They call us ill but they used to define us in other ways. Just a quick look into the historu of civilisation can see that human behaviour used to be pathologised in a different way to psychiatry.

When I say pathologised I should mean "be made an illness" but with mental illness ithe meaning can apply to what religion did. It gave labels and explanations for people and behaviours. It was a different system of laws to crime, ones which could still suffer extreme punishment (no change there).

The mental health and psychiatric paradigm or idea is a Western idea invented when religion waned but there was no replacement for in scientifitc terms.

Medicine supposedly brought the ideals of the Industrial Age to the question, or problem, of the human condition.

Here's the bloody brilliant thing. It did, eventually. Even the old skool of critical psychiatry, bad boys like Szasz, and modern antipsychiatrists like Bentall compared psychiatry to astrology they had to be present to the fact (according to science) that psychiatry has taken this form of labelling and applied science to it well, eventually. They're done far better than the KKK with black people or the Church with gays by wrapping up this prejudice and hokem with science.

What's amazing is the application of scientific principles through the latter half of the twentieth century brought results. It didn't really, truly discover mental illnesses. That's just a temporary value judgement. They discover a system to predict life course in their time based on a cluster of behavioural or emotional symptoms which has a degree of reliability and validity more than astrology. Just a little more but enough to be called science.

But they didn't find real illnesses. They just called them that. They found people and society can create the factors which cause the negative effects of social disability. They also found without realising that it is society and people which cause the prognosis, which can be viewed biomedically but in so doing only sees a small part of the effect, but this biomedical basis of prognosis is essentially arbitary in a biomedical sense because as....well lots of things other than biology change the illness ceases to be or ceases to considered by doctors an illness.

What I'm talking about is pretty obvious and I'll briefly reiterate. You can apply the paradigm of illness to homosexuality but when society changes then the illness disappears. Not a fucking illness then.

Now the boring stuff out the way, boring for regular readers, let the interesting stuff begin.

The application found something. It found phenotypes. There are other names given to discovering types of human being. Psychopathology research seeks to discover the types of people who, in whatever time or culture of whatever other variable, do worse in life. They might die quicker, they may be excluded and do less well at work but only in the circumstances they're in, temporal circumstances.

They discovered certain behaviours and emotions caused other people to, intuitively, create the social disability. And society itself of course, the collective systems which are meant to ...well my view is society looks after every human being and treats us equally.

Psychiatry focuses on the individual because this is convenient and is in line with their traditionally biomedical construct. As the medical profession grows in power it seeks methods outside the true role of a healer in society: it seeks to change lifestyle.

Smoking cessation is an example but perhaps obesity is a better one. I'm not sure. I'm drunk.

Obesity is not an illness. It causes illness and it causes disability. It can be 'treated', i.e. it can be changed, but this is a change in the behaviours. When behaviour can't be controlled effectively (defined by EBM standards) doctors can resort to drugs or even physical treatments to 'treat' such as a gastric bypass which produce the desired result.

Medicine or applied medical thinking has applied science to the idea that some people live poorer quality lives because of who they are. The psychiatric movement considers this reason enough to change the individual. Those who really buy into the propaganda call it distress and use concepts which...well...they're just ways to normalise society based on the idea that suffering comes from you rather than society and people causing that misery.

There is, as yet, a nebulous and, in my opinion, unnamed concept. Society and people cause the illness. Any good doctor could see what needs to be healed. But then any good doctor would never use the term mental illness.