Mad Studies. Stigma and the Concept of Mental Illness

Mad Studies week 3 is today. By week three last year I was almost dropping out because this head wasn't coping well. So much has changed, through hard work, in a year.

This morning we're looking mostly at stigma and discrimination. The slides include Goffman, Chamberlin, Foucault. All good.

The odd thing is, odd radical that I am, I say that the whole medical concept of mental illness can quickly become a stigmatisation of what it means to be fully human. Collectively we're taught to stigmatise our experiences as something very wrong with us and to fight a part of who we are at any particular moment. Individually we can end up stigmatising, rejecting, and even hating a part of what we are rather than radically accepting ourselves and being compassionate towards the distress we experience. One reason why I'm doing so well now compared to a year ago - and even better compared to two years ago - is my rejection of these presuppositions that I inherited as a child and built upon as an adult.

Mental illness, as a concept, has also often been used as a more direct way to "other" and stigmatise people. To combat this we're now at a societal point where we are taught to be proud of our mental illnesses and to claim that medical model even more powerfully for ourselves.

There has to be other ways. I wonder if we'll get that far today. Because there ARE other ways, even ways that exist within mental health professions and the move in some psych circles not to diagnose but to consider people as fully human people who hurt. Which is excellent.

Until you try to apply for support or until that brown envelope with a work capability assessment arrives. Or until you want US health insurance to pay out in which case you need a fancy diagnosis that will get your treatment paid for (if you're rich enough to have the insurance at all) but may be a permanent stigmatising mark on your life.

Yes, I was rereading Kate Millett's "The Illusion of Mental Illness" last night. It's reproduced in a book called "Alternatives Beyond Psychiatry" which is an attempt to seek and embrace those other ways in which humans are accepted as humans in their distress rather than put into the "you're struggling therefore you're sick" box.

Remember guys, there's no good evidence that "depression" is caused by a serotonin imbalance. None. Not even if a drug affecting serotonin makes life more bearable for some people, even if that's in a clinically meaningfully greater way than sugar pills. Even that brain scan evidence that the brains of people with schizophrenia are diffierent was absolutely blown out of the water last year. How are those for controversial and provocative statements? I can back them up though.

And even the word "stigma" can be problematic!