Mental illness thread

Re: Mental illness thread

I think I may have said that exact sentence to someone before XD

Re: Mental illness thread

These days I seriously believe that Western ideals that loosely get called Mental Health, and the institutions that talk about it, so the Mental Health System, are actually harmful by gist of the beliefs that are needed for there to exist psychological illness. The people who delve into this and who view the world through a mental illness paradigm are generally nice, helpful people who are sheepled. There's absolutely a mental illness kool-aid. The solution to anything that is a mental illness by way of definition must be the change of the individual. Because the only other thing is to deem the society is in error about something about the individual. This ends up essentially victim-blaming the mentally ill person, even though no one thinks that that's what happening. This furthermore isn't a problem of stigma, as the stigma itself grows out of the belief of the existence of mental illness in general, not the specific individual person's diagnosis.
Mental illness can't be determined the way the rest of modern medicine determines things, because at its root its a psychological problem. That we disbelieve this and go towards the rhetoric that there are obvious physical issues with what a mentally ill person goes to doesn't change a thing that the parameters of the illness are psychologically based. Furthermore, if the parameters weren't psychologically-based, instead physically measurable, it would no longer be called a mental illness and it would switch out of the ever-nebulous 'its physical we just can't determine what it is physically'. You would no longer have a mental illness and would instead just have an illness. As you can see, that it's based on psychological, mental criteria, is necessary, even though that criteria exists only because we create those criteria.
Let's take for example something really quite obviously a mental illness which has a well-studied, physical background. ADHD. There's a LOT of studies around it, shows up in childhood, has meds which treat it quite well. Outwardly, this has nothing to do with something psychological, although we use the rhetoric of psychological illness to define it. It's the perfect example of how mental illness is, how it must be, based on how well you psychologically fit in to someplace. Because now I want you to think about the child with ADHD growing up in a 3rd world country where one of their chores is to walk to get water 3km everyday, who then, after their chores are done, is lucky enough to be able to go to school afterwards. This child with ADHD doesn't tire like the rest of the children do, and is likely to fair better at school after having exercised for hours. Or even worse, the child can't even go to school because there isn't one, and they have to go do manual labour the entire day because hey, some places use child labor still.
After all and said is done, it's still a social problem, having ADHD. That means that society is what determines what is healthy or not. Let it sink in that there being physical proof of illness doesn't change that at its core it's a societal problem.

Anyways. The mental health system is making people in my generation and younger, believe in psychological illness as a paradigm so strongly that the terms associated with it are part of the generational lingo. Younger and younger people are diagnosed with psychological illness. And trust me, once labelled as mentally ill, good luck running away from that. Here in Canada especially since the health care is institutionalized, your mental illness diagnoses from the past get passed around. There's literally no escaping them. I get told that I'm supposed to keep lists of drugs I've been on, that I'm not taking care of myself properly if I don't join the Mental Health System's view of both myself and society. This happens even while spontaneous remission of pretty much all mental illness can occur.

I seriously think we should defund mental health here in Canada, put the money towards actual medicine or schools or government aided affordable housing etc. and explicitly away psychological medicine. It's unethical to have psychological illnesses especially if the system that defines them is institutionalized, which it is, because the underlying core beliefs in such a system will become self-sustaining.

Re: Mental illness thread

Having a mental illness isn't like having diabetes. Treating a mental illness isn't like giving a diabetic insulin.

Re: Mental illness thread

Your points are fought well, and you seem to have a very strong belief in your opinion. But I may be so bold to say that both of those things save peoples lives. Treating a mental illness is stopping someone from killing themselves because of it. Giving a diabetic person insulin is also stopping them from dying, just in a more medically exciting way.

Both save peoples lives, the only difference is medical. (Doctors feel free to correct me)

Re: Mental illness thread

Using the standard paradigm of what mental illness is, you can be suicidal and not be mentally ill, and you can be mentally ill and not suicidal.
Going further into the paradigm, a lot of people who want help with mental illness are put on years long wait-lists here in Canada, where that money comes from taxes. And then there's the people who don't want treatment but it's forced on them for years and years. That too comes out of the public purse.

Mainly though, the counter-argument to this is that people have started defining what a mental illness is by the drug used to treat it. In a real illness, it must go the other way around. And it's no accident this idea that like, eg: depression is a lack of serotonin and dopamine, exists. The companies that create drugs for mental illness are selling them, and its totally changed the view of what mental illness is. That one gets cycled through different drugs until one of them 'works' (works is in quotes because what gets determined as working is yet another non-scientific determination, in actual practice), and this thing that I first heard this past year comparing the drugs to insulin, is nothing more than people blindly accepting the mental illness paradigm. And no, medicine is probably not going to end up not using the drugs because -something- happens when you use them, and that something surely must be better than nothing. Medically, it's the only thing they have, so they're going to use them. That doesn't change the fact that comparing mental illness drugs to insulin is a pharmaceutical company's dream: create the drug, say you need the drug, say it works like a medicine that's necessary, keep up the appearance that you're breaking the mental illness stigma by making such a comparison to insulin in a diabetic. The masses gobble this stuff up, because there's overtly nothing 'wrong' per se, with the comparison. Because it is a socially defined thing, mental illness and good mental health, there's no hard and fast way to set something as 'not wrong'. Once deemed ill, it's actually extremely difficult, if not impossible for some, to leave their diagnosis behind for good even when there's improvement outside of what has been deemed useful to treat it.
If we were in China instead of North America (I'm assuming you're American), treating mental illness would lie under government policy, and would probably openly be seen as socially defined, instead of all this pretending its all based in science. And I say pretending to be based in science not because scientific rigor gets used, but because statistics aren't science. You don't need statistics to determine, for instance, if you're diabetic. Rather you'd find out urine analysis and bloodwork (I think that's how that testing goes). But you DO need statistics to determine whether you have a mental illness or not, if it's measured properly, which is isn't in the vast majority of cases, very few tests, if any, are issued before a diagnosis is given. And I don't think I need to go into all the moral issues with where one fits on a bell-curve as defining if they're sick or not.