Earlier quoted context omitted.
After wrestling with this linguistic problem for quite some time, the best term I’ve come up with this far is “mental injury”. I strongly prefer it to “illness” because illness connotes a disease of the flesh, and there is no proof that any of the things we typically call mental illness (with a few notable exceptions like alzheimer’s and possibly seizures) are actually based in the body. In contrast, most of the comm…
there is no proof that any of the things we typically call mental illness (with a few notable exceptions like alzheimer’s and possibly seizures) are actually based in the body. Then where are they based? Literally all we are is a body. The idea of chronic and untreatable mental illness is a self fulfilling prophecy and does far more harm than good. Who has this idea? I’ve never heard of depression or anxiety being de…
Perhaps “garden variety” depression and anxiety aren’t the best examples here, although both of them do have their severe forms and even clinical labels like “treatment resistant depression”. I’m thinking particularly of more severe diagnoses like bipolar or schizophrenia, which are generally assumed in mainstream western psychiatry since at least the 60s to be lifelong illnesses whose symptoms may be treatable with medication but for which there is no known “cure”.
I’m speaking from the perspective of someone who watched his sister receive a bipolar diagnosis after a suicide attempt in late teens, and then watched her develop more severe “bipolar” behaviors as a result of the so-called antipsychotic drugs she was prescribed. Only years later did I realize that her suicide attempt was a direct result of severe chronic parental abuse that she was enduring at the time. Of course the relevant information never made it to the doctors who were forced to come up with a reason for a young girl attempting suicide, hence bipolar. My sister died by suicide last year. I can’t speak for others, but in her case the bipolar label was both a convenient cover-up for severe child abuse and essentially a death sentence for my sister’s soul and ultimately her life. I suspect that the same could be happening in many cases where abnormal or self-harming behavior is in fact a reaction to abuse. It’s just so much easier to tell someone that they have a chemical imbalance in their brain and it’s nobody’s fault, rather than confront a child abuse situation.