Psychology and psychiatry often suffer from two fatal errors: medicalization and individualization.
When mental and behavioral issues are medicalized, they are reduced to a set of symptoms, as described in the article. They are often diagnosed subjectively, with the patient as an unreliable narrator, presenting in some clinical fashion. They are treated as medical disorders where medication is prescribed to confine and surveil the victim until he gets crazy enough to incarcerate.
Individualizing behavioral issues is also a grave error. We are social beings who exist in a community and a social context. We have relationships with other human beings. The etiology of mental illness often pertains to relationships and social environment. If a mentally ill person remains in a detrimental environment, they may never recover, despite the best of intentions and the strongest of medications.
A mentally ill person inhabits a world with damaged relationships to other humans. The mental illness can resolve itself 100% in this person's head and they still need to deal with the outside world. But mental health treatments seldom make allowances or confront relational issues, especially when they cannot be solved, such as a family, or in an institiutional setting where you just throw all the mentally ill people together in a looney bin and abandon all hope for those who enter there.
When mental and behavioral issues are medicalized, they are reduced to a set of symptoms, as described in the article. They are often diagnosed subjectively, with the patient as an unreliable narrator, presenting in some clinical fashion. They are treated as medical disorders where medication is prescribed to confine and surveil the victim until he gets crazy enough to incarcerate.
Individualizing behavioral issues is also a grave error. We are social beings who exist in a community and a social context. We have relationships with other human beings. The etiology of mental illness often pertains to relationships and social environment. If a mentally ill person remains in a detrimental environment, they may never recover, despite the best of intentions and the strongest of medications.
A mentally ill person inhabits a world with damaged relationships to other humans. The mental illness can resolve itself 100% in this person's head and they still need to deal with the outside world. But mental health treatments seldom make allowances or confront relational issues, especially when they cannot be solved, such as a family, or in an institiutional setting where you just throw all the mentally ill people together in a looney bin and abandon all hope for those who enter there.