Society doctors

Consider that mental illness can be healed (or caused) by society
changing. One aspect is increased acceptance. Another is social systems
and formal constructs changing, for example the introduction of
flexi-time. Another is actual social or cultural influence, for example
whatever is behind the significant shift in the prevalence of
hysteria/conversion disorder plus specific sexual disorders or the rapid
change of the presentation of anorexia in Hong Kong after a media story
published Westernised symptoms.

This is little regarded in psychiatric research and there's a dearth in
this activity from the psychiatric profession.

Death is perhaps a poor word to use since it implies a need or want for
interventions in society designed by psychiatrists, a profession where
sociology (perhaps precisely socio-politics but I think you know what I
mean) is rarely considered in early learning or ongoing education.
Psychiatrists and psychiatry focus on changing the individual and seeing
deviance from undefined, and often unchallenged, norms of behaviour as
an illness to be changed at individual level.

I say we need a new profession! Heck. We says we need a new profession,
one not borne from a bastardisation of another profession as in
pychiatry, the illegitimate son of medicine and social/behavioural
regulation.

So perhaps entitling this post Society Doctors was a bad start. Bugger.
But you know what I mean. A professional body of people who's goal it is
to heal the illness in society which creates disability according to the
social model expanded to consider societal disability, i.e. the
disability that causes the difference between rich and poor
(irrespective of common constructs of social disability). This is an
objective of psychiatry as it is an objective for anyone who wants
equality but expands the ideal of social disability to a wider section:
those who are disabled by disadvantage.

Who but the odd idealist truly seeks to create more equality.
Politicians will use such idealism as rhetoric to get elected but
history shows they lose this idealism quicker than voter can learn to
hate democracy because their elected officials can lie. Every decade
seems to produce more and more reports and pieces of research but with
no action. The rich die richer and later. The poor die poorer and earlier.

Put it this way, low socio-economic status can be more disabling than a
person with a common mental disorder born into a very wealthy home.
(This is not to say that those who have money and suffer a common mental
disorder nor am I saying they are in no way disabled by society, just
the comparison between two individuals needs to be illustrated to bring
poverty into the sphere of social disability).

It sounds like a strange idea - healing society to heal individuals -
but it makes sense in my head.