Not really. There's so much more though.
Concepts are so important. While I've not been writing I've been thinking. The paradigm of illness is well applied to human behaviour. It is easy enough to say there is evidence to support the idea that mental illness is a real illness. What I have done is say there's evidence to say it isn't an illness.
Or it could be called a psychosocial illness rather than a biomedical one. Or even a biopsychosocial illness.
The change in the word would unite all the stuff...just like the word mental health does.
The thing is...if it isn't biomedical then it isn't an illness. It is something else.
This is basically the reduction of what I'm trying to say into a few words.
The understanding of the human condition, our variances and 'abnormalities' has advanced significantly over the last couple of hundred years. It started off in psychiatry but it need not have been medicalised.
Before psychiatry there were simply asylums. Before asylums there was the prognosis, the exclusion and the stigma. The mad became under the purview of doctors later on and this is all what the biomedical thing is about.
It is an illness because doctors treat it and because of the biomedical model. The model empowers doctors to manage and treat and do whatever to the mentally ill. This is because they're treating a real illness which causes the socially or culturally undesirable 'symptoms'.
Whatever mental health is or isn't it is ruled over by the medical profession. The decision makers and law makers - almost exclusively until very recently - believe it is an illness.
With all the compassion of mental illness and treatment there is also forced treatment. Forced lesbian treatment clinics still exist in South America and they're an easy example of what is currently unacceptable in the West but is still done to other mentally ill people here, mentally ill people who haven't been demedicalised yet.
It is worth remembering that the UK has one of the highest overdiagnosis rates of black people with schizophrenia. They are overdiagnosed 9 times compared to their white counterparts but this effect isn't seen in the West Indies.
What can be done to lesbians in ecuador and schizophrenics in the UK is all possible because it's a true mental illness, it is biologically caused and unwanted and will do worse in life. This is what the biomedical model brought: forced treatment because human types were judged to be the result of biological illness.
The whole system and way of thinking changes if the model deviates from the biomedical model. It is important to remember psychiatric patients lose their liverty and this is the worst punishmment handed out in the UK and other countries. The way this punishment is allowed is through a very well funded system which demands guilt must be proven and innocence presumed. This is the right of anyone but a severly mentally ill person and this right is denied because of the biomedical model.
No other model has the foundations to automatically use this power, not if the power is used justly. The power of forced treatment is being used on lesbians in other countries. Lesbians there are mentally ill and a century of psychiatric science would have evidence to support the medicalisation of homosexuality.
Other paradigms have different tenets which become used to achieve the same objective but they do not deserve the same way of thinking. It is in this respect where this question I've been thinking about has such relevance.
When you string together a concept or new idea there's stuff it is based upon. In science lessons we called in first principles. In other fields these may be called tenets. These are the basic roots or ingredients from which so m.uch of the later stuff is made from when it comes to the thought processes and explanations.
Those must be correct otherwise the rest is a house of cards.
More importantly in mental health, what's made possible by those tenets or first principles of the biomkedical model represent some of the greatest ills in modern times a by advanced nations upon their own people.
Worse things usually happen to prisoners of war than psychiatric patients. The thing is we all know that bad things happen to prisoners of war. We expect doctors to do good things.
Doctors in their own minds do good things. The people also see it that way. It is an assumption that healers are good people. Doctors save lives and help people too. It is why their profession is so well respected.
This brings privileges though. Doctors are readier to admit their mistakes (in the UK) because they're sued and prosecuted a lot less than in the US where private healthcare is the way most people get their healthcare. When they admitted to killing 1,800 old people every year they got away with it without a slap on the wrist.
I wrote to the Department of Health recently via my local minister. She's good at taking my views forward. They wrote back telling me that I shouldn't worry. The government were reducing the number of deaths to just 600 a year.
The figure I quoted was from a report by the Royal College of Psychiatry. The deaths were caused by the use of a drug on the elderly with dementia. The drug doesn't treat the illness. What it does is it makes people easier to manage.
Carers and care home worker assumed a pill given by a doctor is a good thing. The pill didn't treat the illness. What it did is suppress unwanted behaviour.
In a sense this drug is a bit like a pain killer but instead of reducing an individual's pain the drug reduced the pain of others.
it also killed the patient but that doesn't matter. Doctors were treating a biopsychosocial illness...
The paradigm of illness means the elderly can be killed - when the state knows they're being killed unnecessarily - when the treatment doesn't cure the biological component of the illness. It just uses biological methods to suppress unwanted or undesire behaviour or other traits in the individual - symptoms - at the cost of a 50% reduction in the life expectancy.
What is the cost of not defining mental illness?
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