Something I need to totally rewrite for my schizophrenia treatment document

This bit is an important direction for mental haelthcare but I've gone off on one. It needs to be rewritten to be focused on what's rpactical.

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Changing society

There is no profession tasked with this. It is vital to the true goals of mental healthcare but psychiatry’s mode of operation since its inception has been the change and normalisation of indiviuduals.

The removal of the mad from view created one of the biggest problems in the evolution of civilisation. Enmasse they were confined to asylums and hidden from view for generations. This is one of the great evils of the Industrial Age. In an act of compassion the Great Confinement (Foucault’s term for the creation of the asylum system) removed the extremes of the human condition and valuable human types from society’s view. In so doing it created an illness in society where natural behaviours and inalienable human types became evermore labelled as mad and mentally ill.#

Decades and centuries passed. Those with schizophrenia were imprisoned and maltreated for their entire lives. Many died in these asylums. Without seeing their madness society through psychiatry labelled more and more human experiences and types as abnormal, pathological and mentally ill. The psychiatric textbooks got ever larger.

Society grew more and more to value a human which was like a robot or slave but paid. Anyone who was part of the extremes of the beautiful diversity of the human being became labelled as mentally ill and experienced disability and exclusion, discrimination and stigma.

The invention of community care did little to solve the root illness in society. Madness was confined using the major tranquiliser. The diagnosis of schizophrenia was broadened to pathologise a broader swathe of humanity deemed unfit for life as they were in the malformed post-Industrial Age developed world nations. The major tranquiliser became used on more and more people. Though it allowed the severely mentally ill to live outside the confines of the asylum system they were still not free and the behaviours labelled as madness were still hidden from view by these drugs.

The WHO IPSS results# are but one indicator of this illness in post-Industrial Age societies. Developing world nations offer better results for those with severe mental disabilities because their cultures have not yet gone through the pathogenisis of the illness in developed world nations, yet. The new millennium sees this illness in society spreading across the world,

There are beacons of hope. The Disability Discrimination Act and the Equalities Act. The Human Rights Act. The Convention for the Rights of People with Disabilities. New Horizons. The mission statement of Mind and other charities driven by effecting social change which rectifies the illness in society. And, of course, the landmark Time to Change anti-stigma campaign.

These pitifully few examples are the hope for the future. They are the harringers of the progress required to heal the illness in society which creates the negative outcomes of schizophrenia and other mental disabilities. These disabilities mean people and their value is lost to modern society. It means they suffer when they don’t need to suffer.

It is possible to change this but it takes a leap in government thinking. The beginnings of change happened before the recession struck. The well being movement, Gross Domestic Happiness as a priority of governments and the New Horizons strategy were all beacons of hope lighting the way to a better society for all people.

These were the start of the changing in healing the illness in society which causes the disability, an illness which may go back further than the creation of the asylum system which hid the behaviours called madness for generations. Today the result of this is many people with severe mental disability are excluded from mainstream society. With the UK having one of the lowest rates of employment and education for people with schizophrenia there is a significant amount of change required to overcome the barriers which have been centuries in the making.

I know not if there is the will or the desire in the UK government to make the changes needed. I know what I feel and what I feel is that any true advancement in society is not measured by Gross Domestic Product nor other Industrial Age measures. The measure is how bad life is for those worst off and how wide the gap is between those who have little and those who have lots. Progress is making the lives of the worst off less worse and reducing the inequality gap.

There has already been significant work put into this objective by the UK government over the last half century, from working to providing more homes for the homeless to the plentiful supply of mental health and social care. It is the preservation of the ideals of the NHS even in times of national hardships and the expansion of the Improved Access to Psychological Therapies scheme.

There is so much more to do. The lives of the severely mentally disabled is one of the key areas which are a priority for progress. The solutions I’ve offered here are pitifully weak to help those that have been so let down in life. It will take more than small measures to undo the centuries of injustice faced by those who suffer severe mental disabilities.

The Time to Change programme is the first real step towards this better future and rectifying the problems caused through psychiatry’s methods of treatment. As far as I am aware the UK leads the world in the relative size of its national mental health antistigma and discrimination programme though the programme was initially funded through The National Lottery and Comic relief. It was initiated by Mind and Rethink, two charities which are leading the way towards a better society for all.
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