mental illnesses aren't mental and they aren't illnesses
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if someone stabs you and you're bleeding all over the place you don't have a "blood illness"; the blood is not the point. the point is that you were fucking stabbed and now you have a stab wound
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the next time you see yourself or someone else say "mental illness" try substituting either "psychic wound" or "psychic malnutrition"
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"mental illness" ā”ļø something's wrong with my brain and i need to go to a brain doctor
vs.
"psychic wound" ā”ļø someone hurt me and now i have scars
or
"psychic malnutrition" ā”ļø i was deprived of something and now i am stunted
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"therapy" positions itself as a transformative experience to help individuals change, but therapy is also a piece of the control systems themselves, so its potential to create change is funneled in certain directions by therapeutic "directives" like the diagnostic manual (DSM)
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i keep trying to write about this and it keeps not quite being fully cooked, but just like... something wild happens when you use an ontology that was designed for the needs of a *bureaucracy* in order to *understand and explain yourself to yourself and others*
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a couple people told me to check out thomas szasz and i like the cut of this guy's jib
"He maintained that, by calling people diseased, psychiatry attempts to deny them responsibility as moral agents in order to better control them."
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Sz
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Can you explain more about that. I canāt figure it out at all. No reference points or anything.
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as some commenters have said, there *are* exceptions to this.
if bodies are made up of chemical patterns, those patterns can break.
THAT SAID
I would wager that >95% of people with āmental illnessesā today donāt fall into that, & bucketing them the same is a mass tragedy.
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cite: brain tumors, and brain surgery, can change almost anything - personality, outlook, mobility...
I suspect people who looked at this all day wrote the DSM, hence their massive overmedicalization.
Iām wondering, what is the appropriate middle path?
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