(SoCI: No, I'm not turning into Furious Seasons. I'll still have other stuff to talk about here. This is just a continuation to my previous post, and is here in celebration of Mad Pride month. Next week, new soapbox, I promise.)
Thus, we are “depressed” not because the world is being destroyed while we sell our hours to mindless routines, but because our brains are too weak to handle it. We are “ADHD” not because our culture slams us with an average of 3000 media messages a day, but because our brains are too weak to handle it. We are “schizophrenic” and “bipolar” not because we were traumatized or overwhelmed by the madness of our culture, but because our brains are too weak to handle it. Instead of taking a ruthless moral inventory of our culture, families, societies, economics, religions, education systems, and pointing the blameful finger outwards, we do it of and to ourselves, and now of and to our biology. Everyone is mentally ill, that is, every individual except the sum of the parts: society. ~From "Indicator Species?" by Steven Morgan
I can't get to the page to link you guys because I don't have a membership and don't want to fool around with all that, but apparently if you log into the DSM-V website, there's a place for "suggestions", and the DSM guys list five categories of suggestions. One of these is "suggestions for a new disorder to be added to the DSM."
When you consider that the DSM is pretty much the be-all-and-end-all Bible of psychiatric diagnoses, that's just weird. Inviting laypeople to make up new disorders? Nobody gets to make up other types of diseases; one has to discover a microbe or isolate a cluster of symptoms or something. This exposes the fluidity and subjectivity of what many people like to present as a solid, objective science. This invitation to create mental illnesses out of imagination, social stigmas, boredom, thin air or whatever speaks volumes about our society and the nature of mental illness.
Most mental illnesses are seen as disorders because they prevent the person from functioning properly in the social world we have set up for ourselves. People have become so indoctrinated into this reality that they fail to realize almost all of the expectations placed on us are arbitrary and unnatural. Nobody counts "air dependency" as a disorder, but if we all tried to live on the moon, this would become a failure-to-cope disorder just like mental illness. If our society had an established place, purpose, or outlet for "mentally ill" behavior, it would become normal. Normal and healthy behavior is completely relative - an American assertive, go-get-em girl would be seen as irreparably rude and offensive in Japan. Does that mean that by changing location and surrounding culture, this girl acquires some sort of behavioral condition? Is failure to hold up to the expectations of other people really a disorder?
I'm not denying the existence of psychiatric quirks that fit DSM-style definitions of named disorders. I'm not (in this post) bothering with the argument over whether they arise from genetics, brain chemistry, environment, choice, or alien lasers. Those are all extraneous issues. The fact is that some people perceive an alternate reality or experience a state of consciousness that is foreign to most, and society as a whole has chosen to recognize these differences as dangerous or broken.
The most beautiful as well as the most ugly inclinations of man are not part of a fixed biologically given human nature, but result from the social process which creates man. ~Erich Fromm
Why have we chosen to label certain thought patterns as disorders and not others? My entire family hates being late, to the point that we tend to show up obnoxiously early to things. This creates major stress as everyone gets anxious and tense and people start lashing out at each other because they're upset over the threat of being late. Yet because our society values punctuality, it is acceptable to allow this fear to create high levels of stress. But if a different situation causes one to become very anxious and upset, they have OCD, a phobia, paranoid delusions, etc. Even though excessive need to be around other people may culminate in perpetual partying and perhaps a neglect of relationships, studies or other responsibilities, the DSM IV is lacking Tucker Max Disorder because wanting to be around other people has been deemed "normal" - but excessive need to be alone is bizarre and strange. I can write a checklist of traits and say "if these apply to you, you have X disorder," but that's meaningless. Homosexuality used to be considered a mental illness but today is a (kind of) socially acceptable variation on thought patters regarding sex. Did it suddenly become healthier? Why haven't doctors ever decided that cholera or the flu "isn't a disease anymore, jk guys"?
I concede that many people who are labelled mentally ill may engage in behaviors that are destructive to themselves or others, but I honestly believe that if we collectively showed more respect, empathy and need for those whose minds we do not understand, we would severely diminish addiction/self-harm/homelessness related to mental illness. People often assume that these choices stem only from the thought patterns, without considering that the choices may instead be a reaction to the frustration, anger and alienation that are a result of society's refusal to validate those thought patterns. In an interview on Madness Radio, Richard Unger points out that "recovery" rates for mental illness rose significantly in the 1970s and theorizes that it's because during that time, altered or extreme or alternate states of consciousness were more accepted and so the people experiencing them had the opportunity to work through, engage with, and share them.
It is not possible to separate the autism from the person. Therefore, when parents say, ‘I wish my child did not have autism,’ what they’re really saying is, ‘I wish the autistic child I have did not exist and I had a different (non-autistic) child instead.’ Read that again. This is what we hear when you mourn over our existence. This is what we hear when you pray for a cure. This is what we know, when you tell us of your fondest hopes and dreams for us: that your greatest wish is that one day we will cease to be, and strangers you can love will move in behind our faces.~Jim Sinclair
Before you argue with me on this point, realize that the thought patterns so strange to you have a huge part in allowing your daily life to continue. You appreciate the madness of others every time you turn on the lights (Nikola Tesla, who paved the way for modern electricity, would be considered "very weird" by any social standards), admire Van Gogh's Starry Night (said to represent the ups/downs of manic depression) or wake up in peaceful America (Winston Churchill, British Prime Minister during WW2, made reference to periods of depression as his "black dog", possibly indicating what the DSM refers to as Major or Manic Depression). Would these accomplishments have been possible if the minds of these three men adhered strictly to the thought laws we have established? I'm inclined to doubt that.
If everyone thought inside the box, we'd still be living in the stone age. Creativity and problem solving require the pushing or breaking of boundaries, and historically this has been done by those who do not see or understand those boundaries to begin with. Society relies on the outcasts of thought for progress, but fears them and chooses to arbitrarily define "normal" within random but rigid limits, leaving little room for psychological quirks. If the majority of the population was bipolar, things would be set up to accommodate them, and those without bipolar "symptoms" would struggle to fit in and understand the world.
My main point: Normal means only what we allow it to. There is no such thing as standardized, healthy behavior. Labels are arbitrary. The DSM is a joke. "Mental illness" means nothing. The ostracization of the strange is deeply hypocritical.
Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics. It is they and they alone who found religions and create great works of art. The world will never realize how much it owes to them, and what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it.~Marcel Proust
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3 comments:
Algh I feel so deeply about this. It's really terrifying to me what we're doing as a society with all of our drugs and trends and DSM and definition of 'normal'. When I took psychology, the terms 'introvert' and 'extrovert' were identifiers akin to left- and right-handed, or 'spontaneous' and 'organized'. The way we're going, it could soon be placed among the symptoms of a mental illness - is it not already? It could become a mental illness itself. Thoughts like these terrify me. It's so dangerous and it so resembles horrific WE-like societies or the complete abolition of human rights. I'm going to stop talking to up my coherence level.
When I saw the title "Creativity tied to Mental Illness" under rec reading I almost laughed because it kind of was a 'duh' thing to me, and then I realized that that's generally not what it is at all.
p.s. an xkcd shirt:
http://imgs.xkcd.com/store/imgs/just_shy_square_0.png
Being introverted is currently not a diagnosable mental disorder, but it is a "condition" overrun by stereotypes, labels, and a "mad pride"esque struggle to be recognized as "normal" and "not school shooters." You're right that this is dangerous to human rights - if we can convince the majority that any thought pattern is dangerous, we can begin the campaign to eliminate that thought pattern. China and other Communist countries are so convinced that their governments are perfect that those who oppose them are considered "mentally ill" and a common way to deal with dissidents is to put them in asylums for decades.
And you're right that only the creatively maladjusted realize what it truly means - most "neurotypicals" would never realize that the technology and art they enjoy is created by minds they would look down their noses at.
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