the four right chords can make me cry

I'm sorry darlings, another academic essay.
http://laingsociety.org/colloquia/polofdiagnosis/r.roberts1.htm

This one is about madness! Really interesting if you think about it. I mean, what determines madness? We all are a little bit crazy sometimes right? How should we treat mad people? You'd think the pyschiatrists of all people would know. But they don't. Even among them there's debate about how to diagnose it. This piece is under a section called the Politics of Diagnosis. And since i know nobody's gonna read the whole article, here are some "best of"s.

The charges against the legitimacy of the medical model begin with unanswered questions about the validity of the classification of mental disorders - several hundred of them now enshrined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association (APA 1994). Here it is stated that mental illness "must not be an expectable response to a particular event". The clear problem is that this presupposes an extensive and detailed knowledge of how people 'ought' to respond to a wide variety of traumatic and distressing circumstances, the consequences of which could in principle be moderated by any number of permutations of possible personal characteristics and circumstances. To illustrate this, we might consider the outcome for someone following physical or sexual abuse in childhood (bearing in mind that this could take many different forms). Do we know how they will come to react given a knowledge of their gender, age, ethnicity, physical size, family position, social class, place of birth, prior or later feelings of being unloved, later career success/failure, educational success/failure, beliefs and fears about mental health/illness, the changing values, attitudes and beliefs predominating in a culture over a period of time, the lack of knowledge of other (dominant) cultures' 'ways of seeing', and how this lack of outside understanding interacts with existing psychological distress? Patently the answer is no. So, if we cannot determine what is an expectable response to a particular adverse event, we can be in no position to categorise behaviour in such a way that leads to pronouncements on the existence or otherwise of mental illness. Furthermore even if by some stroke of good fortune, we were in such a position to know what constitutes a normal response to distressing psychological phenomenon - something that could carry meaning only in the statistical sense of normal - then as Walker (1983, p100), reminds us
"If maladaptive behaviour in the same circumstance(s) is characteristic of a species then it is part of its 'normal' rather than abnormal psychology".

(becky: so if more and more people start being depressed, then depressed becomes normal and normal becomes stupidly happy for no reason)

Postpsychiatry is the latest neologism bequeathed to us from the world of post modernism. Like some of its linguistic relatives, it takes us to a paradoxical brave new world, where we struggle for meaning, enmeshed in a system of social relationships stripped bare of the struggle for power between oppressed and oppressor, paradoxical because the old inequalities of power remain - arguably in the most brutal form for more than half a century. We debate post-feminism in a world in which women vie to sell their bodies in the global multimedia sex and pornography market; post-industrialisation where inequalities in wealth and death are manufactured with celebrity endorsement, precision marketed and cheap (and dangerous) industrial production has allied itself, or should I say foisted itself, onto the majority of the planet which actually resides in the developing (underdeveloped) world.

(becky: true! alanis morrisette: Isn't it ironic)

Here, Laing recognised that the human condition, in whatever circumstances, is not reducible to a depersonalised natural scientific formulation. What he saw as 'outside the investigative competence of the natural sciences', included, as he later put it;
" love and hate, joy and sorrow, misery and happiness, pleasure and pain, right and wrong, purpose, meaning, hope, courage, despair, God, heaven and hell, damnation, enlightenment, wisdom, compassion, evil, envy, malice, generosity, camaraderie and everything, in fact, that makes life worth living." (Laing, 1982, p.18)

(becky: ya lor...)

We may locate such disturbance as a function of the meanings and power relationships which suffuse the lives of people whose existence is marginalised either indirectly by the organisation and institutions of society, or directly by the actions and interactions of others. For example, examination of the contents of auditory hallucinations reveals that these are frequently persecutory and abusive - revelatory not of brain disease, but of literal recorded experience - experience of sexual, physical and verbal abuse that is distressing and difficult to live with (Ellenson, 1986, Nayani and David, 1996, Birchwood et al., 2000). All of these things do occur in families as well as outside them. To deny this, is to deny the real world we live in. The article of faith in modern psychiatry which denies that families or other 'social systems' can, and do, drive people crazy'', is an act of collusion with the perpetrators of psychological damage, and an act of mystification on those driven to psychological extremes by them.

(becky: ya! blame society! as usual...)

Given the level of lifetime exposure to the propaganda products of the biomedical industry, it would be remarkable indeed, if at this moment in history, many mental health services users, past and present, had not already swallowed the biomedical party line of brain chemistry gone awry. Most have heard this mantra chanted regularly by their general practitioners and psychiatrists. It is disappointing, to say the least, that concepts of stigma, labelling or internalised oppression which might go some way toward explaining users' adherence to the traditional model, have not occurred to someone who situates their work within a critical psychological framework. Does Crossley believe then, that critics of the pornography industry for example, are incorrect when they assert that the women working within it are being exploited, simply because there are women who earn their living from it who deny this? It goes without question, that people on the receiving end of oppressive practices have much that is of value to teach us. However 'the inside view' may also at times be clouded by the detrimental effects of life at the sharp end, and the view from outside offer greater clarity. It must be a matter of judgement in each concrete situation where the greater wisdom lies, and not something to be decided solely on the basis of who is saying it.

(becky: evil biomedical industry!)

posted by beckyboo @ 4:55 AM