Wednesday, 16 March 2011

If the idea of phenotype versus mental illness doesn't make sense then...

...understand that people get stoned to have fun and enjoy and make themselves feel better. They discover a solution for themselves. Others call it psychosis.

Good skunk has high delta-9-THC content. This causes psychosis on psychiatric measures on test subjects in lab conditions when it is injected. People smoke it to increase their mental health and/or well being. It makes them feel better.

Not everyone does it. Many do. Many induce psychosis intentionally. They don't call it psychosis. They call it being high. Or drunk. They enjoy themselves. They find it helps them on their personal definition of mental health, one analagous to the psychological distress continuum of mental health.

This is different to their phenotype perjoratised using the 'science' of psychiatry. The truth is that psychiatry has pathologised a high (in research settings) which many million people enjoy and makes up part of their lifestyle.

Psychiatry pathologised homosexuals. It used science and medicine to perjoratise a phenotype. Phenotype has no perjorative aspect. Pathologisation and the labels of psychiatry do. That's why I have a major bone to pick with the Royal College of Psychiatry and any other establishment which perjoratises types of people. This includes the KKK as well as the psychiatric hegemony.

The KKK and some American psychiatrists used to share similar ideas. The diagnosis of drapteomania was created to apply this idea of mental illness to black slaves who kept on running away.

Today the UK and US significantly overdiagnose schizophrenia in black men compared to their white counterparts. PANSS, the psychiatric measure of psychosis, is not weighted to any ethnicity. In the Caribbean it is diagnosed equally amongst black and white men.

Phenotype's are truths. The value judgement is a construct of society, culture and individuals. It is not a truth. Mental illness is not a truth.

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We It comes in part from an appreciation that no one can truly sign their own work. Everything is many influences coming together to the one moment where a work exists. The other is a begrudging acceptance that my work was never my own. There is another consciousness or non-corporeal entity that helps and harms me in everything I do. I am not I because of this force or entity. I am "we"