meestor grahamster guy-o-rama ozzie-dude wrote
>It's good to see your interests, Eric. I wish I could be so specific. But
>on this last point of interest: I wonder if (even by simple inversion) we
>might ask the question "why are people who march to their own drummer and
>do not accept cultural norms considered to be mentally ill"? OR less
>simplistically, "what kinds of disrhythmic marchings or cultural norm
>rejectings might be considered symptomatic of mental illness?" OR "to
>what
>degree do the violent rhythms of highly technologised and regimented
>cultures produce nervous recoilings in the human organism and concomitant
>refusals to march, to conform, or even to continue?"
this is a particular question that points towards the more generalized
interests in difference.
INDEED. how did the very idea of "normal" come to dominate institutional
expectations of
participation ? well, we've all read the histories.
but CRUMB. what have we learned?????????
all suffering is unjust - and i can actually situate gender as a casualty
here, not a cause (awake martin! awake! ha ha)
seriously being so community-connected with diagnostic difference,
as well as political difference, i am ceaselessly distressed by the ways
ignorance manifests through
particulars of typical privilege.
it is all a fabulous elaboration upon the "i walked five miles to school
everyday" idiom,
a grand design, if you will, that preserves the very structures that punish
the outcomes of suffering.
those people who are different, those who produce, through their own
suffering, the suffering of others, are not the enemy, but symptoms. the
system is SICK in its lust for normalcy - which is a code, really, that
appeals to power, authority. .
>
>
>OR OR OR
>
>Is the term "mental illness" even helpful anymore? Single motherhood and
>homosexuality used to be considered symptomatic of mental illness. Today
>depression is considered to be mentall illness, when it seems rather like
>a
>mass state of being, and not the least bit "abnormal".
in my experience, i've known people who were - in my opinion - "ill" from
their bouts of schizophrenia, paranoia, depression, manic delusions, and
so on. they understood themselves as "ill" in ways that
talk-therapy could not address, they understood their neurological process
as a malfunction to the extent that any kind of toxin is welcomed if only
to relieve the insanity.
i think you have to have been insane in order to grasp the phenomenon - it
is one thing to suffer an other's insanity, quite another to be insane.
the paradox lies in the midsts of larger moral dilemmas - if you seek pain
and grief, is that an illness? is it healthy to suffer to the extent that
the quality of your life, and others, diminishes? at what point has the
pain of suffering moved to an illness that is beyond a particular grief?
are some of us existing to suffer? are we mediating a class of people who
have yet to provide us with what we might yet need to understand about
loss, grief, difference, pain, and so on?
it's a tough call for me. i want to be righteous, but having interacted
for so long with the so-called mentally-ill, i found myself at a wall of
ambiguity, --- suffering is, really, a moral determination. and who's
morals determine suffering? how can we actually assert a " quality of
life?" beyond food, shelter, ? companionship = that's the trigger, seems
to me. we can sustain life, but we cannot seem to find it in ourselves to
care. on an interpersonal, personal sacrifice, base existence - a what's
mine - is - yours kind of world.
we own too much. we're too socialized, too institutionalized, too readily
righteous about rights to
deal with the inhumane conditions of existence.
>
>
>Even if we continue with the fiction that the mind can be ill and the
>body
>quite healthy (i.e. the "cartesian" fallacy), or vice versa, how would we
>proceed to describe the kinds of "mental" anguish that people who are
>dying
>from "non-mental" illnesses (almost always painful, always degrading)
>feel
>as something other than mental illness.
exactly. how many doctors have explained to their patients that their
illness is "all in their mind?"
please.
it takes a leap of consciousness, as far as i'm concerned, to really
respect difference and the infinite ways the expressions of this manifest
- much of it is cataloged by science, as you note,
and mental illness is, often, a containment strategy, not an intervention.
>
>
>Just so you know, I'm not being provocative or glib. I really want to
>know
>what you and others think.
well, as i say, having worked with folks in the street in vancouver for so
many years, i have a LOT to say,
but it's the rhetoric that most disdain. people are not "sick" - we live
in a sick society, a sick world,
and the manifestations of illnesses are best contained by science, because
that's where the money is.
>
>
>If psychological "order" and "disorder"; "well-being" and "disease";
>"health" and "illness" are fictions, inseparable from the state of the
>ecosocial system and the entire human organism, what is the focus of
>psychology?
psychology is, and has always been, in the business of control.
it is as much a fiction as any science or art - the difference being in
the assigned validity.
HAH!
diane
philster dudester, sorry it took me so long to respond.
>
>Best regards,
>Phil
>
"I want you to put the crayon back in my brain."
Homer Simpson
diane celia hodges
university of british columbia, centre for the study of curriculum and
instruction
vancouver, bc
mailing address: 46 broadview avenue, montreal, qc, H9R 3Z2
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