Sunday, 29 January 2012

Human types and psychology

Typing systems are already in existence. I think it is Meyers and Briggs' work which creates the well accepted types of activist-paragmatist-theorist-reflectionist. People are rarely a single type, and all types and combinations are valued. I don't know enough about these types to know if they can change over time. They're used by employers who want empiricial psychological evidence to build their teams the right way, which means based on organisational theory they need a right mix of types in the right positions to make a team work well as greater than the sum of its parts.

The problem is too many still see mental illnesses as illnesses and not different types, different human types which are all part of a spectrum of illness and not a product of a brain illness or supposed chemical imbalance.

Looking to find usefulness is what psychometric stuff is meant to do. These tests seek out the value of people rather than what's wrong with them. The latter is what psychiatrists do - and their science is the science of unwellness of the mind or psychopathology.

They look at a rose and see the thorns. The opposite would be to see the flower. The truth is to see the thorns and see the rose, and see the beauty and the potential pain. This I would hope is what mental health does but it doesn't. It just sees the pain.

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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"