinion it is wrong. The mentally ill are just people. They're not ill. They're different. They're considered abnormal in their emotions and behaviour. This is fundamentally what psychiatry does: it presides over these social judgements in the way religions used to. It judges and explains the human condition and its vagries.

The fundamental of medicine is biological deficit or difference and these can be found using objective techniques but the mentally ill are different in a different way. Their different because they exhibit behaviours and emotions which are different from temporary and cultural judgements of this thing which people term normal but don't really think what it means in practice.

As the opposite of mentally ill, normal is docile, emotionless adaptability as a perfect concept. In practice it is people who have a little emotion but not a lot, who react a litte to life events - as one should to social norms - but not too much. It is a person with little anima, few eccentricities and who is as bland as bland can be.

Extreme and undesirable differences are called mentally ill. Labels and systems of labelling are used to categorise these differences into different types of people and human experience and externalisation. Studies are done to show brain differences and this is how human difference is called an illness. Prognosis or outcomes studies are done to show just how poorly people who are different do in life in this shit of a world where only docile, lifeless machines can prosper adequately and difference entails stigma and discrimination. Epidemiological studies are done to show how many of the human population are different in a certain way. Economics assessments then put a price tag on solving these problems using mental health and social care systems and say things like "the burden of mental illness costs society X billion a year" without any consideration of the suffering of the individual because of society's burden.

Then politicans, journalists, judges and who ever else believe this shit.m

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