

The Americanization of Mental Illness - tokenadult
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/magazine/10psyche-t.html

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tokenadult
"'The results of the current study suggest that we may actually treat people
more harshly when their problem is described in disease terms,' Mehta wrote.
'We say we are being kind, but our actions suggest otherwise.' The problem, it
appears, is that 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. 'Viewing those with mental disorders as
diseased sets them apart and may lead to our perceiving them as physically
distinct. Biochemical aberrations make them almost a different species.'"

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hga
I'm committing the sin of not reading the fine article, but if you've spent
any time around an uncontrolled (i.e. unmedicated) schizophrenic you realize
their thinking is fundamentally broken. They are in a sense "thoroughly broken
and permanently abnormal" _in a way that only medicine can treat_. Cognitive
Behavioral therapy can help and sometimes fix a lot of things like standard
depression, but there's absolutely no substitute for antipsychotics for the
schizophrenic and mood stabilizers for the bipolar (which hopefully TFA
pointed out).

My mom became an RN at a fascinating time in the '50s: she did 3 months of her
residency in a psych ward, and then a few years later she was amazed to see
one of the "hopeless" cases from there working at her hospital in a service
role. That was after the first antipsychotics came out, and they truly are
wonder drugs.

All that said, the thesis might be correct, although I seriously wonder if the
layman's view of the mentally ill is that nuanced. A lot of people don't want
to have _anything_ to do with the "mentally ill", full stop....

