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" ➡️ something's wrong with my brain and i need to go to a brain doctor
vs.
"psychic wound" ➡️ someone hurt me and now i have scars
or
"psychic malnutrition" ➡️ 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 also be helpful to view in terms of behavioral adaptation. Ways of being that are useful in dangerous environs may be less so elsewhere. Puts a positive spin on the "broken" parts and returns agency - you adapted to danger once, now you can adapt to safety.
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I don't disagree with your main point, at least for a number of common mental illnesses, but!
Neurological illness is when something's wrong with your brain. Mental illness is distinct from it, and all other illness, in that it's rooted, felt, and diagnosed in your *experience*
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This isn't meant to be pedantic but more to say there's something not covered by wound or malnourishment in the phrase 'mental illness'. As with many physical diseases, there are pathological processes involved
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This is a bad analogy. Scars are from a healed wound - if a wound is serious enough, you will need an ER doc.
Similarly, if your mental illness is bad enough...
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it certainly fails to capture important aspects of the situation and so does the “mental illness” metaphor
what it does a good job of capturing imo is the role of outside forces in inflicting lasting harm
all models are false, let a thousand metaphors bloom and so forth
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