What is Mental Illness?
The ever-increasing mental illnesses, or mental disorders, that are listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), can be understood as objectified forms of emotional suffering and behavioral divergence decided upon by people in the psych establishment. This means that they are just as real as they are made up, in that they are labels applied to cut out patterns of a real substratum of lived emotional suffering and behavioral divergence with a norm dictated by our current social order.
This also then means that the old labels can easily be dropped, or can change quite significantly in what they refer to, and new labels can proliferate, theoretically, infinitely. Much of the history of the psych establishment consists of just this sort of shuffling around of diagnostic labels and what they refer to, and the incorporating of new labels of illness, always with much disagreement. To this day, the psych establishment is notorious for having poor validity and reliability in relation to their constructs of mental illness. What this means is that it is hard to objectify the fluid processes of emotional suffering and behavioral divergence. This, however, is not the biggest problem of the concept of mental illness.
Sources:
Deacon, B. J. (2013). The biomedical model of mental disorder: a critical analysis of its validity, utility, and effects on psychotherapy research. Clinical psychology review, 33(7), 846?861. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2012.09.007
Kendler, K. (2005). Toward a philosophical structure for psychiatry. The American journal of psychiatry, 162(3), 433–440.
The Problem With Mental Illness
The chief problem with the mainstream understanding and use of mental illness is not that it struggles to objectify relatively fluid processes of emotional suffering and behavioral divergence [labels can be helpful], but that it tends to do so in a way that obscures or forecloses the necessary context and individualizes someone’s contextual suffering. This has always been a problematic tendency in the psych field; however, today, more than ever, this is done in a criminal way. Criminal in the sense that the current establishment discourse on mental illness is based on the destruction of personal and collective histories, and the production and dissemination of a model that poorly matches reality.
The biomedical model of mental illness, places its emphasis on a genetic caused, neurochemically imbalanced, coherent and distinct brain disease. Under this dominant model, despite the radical variability of the expression of emotional suffering and behavioral divergence, the mental illnesses become solidified as if they really were autonomies disease entities in themselves. Not only this, but they become separated in any meaningful way from the crucial psychological and socio-environmental factors that modify neurobiological risk toward certain forms of distress. Today’s mental illnesses become like implanted genetic time bombs, just waiting for the moment to explode and assume their autonomous course of action. In this model, due to their faulty premises, the only real treatment is biological in focus (drugs and electric shocks) and the only room for psychological and social treatment is limited to coping with and managing the symptoms of the autonomous disease process.
Research, however, continues to demonstrate that there is no simple genetic, neurochemical, or neuropathological explanations for specific, coherent mental illnesses cut off from the psycho-socio-environmental. The neurobiological risk factors that are inherited do not directly lead to a specific mental illness, but rather contribute to the likelihood of certain forms of emotional distress and are significantly modified by psychological and socio-environmental factors, which play a more influential determining role.
Continue reading below for a different understanding of mental illness.
Social (dis)Order
Social (dis)Order
Mental illness then, refers to an objectified form of emotional suffering and social divergence, which emerged as an individual’s creative psycho-biological response to problems in the socio-environmental. Mental illness then, isn’t something that someone has, but something that someone is expressing — a meaningful communication. And what is it that so many people are expressing today through mental illness if not the fundamental madness of our current social (dis)Order.
What does it mean to be diagnosed with a mental illness today, in a time when mental illness has become ubiquitous—spreading in differing forms, but attaching itself everywhere across the social body? The madness is better understood as a social (dis)Order, and a mutation in the capital-subordinated Technosphere, that affects us all in different ways, but especially those already vulnerable. Mental illness is increasingly becoming a general social mutation to the conditions of social (dis)Order and technological capture.
This news is as distressing as it is promising. We are not condemned to a growing epidemic of a biological-caused degenerative disease attacking the entirety of our social body. Insofar as we are able to build new anti-authoritarian heterogenous communities, radically change our system of values, reclaim our attention, and reinhabit our desires, mental illness will fall away with us as we slip away from systems of violent control and capital accumulation.