Let me make a quick separation. There is drug use and drug misuse. Both may e stigmatised but only one is pathologised.
Well...that used to be true. In the last few years there have been calls by some in the mental health movement to pathologise drug use.
How or why? It doesn't matter if they're successful. Their dogma will be substantiated by evidence as is current practice. Treatments will be offered and the public accept this as the right thing. Such is the pattern.
Drug use is fun and doesn't mess up your life. Its the same with lots of stuff. I've tried many drugs and they're fantastic but risky things. The risk is worth the reward.
People who do a bit of drugs and drink but function and work. They're okay right? As long as it's not an addiction which messes up their life?
It's like gambling. We all do a bit here and there. Some don't. But some people get addicted to it.
The thing is when drug use..or gambling...becomes a mental illness in itself, for example like in the islamic religion, then it is enforced. The islamic tradition uses old systems of mental health to ban drugs and gambling. It percieves the ban to be purist but as time has gone on there have been allowances. There are muslims that smoke skunk because it wasn't literally banned but the messgae in the kuran is all drugs allow the devil in. There are islamic banks and muslim people who trade on the stock market even though gambling is banned.
Psychiatry sees the same thing happen. Mental illness is a biologically based construct. Alcohol is addictive because the addiction is physical. Same with heroin. Not cannabis though. Cannabis doesn't cause a physical addiction.
It is psychologically addictive but in the past this wasn't considered something which was within the purview of the mental healthcare system, I.e. it wasn't a biological illness whereas the others were.
Mohammed's pillars of Islam have been torn down by the sands of time just as Kraeplin's tenets of psychiatry have been willfully ignored in the name of progress and whatever else. Kraeplin probably wasn't a schizophrenic but muhamed probably was.
When the idea of illness was applied to an objective quantity, the human race and how individuals express, it was fundamentally based upon a principle. This is what ostensive means in psychiatry terms. The diagnosis strictly adheres to the model of the kraeplinian prototype, the model which allows the application of the paradigm of medical illness.
Now that's already been done the forces with power stick to sway what the word means. Mental illness now covers a wide range of things which are not related to the fundamental concept.
Gambling and drug addictions are pathologised without a strong focus on brain imaging like with schizophrenia. Schizophrenia remains the prototype but even time is chiselling away at Kraeplin's legacy.
The pathologisation of gamlbing and addiction, and schizophrenia in the modern shifted definition of mental health, are also defined by significant or severe psychosocial dysfunction. It fucks up your life, on average.
People who enjoy these vices in pleasure and in moderation usually do okay in life. It doesn't affect their life course. It doesn't mess up their life and they get a lot of pleasure from it.
I'm different.
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