*crazyface*

[sofiaviolet]

I'm supposed to keep a weekly log for my honors seminar, Being "Crazy" in America, in which I record and reflect on stuff about mental health issues that I've stumbled upon (or sought out, but I'll find enough via my reading page). I will be using my journal for this, and you are welcome to comment. Also, I suspect it will be more frequent than 'weekly,' because of how quickly the internet moves.

Most of the following was written yesterday, around lunchtime.

via sharpest_rose and a number of other places (Mary's journal is just the first place I've seen this since receiving the assignment): The Americanization of Mental Illness (Mary's post, with comments worth reading).

"In any given era, those who minister to the mentally ill — doctors or shamans or priests — inadvertently help to select which symptoms will be recognized as legitimate." This construction happens for any type of disability (and I'm interested in seeing the degree to which we discuss mental-illnesses-as-disabilities in the course), and not just which symptoms, but how severe they must be before a person's issues are "legitimate." Additionally, people form expectations about who is "allowed" to experience a given illness or disability, or receive treatment (and which treatments are legitimate, and and and). I got all the help I wanted because I was a white girl of means and good health insurance, well before I was blogging about being suicidal or bombing the second semester of my college career.

"In trying to explain what happened to Charlene [a young woman in Hong Kong who died of complications from anorexia], local reporters often simply copied out of American diagnostic manuals." On the one hand, I think this is a failing of reporters everywhere - I do not trust news media to produce materials with nuanced information and thoughtful analysis. (Especially in cases of pieces about oppressed groups or individuals which are produced by people with greater privilege. This means I am inclined to mistrust the aforementioned Chinese newspapers on the basis that presumed-"sane" people were writing about presumed-"insane" people (as well as gender and age factors, and perhaps other things), and this very article because an American is writing about societies to which American culture is being so thoroughly exported.)

"Similarly, illnesses found only in other cultures are often treated like carnival sideshows." Similarly, other cultures are often treated like carnival sideshows. (There. Fixed that for you.) This is not a new problem and it's not confined to only some cultural elements.

"It means that a mental illness is an illness of the mind and cannot be understood without understanding the ideas, habits and predispositions — the idiosyncratic cultural trappings — of the mind that is its host." THANK YOU. Potentially problematic diction aside, the basic concept that people are influenced by their cultures and vice versa, should be 100% obvious and yet somehow isn't.

"The logic seemed unassailable: Once people believed that the onset of mental illnesses did not spring from supernatural forces, character flaws, semen loss or some other prescientific notion, the sufferer would be protected from blame and stigma." And how's that working out for us here in America? (Furthermore, even Western cultures haven't embraced this idea fully - plenty of folks are happy to tell me I wouldn't be depressed if I would just exercise/choose to be happy/talk to Jesus/try harder.)

"...the biomedical narrative about an illness like schizophrenia carries with it the subtle assumption that a brain made ill through biomedical or genetic abnormalities is more thoroughly broken and permanently abnormal than one made ill though life events." ... "In other words, the belief that was assumed to decrease stigma actually increased it." The effect is probably more pronounced when it comes to diagnoses assumed to mark a person as somehow dangerous to others. At any rate, I have developed a dislike of "it's biologically hardwired!" from studying gender. In light of these kinds of studies, I am finding it easy to transfer that attitude to purely-biological explanations of mental illness.

"Even as we have congratulated ourselves for becoming more “benevolent and supportive” of the mentally ill, we have steadily backed away from the sufferers themselves." Yes, folks, thanks for your pity. (At least I don't get people telling me they'd kill themselves if they had my condition? Currently-able-bodied people seem to say that a lot to people with visible physical disabilities.)

"Critically, the story [that schizophrenia is the result of spirits] allowed the person with schizophrenia a cleaner bill of health when the illness went into remission." ... "Since the illness was seen as the work of outside forces, it was understood as an affliction for the sufferer but not as an identity." This is something I want to think about more - depression as an identity works okay for me, because my experiences with depression stretch back as far as I remember and I don't expect to ever see remission. But I think reducing the sense that you are your diagnosis is more important than the benefit I get from it, because it's limiting. I might find it limiting if I had a less commonplace/acceptable/not-scary label, or if my symptoms were not constant, etc.

"Some philosophers and psychiatrists have suggested that we are investing our great wealth in researching and treating mental illness — medicalizing ever larger swaths of human experience — because we have rather suddenly lost older belief systems that once gave meaning and context to mental suffering." Needs citation! If only because I would like to take a look at some of these theories.

shehasathree linked The Globalization of Biopsychiatry in Mary's comments, which is a response to the above and does include some further information.