The figures speak for themselves. Early death, illness and intense misery such that many kill themselves.
This is the legacy of 100 years of the label of schizophrenia. The label and the science do little to help and may even hinder the lives of schizophrenics.
It was henry t ford who said some thing like don't find fault, find a solution.
Mine is simple. Change the world.
Oh yes, I know it is difficult. The problem is it is also necessary. Treating individuals alone doesn't work. All it does it allow wider parts of the diversity of humanity to become normalised through labelling and treatment. If we took the thickness of a psychiatric textbook as a measure of the percentage of the human population who are defined as mentally ill then we see an evergrowing list of abherrances and percentages of people who fit within the mental ill category are rising exponentially.
Psychiatry allowed a terrible trend. It allowed the hiding and suppression of human difference. Treatment means to make normal, to diminish the abherrance. Even distress is an abherrance, a deviantion from a fictional norm which is the negative aspect of emotion.
First the mad disappeared into the asylums. With this one move the symptoms of madness disappeared from human view for generations and society evolved without having to be constructed to allow for the full diversity. Too different was choppped out and disappeared from view.
As time went on people forgot about the wide spectrum of the human condition. Craziness disappeared and slightly less crazy suddenly became a target for psychiatry. Then not that crazy. Then not crazy at all.
All became targets for treatment, the benign thing which doctors do to illnesses. The problem is they're not illnesses. They're just people.
Disadvantage and predictable prognosis exists. Don't get me wrong. Some types of people in this shit of a life do worse because they're different. As far as I am concerned this is an adequate summation of the social model of disability.
Crazy, cranky, horny,excitable, too happy, too sad, etc. These symptoms which certain types of people express more than others leads to a worse life.
As time has progress this understand has gotten better. Balancing systems have come into existence, for example the welfare state. This helps and hinders. It doesn't benefit the person's life outcomes other than keeping them alive. Psychiatric treatment has gotten better. At least the mad can leave the confines of the psychiatric ward but their madness is still caged by medication and their life tainted by it too.
Psychiatry still has one mode of operation: change the individual. Psychiatry is rarely the instigator of social change to accept or adapt to difference.
Herein lies the future. Herein lies the real change to the terrible life outcomes. Change the world to change schizophrenia outcomes. And other outcomes.
There is something wrong with what is called the Western world when valuable people are dying early and living miserable lives. We only need step back to Bleuler's time to see the plight of the homosexual or unmarried mother to see that the idea of illness can change and when it does thing get a little better for those once pathologised and treated a different way.
Unmarried mothers today are much better looked after. They're not locked up. They're supported. They're no longer considered mentally ill or mentally unhygenic (another term for mental health in the UK around Bleuler's time). Some even have jobs. There's no stigma. There's no treatment to stop unmarried mothers from become unmarried mothers. Their children are not taken away.
Imagine yourself as a single mother now. It'd be pretty tough. Imagine...just try...to think what it would have been like a hundred years ago? There would be a world of difference between the quality of life and the outcomes. A hundred years ago single mothers did so much worse in life.
Treatment wasn't to normalise single mothers. Change was brought about by social progress. Their lives are better because society got better and stopped judging and disadvantaging single mothers.
In a hundred years time daily life will be very different. Reality itself will be unrecognisable as electronic and real worlds become seamless pervasive experiences. Human augmentation and progress in medical science will bring new challenges and benefits to human health.
What will be constant is human disadvantage. What we would recognise a hundred years in the future is some people are treated without equality...or equity...they'll probably call it something different in the future.
This disadvantage and its rectification is all that I see as good about psychiatry as a system. It is impressive to reasonably accurately predict a person is going to do worse in life. It is useful and truly beneficial to positively impact the prognosis.
For all the money and drugs and human endeavour the current best efforts of psychiatry reduce the burden of disability by a sixth or a seventh. The funny thing? This figure refers to the burden on society, not the individual. Taken in context with the statistic that 20% of suicides in the UK are by schizophrenics in is a saddening thing for many reasons, not least of which the focus of the idea of disability and economics is too often on the burden to society.
It is temporal society and culture which is the burden on the individual. Normalisation treatments often don't work and when they do they make the problem worse. They allow society to significantly advantage a few or a certain homogenous group rather than the full expanse of our species. This increases the burden on the individual in future generations.
Yes. This is as crazy an argument as to ask healthcare to change society. It is as fucking crazy as healthcare becoming a tool of sociopolitical control and normalisation rather than a profession which heals genuine illnesses. It is crazy that people are treated to make them normal to help them when it is society which is ill.
Sent from my smartphone
No comments:
Post a Comment