Original SDMB thread - A Mental Health Epidemic
matt mcl:
quote:
This is the thing, Gaudere. It probably wasn't a misdiagnosis. Whatever could be said for Dr. Corcoran, she probably wasn't a liar. By the standards of psychiatry I probably am autistic. My argument is that that category is set up not to specify a disorder, but a deviancy - something which is socially, not systemically, out of order. And social categories ought to have no pretentions to the scientific mantle.
I don't care if it is caused by brain-chemical imbalance. Lots of things may be caused by brain-chemical imbalances. They ought only to be diseases if they are destructive. And the only destruction or dysfunction my 'autism' ever caused me was that which was inflicted on me due to social prejudice and psychiatric normativism.
Amen. I was diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic in one institution and bipolar in another, and I wasn't terribly different from the folks held in other rooms in the halls of either bin. It is convenient for believers in the efficacy of the mental health system to say that I was "misdiagnosed", as if the application of these labels to most others had a different meaning, and the treatment to which they were/are subjected were more appropriate.
I suggest people rethink "mental illness" as "mental condition". First, a condition is not necessarily bad, and everyone's mind can be said to in a condition of some sort. Second, it implies a more fluid and ever-changing...uh, condition. The condition that my mind was in in spring of 1980 is a condition that anyone's mind could be in under the right circumstances. Like "unhappy" or "stressed out", such conditions become descriptive adjectives, not diagnostic nouns. This is more appropriate because of the failure of the psychiatric profession to develop tight diagnostic definitions and testing mechanisms that result in high inter-rater reliability rates, [as evidenced by my pair of non-matching diagnoses applied to me in different wards by doctors unaware of each other's findings]-- they are just descriptions of externally observed behaviors as it is!
As to the role of chemistry (balanced or unbalanced), I'm sure it correlates often enough to such conditions. I suspect if I tied you down and inserted pins into your foot, your brain would take on chemical differences similar to those of other people whose feet have been stuck full of pins, but the chemical "imbalances" in your brain are not the reason for your agonies or theirs. Of course, ongoing or congenital differences in blood or brain chemistry, neural tissue structure, or chromosomal composition may cause some people to be more predisposed to lapsing into a certain condition than others are. I have a neighbor who is much more inclined to be a cranky fellow than most folks are, and for all I know it is built into him in some such way. If such people wish to take pills to modulate themselves, I have no objection.