Now there's a bloody big word no one has heard of. "Psychosanology paradigm" used to be a Google Whack, one I didn't bother listing but wrote about on my anonymous online notepad.
Psychosanology is a word I came across in Keith tudor's book Mental Health Promotion: paradigms and practice. It is a word few have heard of but a concept which is important to many. It is the wellness of people. It is the benefit of the mentally ill. In my own twisted definition it is the relationship between illness and wellness, or vice versa.
I only made it through the first chapter but the chaper took as long for me to read and this work takes to write. There were so many new concepts. The concept of psychosanology was something I had an idea about for myself but didn't know the posh, long word for it.
I think many people understand this idea too. Bad things can be good, like negative emotions or traumatic experiences. It's not rocket science. It becomes rocket science when scientific methods are applied though.
Psychiatry is usually described as psychopathology if one were to chose to use big words. It is about illness or difference or deficit in people's psyche. They use sophisticated techniques to understand more and bring extraordinary functions such as predicting a person's negative life path based on a diagnostic interview.
What they don't do is predict positive outcomes in the same way as an astrologer might but they make their predictions about prognosis based on label with an unsurpassed degree of accuracy.
The same degree of science hasn't been applied to wellness. It occassionally crops up but the wealth of psychology and psychiatry research is into pathologised human types, at least the high quality stuff which gets the big funding.
This is where mental health lacks knowledge. It is so well equipped to describe pathology but not sanology. It is so well funded to establish label and prognosis but the system seems lacking at effective ways to halt the detrioration of life outcomes for the severely mentally ill. Surely a strong scientific basis for sanology would be a useful starting point?
There's another reason psychosanology is an important concept. This is quite hard to explain but I'll do my best.
Mental health I've described as spectra. It is a scale from one end to the other. The negative end is well studied but the positive end isn't, at least not in a scientific way.
The continua have judgements applied, judgements of right and wrong or good and bad. Good mental health is good. This may not be true.
I can't reinforce this enough. Mental health described as a continuum doesn't easily lead to scientific and real judgements of good and bad.
Mental health is a concept. I hope I've explained that it has many discrete meanings, each of which are different concepts. This is almost easy to understand. What I'm attempting to convey here is the idea that the negative aspect may not be, in truth, truly negative.
Psychosanology is a word to describe a concept which is as complex as mental health. It should describe the study of wellness of the mind but I'm taking it to mean something else, something a bit more advanced in a way. (The reason is because I don't know the big word to make all my little words into one. Words relate to concepts and I speak to communicate concepts but this one particular field of study has no big word associated with it, at least no big word that truly delivers on what I'm talking about.)
The concept, etymologically speaking, means wellness of the mind and what I say about the lack of high quality research into this is true. Read enough randomised controlled trials published in well repected psychiatric journals and you'd come to the same conclusion. The science doesn't seek the complete answer to the human truth. It looks at the bad stuff.
And this is great because of the prognosis aspect but the prognosis aspect is not where psychiatric science delivers. It doesn't help people recover. Not often.
I'm trying to extend your thinking one step further
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