Are you familiar with my commentary on psychiatric stigma?
In particular diagnoses, or psychiatric labels, compound the problem. For example schizophrenics also experience depression due to stigma that can be treated with CBT.
Further, a person imprisoned will experience depression and imprisonment is similar to ostracism experienced when given a diagnoses.
It is my belief that stigma is so strong it even effects the opinions of doctors.
A phrase I coined is "mental illness is culturally constructed and it exists" because I believe that a psychiatric label is like a closure on discourse.
You see, even people who are so sick they cannot speak still are understood by their families with eye movements.
What in general I'm calling for is treatment of the individual as a whole rather than a taxonomy which obfuscates the underlying medical cause of illness.
People who have radically different psychiatric diagnoses can find relief with similar medicines and people with the same psychiatric diagnoses can have radically different medicines. I believe the taxonomy in psychiatry obfuscates the physical cause of disease and that it would make more sense to study neurodivergence based on what medicines work more often than based on psychiatric labels.
I also believe in family therapy over institutionalisation because I think mental illness is infact a dynamic and that a label is like laying blame.
I think the DSM was created with good intentions but the taxonomy is now hindering treatment.
I wrote a paper about the philosophy of madness, and in particular there is a clinical psychiatrist Louis A Sass who called the work by Franz Kafka, "Description of a Struggle" the "most schizophrenic work in all of Western literature," but to say so is both an anachronism (because the term "schizophrenia" post dates the publication of the story) and a misnomer (because Kafka had tuberculosis). Now this isn't to call out Sass but rather to show that what he calls the "praecox feeling" can also be mistaken. I'm merely using this as an example of how physical illness can be confused with mental illness. A very seasoned practitioner can make this mistake. That's the power of stigma.
I'm not interested in destroying psychiatry, I'm not in the field of antipsychiatry, I just want what psychiatrists want which is better patient outcomes.
It's my belief that you need to treat the whole person like Dr. Kellogg ❤️
And madness is a dynamic between people. I know a guy who harnessed a guy into hitting him in the head with a bat. The harraser was proud of this and the guy with the bat went to jail. Who's crazy?
The thing that most helps people is lifting them up not discipline and punish, but a cup o’ kindness and a little food!
I wrote a paper called Madness the Essential Other in 2004, and applied to SSHRCC in 2006 for research on Kafka. I'm not Jewish but I believe in helping people not like me.
I applied to work at Foreign Affairs in 2007.
On the scale of Gov't officials, healthcare workers, I'm not very expensive.
All I want is my health and a little peas 🫛
