“It is just as foolish to fancy that any philosophy can transcend its present world, as that an individual could leap out of his time or jump over Rhodes.”[Hegel, Preface to The Philosophy of Right (1821)]
... will give a clue that my own view is that we are on deep rooted and enormously complex terrain whereby ancient wonders of the world are as likely straddled by one person than small charities (for example Time to Change and Time to Change Wales) can decisively interject on the panoramic reach of a world view which favours many things ahead of densely concentrated lived-experience and the necessary changes to everyday life which our current fascinations with the indefinable area of mental health presage. (Pause for breath).
An interesting question to commence with might be how many people have mental health concerns? For one, I don’t expect to find a definitive answer, or to overcome the continual reproduction of stigma and discrimination as part of existing and remade social relations. Given recent counter-edicts that I have been following (see the Powys Mental Health Blogspot or the following blog in at least two places Discursive of Tunbridge Wells and here) the themes are known to be numerous. But if the limelight that a few TV adverts (my favourite is this one), posters, radio slots, interviews, the odd celebrity and some necessary rhetoric casts an uneasy shadow on the other already-dispossessed who will claim that our common heritage of ‘mental distress’ can't and shan't ever be labelled as ‘ill’ (regardless of what we may sometimes do or not do, say or not say, need or want); then there is a problem.
Of course there are many different angles of approach and places of emphasis. The medical model of mental illness (sic) enjoys an enormous power base but even a small child could recite that there is a difference between an individual pancreas say, which if deemed deficient will need insulin, and millions upon millions of human brains that if deemed individually deficient and at fault, still communicate with other ‘brains’ and are developed, fed and maintained by more than the processes that occur within any one person’s skin. Whether it is accurate to say that the human brain is more complex than the furthest unknown reaches of the universe I do not know. But if we don’t yet understand one brain then the task of engaging with and altering amalgamated human action is even more difficult. Perhaps though, if we made the journey to the experimental collider at CERN in Switzerland and all put our heads in there some interesting results would follow?
To say that
stigma (and discrimination) can’t be effectively quashed by a UK civil society
campaign is a fair point. But not to laud the efforts of the small team who;
are on finite contracts, have a fixed budget and who must fulfil ‘interesting’
ways of statistically measuring results in order to satisfy funders, for at
least trying? Perhaps make up your own mind.
The larger picture, I would argue, brings us onto the question of the frequency of mental health concerns both in the UK and beyond. This, to have any relevance to a meaningful debate, has to sketch amongst other concerns the explicit points of the relationship including places such as the UK to the wider world and some central implicit aspects from known and recorded human history. Combined with individual perspective(s), I hope that we can honour the spirit of previous debates that I have witnessed that have stemmed from the Time to Change claim that ‘1 in 4 of us will have a mental health problem at some stage’through to the counter claim, that if extended too far, says that we’re all imminently and immanently at risk of meltdown of an apocalyptic scale.
That claim, just in case you’re wondering, is that we all have a mental health problem comparable with severe and often life-ending conditions. My innocent side hopes that although we all have on-going health and wellbeing concerns I would rather conclude less than‘1 in 4’ than more. Even this though, risks over simplifying the richly interwoven individual and social tapestry which we are all part of. A diagnosis may, or may not, be proof or otherwise of the severity of a person’s distress by comparison to another person who doesn’t have a diagnosis. By the same token, scientific, quasi-scientific or the science by proxy that modern psychiatry embodies, even during its most exact moments, will never be the pinnacle of knowledge that well-used philosophy happens to be. To be clear, science is a branch of knowledge, not knowledge in itself. Psychiatry may or may not be deemed science in turn, which is something to bear in mind when working out the sort of hierarchy that an attempt to challenge orthodoxy might entail some days.
Whatever view you find most endearing and whichever ones sit most comfortably with your own known or unknown position in space and time, we may safely conclude that we don’t really have accurate ways of describing those things that go on in our heads when we can’t sleep, or if and when psychoses or deep depressions take hold. Not to be a pessimist, but one can also paint a picture of a universe which is thought to be contributed of mostly dark matter and dark energy (neither of which we really know too much about) and of a human history which is, at the bare minimum, nine tenths unrecorded in any way whatsoever. From here, the idea that we are particularly different to pre-historic incarnations of ourselves that lay beneath stars and wondered about what was in them, and what was above, may either soothe or frighten. Language for one, has surely moved on greatly since then, as have the internal neurological receptors that register acute verbal signals in meaningful and emotive ways.
But even with highly sensitive measuring devices carried around with us at all times, most of us ought admit to regularly using imperfect ways of describing things which we don’t really understand. With possible danger around every modern city corner if you believe certain news outlets, it might be better to say that paranoia is a very sensible default position to assume. Similarly, although voice-hearing may have a long and rich history of incorporation in other cultures or that can be normalised within other spiritual currents, the small percentile who are pathologised for admitting to it these days might be the only ones who truly give time and effort to exploring every deep, dark corner; every nook and cranny within their own mind-space for the sake of functioning normally alongside others.
The larger picture, I would argue, brings us onto the question of the frequency of mental health concerns both in the UK and beyond. This, to have any relevance to a meaningful debate, has to sketch amongst other concerns the explicit points of the relationship including places such as the UK to the wider world and some central implicit aspects from known and recorded human history. Combined with individual perspective(s), I hope that we can honour the spirit of previous debates that I have witnessed that have stemmed from the Time to Change claim that ‘1 in 4 of us will have a mental health problem at some stage’through to the counter claim, that if extended too far, says that we’re all imminently and immanently at risk of meltdown of an apocalyptic scale.
That claim, just in case you’re wondering, is that we all have a mental health problem comparable with severe and often life-ending conditions. My innocent side hopes that although we all have on-going health and wellbeing concerns I would rather conclude less than‘1 in 4’ than more. Even this though, risks over simplifying the richly interwoven individual and social tapestry which we are all part of. A diagnosis may, or may not, be proof or otherwise of the severity of a person’s distress by comparison to another person who doesn’t have a diagnosis. By the same token, scientific, quasi-scientific or the science by proxy that modern psychiatry embodies, even during its most exact moments, will never be the pinnacle of knowledge that well-used philosophy happens to be. To be clear, science is a branch of knowledge, not knowledge in itself. Psychiatry may or may not be deemed science in turn, which is something to bear in mind when working out the sort of hierarchy that an attempt to challenge orthodoxy might entail some days.
Whatever view you find most endearing and whichever ones sit most comfortably with your own known or unknown position in space and time, we may safely conclude that we don’t really have accurate ways of describing those things that go on in our heads when we can’t sleep, or if and when psychoses or deep depressions take hold. Not to be a pessimist, but one can also paint a picture of a universe which is thought to be contributed of mostly dark matter and dark energy (neither of which we really know too much about) and of a human history which is, at the bare minimum, nine tenths unrecorded in any way whatsoever. From here, the idea that we are particularly different to pre-historic incarnations of ourselves that lay beneath stars and wondered about what was in them, and what was above, may either soothe or frighten. Language for one, has surely moved on greatly since then, as have the internal neurological receptors that register acute verbal signals in meaningful and emotive ways.
But even with highly sensitive measuring devices carried around with us at all times, most of us ought admit to regularly using imperfect ways of describing things which we don’t really understand. With possible danger around every modern city corner if you believe certain news outlets, it might be better to say that paranoia is a very sensible default position to assume. Similarly, although voice-hearing may have a long and rich history of incorporation in other cultures or that can be normalised within other spiritual currents, the small percentile who are pathologised for admitting to it these days might be the only ones who truly give time and effort to exploring every deep, dark corner; every nook and cranny within their own mind-space for the sake of functioning normally alongside others.
But, over time, how many people have had
mental health issues that we can compare to the things we recognise today? And
how many people in ‘non-western’ spaces have comparable or worse conditions
than we know of here? Similarly, how do large scale known historical events
such as wars, the spread of markets, industry and technology feed back into
these questions? If indigenuity were
to be a thing of the past, and modernity were to crumble around it’s already
bowing edifices; what would a healthy post-modern mind and body be like on the
whole? Perhaps these are the directions change is already occurring in and that
we need to begin to acknowledge in more than tacit ways over the coming days,
weeks and months.
No comments:
Post a Comment