It is many things. It is not nebulous though. We just need to keep shaving the concept to see what's underneath.
There are many assumptions and systems created around the single concept of mental health. Each person has their own understanding. There are many systems of truth and many things allowed because of this truth.
Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity is one. This is a legal concept. A person who has committed a serious crime is not guilty because they're mentally ill. Rather than prison they usually face possible unlimited incarceration in a modern asylum.
In the UK those not found guilty of a crime can also be locked up indefinitely without trial if they are considered mentally ill and at risk of committing a serious crime. The tenets of innocent until proven guilty and due process before loss of liberty are disregarded by the amended Mental Health Act. A person who is mentally ill can be remanded to indefinite psychiatric incarceration and there is no requirement for a treatment to even exist let alone be provided. The law was amended to make this possible and in so doing the medico-legal framework allows justice to be subverted, all in the name of dealing with those with mental health problems who are problematic.
How is it possible that systems of justice seem to be ignored when it comes to mental illness. Medico-legal instruments allow for the same punishment - loss of liberty - as the criminal justice system uses for the worst crimes in the UK. Of course psychiatric wards might be better but the frightening truth is the best prisons are better than the worst psychiatric wards.
Prisoners have more freedom, rights and protection when they're incarcerated because it is assumed that the healthcare profession would only do good things. This can be a false assumption. The same protocol of punishment is used in both psychiatric hospitals and in prisons.
The jailers are doctors and nurses in the former and it is assumed they treat people well. After all, they're healers. Looking into the history of psychiatry and learning about what happens in other countries quickly dispels this notion.
Lesbians are tortured to change their sexuality in Ecuador. Homosexuals are still persecuted in other countries without the help of the mental health system but when it's done by doctors and nurses it's easier for the public to be fooled that this is a good thing. Electro-convulsive therapy is still forced on people in developed world nations. This treatment causes harm and kills. Recent evidence shows it doesn't even work. Water boarding, a now outlawed torture which is not used by civilised nations even when interogating prisoners of war, was used on psychiatric patients first.
These inhumane treatments are all possible because of what happens when you call something a mental illness.
Where this comes from is an important question? Why do we allow this sort of injustice to happen to the mentally ill? Instead of exploring this I'm going to come back to the other side of the coin of mental illness.
We also allow the privilege of the invalid. The mentally ill are looked after by the welfare state in a different way to those who aren't mentally ill. They're higher priority and they get a higher rate of state support. This is the extension of the privilege of the invalid, the privilege extended to those who have physical illness
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