First incarceration was used to make the mentallly ill disappear. Then drugs were used to free the mentally ill but suppress their symptoms and type. Depressive types were prescribed narcotics to make them cheer up and not be so glum. Manic depressive and schizophrenics had other drugs foisted upon them but these central nervous system drugs were not real treatments.
They were using the power of medical science to change behaviour and being. CNS medications are used to solve psychosocial problems, not real illnesses, but the science is applied as if they were real illnesses and so is the language of change.
Change is what treatment involves but a different type of change to what most physical medications achieve. Drugs for mental disorder arrest the disorder. They can incapacitate individuals to resolve the problem of emotional and behavioural disorders - the stuff which is often a problem for society and can be healed by changes in society or society's norms.
For example, homosexuality is one diagnosis which was healed by forces other than the usual treatment of an illness. It was demedicalised. There still exist other paraphilias which are treated the same way as homosexuality was but today a social change changed the pathologisation of homosexuality. This happened when psychiatrists said it was okay to be gay.
Other 'illnesses' may be healed in similar ways. There is a growing movement who seeks to shift the power-base away from psychiatry's biomedical dogma and domination over humanity. This is the movement which seeks to look at schizophrenia as not an illness. Many just call the idea the social model of mental disorder without fullying comprehending what significance the social model has.
It demands demedicalisation in my opinion because medicalisation - no matter what it purports to achieve - is only one half of the solution. The illness model says the individual must be changed to remove abherrant symptoms. Psychiatry and psychology both work on these aims. They percieve people as ill and healing means changing the person to be more normal.
The social model asks people to consider the impact upon the individual from different cultures and countries, from social factors which can significantly impinge on the disability.
After all, the science of psychiatry exists because of a social problem where the mad were outcast from family and society. Their exclusion was created by dispassionate norms common in the industrial revolution societies. Those who fitted in prospersed. Those who didn't fell into disability and inequality. It was only afterwards when psychiatry and the biomedical model really developed to take custodianship over the asylums and their inmates. This is the beginning of the mental health system and the paradigm of illness as a commonly understood social knowledge about humans who were different in some way.
Unwittingly, psychiatry became a tool of social order instead of something which treats any real illness. Homosexuality was never an illness and neither are any of the paraphilias. They're a social problem for society and a problem for individuals when there aren't suitable structures available in society. This may be hard to accept when considering something like paedophilia but it is easier when considering depression.
Depression may simply be a natural pain which some people suffer. This is the pain of life and a shit life for certain individual types, types who may suffer to much or not feel enough joie de vie. This doesn't have to be an illness but it can be treated by drugs which make the person feel better. The drugs aren't curing any illness because unhappiness isn't an illness however it is also true that some really unhappy people are made happier by SSRIs just as many people are made happy by other things, not all of which are drugs.
Bah...buggered this piece up.
Sent from my smartphone
No comments:
Post a Comment