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I have just been cured of a major mental illness. The cure was cheap, effective and instant. And the original diagnosis did not involve any ‘road to Damascus’ experience after hours on the couch, years of painful soul searching in therapy, or complex cognitive behavioural therapy. No drugs or surgery either — NHS executives take note. I have a real cure, which is not a word clinicians like. They prefer ‘treatment’, or better still, the ‘management’ of a mental illness (as with something like diabetes, where there is effective management, not total cure). The secret? Simple — abolish the illness. I am cured because my disorder has been declassified. It is no longer a sickness, illness, or disorder. It is okay to have it.
Psychiatric diagnoses have always been difficult and unreliable. This is one of the major reasons why illnesses seem to come and go. It was said that the best way to cure schizophrenics in America in the 1960s was to move them to England, where they would be considered merely ‘eccentric’. And it remains true that schizophrenia is still diagnosed less frequently in the UK than in the US. America has always dominated the psychiatric world.
Americans might not be too eager to accept that mental illness could be culturally determined, but in the UK we have tended to import their illness in much the same as we have embraced their taste in personal injury lawyers, sitcoms and diet. In the US, someone might be regarded as socially unskilled, unassertive and emotionally repressed; in Japan, the exact same behaviour might be considered simply demure or polite.
Psychiatrists have a tendency to colonise and pathologise behaviour patterns. New syndromes appear, the diagnostic manuals grow larger with each new edition. Naughty children now have attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder or adolescent defiant disorder. All sorts of behaviour previously thought of as selfish, immoral, even shameful, now gets nicely medicalised with a label that can be seen to excuse it. And soon there will be pharmaceutical companies with appropriate drugs to cure these new illnesses. Continue reading
Sources
- Aeon Magazine
- Image: You Tube
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