No Such Thing as Mental Illness

[Goku]

http://www.madinamerica.com/2012/03/i-dont-believe-in-mental-illness-do-you/

Spoiler

Dr. Michael Cornwall

March 19, 2012

In November 2000, I anxiously stood before the gathered four hundred and fifty mental health professionals, administrators, peers and academicians and said, “Hi, I’m Michael Cornwall and I don’t believe in mental illness!”

I was the first plenary panel speaker at a big conference held in San Francisco. I didn’t believe in mental illness then or when I was in my own madness 46 years ago, or for the past 30 years serving people in madness. Jay Mahler was the only person who came to me and thanked me for saying I didn’t believe in mental illness. A great many people responded to me as if I was radioactive that day.

I’m prompted to write this blog because I just read an article by Marianne Farkas published by the The Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation at Boston University entitled, ”The Vision of Recovery Today: what is it and what it means for services.” She refers to people who need those services as having “Serious mental illness.” The article was written in 2007 but is still being recommended by leaders at the Center for its in-depth analysis of the recovery movement based on the vision that people have serious mental illnesses.

What we believe motivates much of what we do with our lives. Because I didn’t believe in mental illness, I spent my life since I was a young person that went through madness without medication or treatment asking, “If madness isn’t what bio-psychiatry says it is, then what is it?” I came up with my own definition of madness based on my personal experience, therapist work experience and study as a doctoral level researcher. I shared that in previous blogs.

If I had believed that madness was a genetic based brain disorder I may have become a bio-psychiatrist or welcomed taking medication for my madness.

Because mental illness is how bio-psychiatry refers to madness and every diagnostic formulation in their DSM, I never tell the people I serve that they have a mental illness. I don’t see them through that lens of the DSM.

I see them as I see myself, a person who may have various experiences of human emotional suffering which sometimes takes the form of madness.

I was recently chastised by a national peer recovery leader for describing myself and others as able to experience human emotional suffering. He said suffering is the wrong word — distress is more accurate. I don’t believe so, because it doesn’t reflect my own experience or how I would describe others’ pain when in terror, despair or madness. Distress is a mild form of suffering in my understanding. Kind of like indigestion that maybe a couple of Tums will relieve. But that’s just me, what I believe.

Our culture and world is rife with polarizing beliefs — political, religious etc. In a meeting, I heard someone publicly call a national leader of the peer recovery movement a Nazi because that peer leader had said that full recovery was possible. The person who called him a Nazi feared that if mad people believed him and didn’t take medication, there would be a holocaust of death and it would be on his hands. I have heard peers call bio-psychiatrists Nazis.

How far can we go in respecting and opposing each others’ extremely different belief systems before we lapse into name calling and seeing the other as evil?

I imagine some people believed Bob Whitaker had crossed the line when he wrote his blog, “The Taint Of Eugenics In NIMH-Funded Research.” Because of my beliefs I don’t believe he crossed the line.

I believe some practices — such as forced medication, seclusion in restraints, ECT for toddlers and children and teens and forced ECT for adults, prescribing psych drugs for children — are all human rights abuses. Do you think I have crossed the line by saying so?

Is there common ground we can stand on even with our polarized beliefs? That piece of common ground varies in size. Sometimes it doesn’t exist.

I don’t believe in mental illness. I believe we are sovereign souls that should not be imprisoned or be given forced treatments or offered any treatments that do us ANY harm when we are suffering human emotional suffering and madness. I believe we should be given respect, love and compassion.

What do you believe?

^quoting an article written by a doctor who shares my belief;

Western medicine, DSM, it is a belief system first.

 

[shoeless]

i agree with the last sentence. everything else seems like poorly thought out rhetoric.

my aunt is diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and has recently stopped taking her medication. if you could see the change i've seen in her, you'd call bullshit, too.
if a person is having a psychotic break and becomes a threat to him/herself or the people around him/her, sometimes force is necessary, for the safety of everyone. i don't believe that all forced medical practices pertaining to mental illnesses is necessarily correct, and i don't believe that all hospital workers give these people the love/compassion/respect they deserve, but sometimes, action has to be taken. you can't talk a delusional person out of delusion. believe me, my family has tried. it's terrifying to witness, but if a person is not in control of his/her mind, somebody has to intervene, especially when this person is dangerous.

 

[Goku]

i agree with the last sentence. everything else seems like poorly thought out rhetoric.

my aunt is diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and has recently stopped taking her medication. if you could see the change i've seen in her, you'd call bullshit, too.
if a person is having a psychotic break and becomes a threat to him/herself or the people around him/her, sometimes force is necessary, for the safety of everyone. i don't believe that all forced medical practices pertaining to mental illnesses is necessarily correct, and i don't believe that all hospital workers give these people the love/compassion/respect they deserve, but sometimes, action has to be taken. you can't talk a delusional person out of delusion. believe me, my family has tried. it's terrifying to witness, but if a person is not in control of his/her mind, somebody has to intervene, especially when this person is dangerous.

yea the article was not that great, that's why I spoiler'd it haha

but I can't deny the obvious delusional cases of schizophrenia, which are far and few between.

My "favorite" schizophrenia symptom is:

[...] Social withdrawal, sloppiness of dress and hygiene, and loss of motivation and judgment are all common in schizophrenia.[8]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizophrenia#Symptoms

^I should be lucky I found MBTI before I found DSM, because I instead diagnosed myself as 'INTP who smokes too much weed'. Very scary how that could be easily seen as schizophrenia.

 

[Ex-User (5841)]

I agree with the thread title, and that the article sucks in general.

The constructs that are considered "mental illness" are very real. They're just not bad, useless, or wrong. This covers the whole shebang from perception to cognition to memory. Anti-psychiatry ftw.

I believe some practices — such as forced medication, seclusion in restraints, ECT for toddlers and children and teens and forced ECT for adults, prescribing psych drugs for children — are all human rights abuses.

^

 

[Hawkeye]

I'd say mental illness is the wrong phrase; Generic Cognitive Deficiency sounds more appropriate.

 

[Ex-User (9062)]

I don't believe in gravity.

 

[Ex-User (5841)]

I'd say mental illness is the wrong phrase; Generic Cognitive Deficiency sounds more appropriate.

Why is it that deficiencies apparently tend to co-occur with enhancements? Compensation, or orientation?

I don't believe in gravity.

I believe in magick.

Spoiler

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBVOYkhNb1o

 

[Hawkeye]

Why is it that deficiencies apparently tend to co-occur with enhancements? Compensation, or orientation?

I guess it depends on the deficiency. Some could be compensation such as with the loss of a sense. Others could simply be orientation like with savants and the autistic.

 

[Seed-Wad]

If you are a threat to yourself, where you do not wish to be, or a threat to others where you do not wish to be, you are mentally ill. (In the example of the paranoid schizophrenic).

Previous is based on individualism. But the assignment of illnesses is very much a social process, meaning that you can take it as far as saying that 'when a person can not do his social task properly, when it is expected of him, and he expects it from his self, he is mentally ill.'

I hope it is clear to everyone how distinct the two definitions are in their paradigm and consequences. Also, it is troubling that the extreme change in our society makes that a lot of the tasks assigned to people are beyond their ability to deal with, while the idea that you should 'just deal' with your assigned social task has not yet softened enough.

 

[Ex-User (9062)]

Oh, i believe in magic too and the melodies start to make me feel all itchy...

Spoiler

Sirhan Sirhan mode engaged.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_J0QWc-doNA

great human mannequin impression on behalf of the women too.

 

[paulademourl]

What i firmly believe is that the (socially accepted) methods used to treat 'madness', are just to temporally palliate the result of a massive chain of experiences faced with the lack of appropiate tools, or family inheritance, not to actually cure them. My grandmother suffered from mental illness herself, derived from some struggles and resource shortage...Years later, my mother as a theraphist achieved what years of medication and traditional medicine couldn't (or wouldn't).

 

[Seed-Wad]

What i firmly believe is that the (socially accepted) methods used to treat 'madness', are just to temporally palliate the result of a massive chain of experiences faced with the lack of appropiate tools, or family inheritance, not to actually cure them. My grandmother suffered from mental illness herself, derived from some struggles and resource shortage...Years later, my mother as a theraphist achieved what years of medication and traditional medicine couldn't (or wouldn't).

Wouldn't that mean that her illness was wrongly prognosed as physical, where it was emotional/social?

 

[Latte]

Wouldn't that mean that her illness was wrongly prognosed as physical, where it was emotional/social?

There are issues that cannot occur without specific physical parameters being in place but that don't necessarily occur.
So that you can have two unmedicated people who both have the genes that enables schizophrenia and show the brain structure changes associated with schizophrenia on brain scans but where only one presents the symptoms.

Imagine a person with normalish brain development and physiology. Imagine it getting PTSD or something else when meeting with traumatic experience. There is a kind of failure to process what occured into a perspective and sense of things being fine again.

What we have to understand is that the weird parts of schizophrenia are ways of processing one's life. In our current cultural environment, there seems to be a high rate of people utilizing these ways of processing things to get stuck in self-destructive loops.

For those I personally know who have experienced the self-destructive end of this manner of cognition, the inner imaginary life has been aptly interpretable as externalizations of negative feelings about oneself and one's life.

The stigmatization from the psychiatric attitude and as a consequence the societal attitude that the problem is their manner of cognition rather than the self-destructive nature of how it was currently being utilized made them distance themselves more from these externalizations of aspects of themself, to great detrimental effect in the long term, because they increasingly relinquished mental control of them and increasingly reinforced the idea that they should be afraid of them, and that again reinforced the intensity and malevolent nature of the externalized fears. An increasingly nightmarish existence ensued to the point where for some of them, temporary neurochemical alteration became the only way.

The current long term solution implemented in reaction to certain self-destructive behavioral patterns is one of supression rather than empowerment, understanding and self-control, and that's not good for the patient's prospects for self-development. It's a very blunt against-the-grain-of-a-person solution that mainly serves to have society not having to deal with unpredictable or dangerous behavior.

Related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syjEN3peCJw

 

[The Void]

Mental restlessness.
Mental unsatisfaction: easily distracted by mundane things, and silly thoughts. Desires to party, sex, friend, desires to do drastic physical actions to satisfy.
Worry about what others think.
Belief: emotional attachments to belief systems,
Taking things too seriously,
Meaning disorder: fear of uncertainty, quick to attach attribute, quick to judge others without enough justification (predujice based)
Fear of thinking and doubting over one's belief system or comfort zone.
Mental sensiticty, easily offendable -> showing usnatbility, easily influencable no stable state,
,mindlessness, easily conditionable, impulsive actions, etc etc...
Too comforming....

Symptoms of NORMALCY DISORDER.

If society gives me disorder I will give them back.
Screw you all. I work with karma.

 

[Ex-User (5841)]

Spoiler

Whether "mental illness" is inaccurate or the like is a different issue from what the OP concludes, even though it is valid. But I wonder to what degree we would be able to make a more accurate system as we still lack knowledge.

But our knowledge of what we call mental illnesses is updating and we see that the illnesses are categorized accordingly. So at least the system is progressing and it is not unlikely that the definition and categories will change when we understand the illnesses better.

Of course there are people who are misdiagnosed and treated badly by med staff, but often these are voices who later are louder than all the thousands who are helped positively with treatment based on their diagnosis. It's debatable to how large degree we should blame the DSM system for human errors and abuse.

Of course you know most of this, I assume, though it's difficult to know where you stand based on a link and a few sentences.

There are many who are unable to live normal lives without proper treatment. In some cases, they can't function without medication. That's not something we can disregard.

For the most part we agree.

I think there's enough evidence out there at this point to consider most major groups of mental illness epigenetic phenomenon, which means they manifest in physiology (likely in specific regions of the brain, but perhaps in more complex chains of expression in more complex illnesses).

What I dislike is... the use of medication as a primary means of treatment, which isn't even something that's built into the DSM. Every other form of medicine has a fairly well-defined protocol for both diagnosis and treatment. This leads to a reliance on a carpet bombing approach 1) instead of investment in understanding the problem 2) which very likely creates new problems or worsens old ones. This philosophy doesn't exactly jibe with "First, do no harm."

How many decades were spent treating infection with bloodletting, sterilization, and standing in a bucket of your own feces while petting a chicken (a common folk remedy in the southeastern U.S. ), instead of searching for a "magic bullet" substance that would kill only the offending bacteria, which Gerhard Domagk discovered in sulfanilamide?

If we can't narrow down the cause, how can we be sure that existing treatments are effective at all? All three, bloodletting, sterilization, and the chicken treatment, certainly made infections worse or caused additional ones (sterilization kills healthy tissue as well as infection, which prolongs the healing process and increases opportunity for further infection), but they survived because people believed that they worked (not to mention the other cure-alls of the day like mercury, colloidal silver, and any number of elixirs. Coca-Cola was an elixir originally marketed as a nerve and brain tonic...).

In my view, therapy techniques should be exhausted before medication is prescribed, not because medication isn't potentially useful, but because every patient should have the benefit of accurate risk assessment. Antipsychiatry is the psychological equivalent of personalized medicine. I actually think forums like this fill this role better than the social institution of psychology itself.

*EDIT: It disappeared!

 

[Minuend]

I deleted it because I realized it was inaccurate in relation to what I tried to convey. I tend be fairly pessimistic about what humans can actually manage to do. I usually start with that premise in mind, and it might have seemed like I figured the system we have now is good enough or ideal. Which I don't think it is, but I don't see anyone being capable of digging up the whole thing by it roots and create something better.

Aka I regret everything

 

[Cherry Cola]

I think the guy quoted in the OP is a shortsighted idiot for the most part. All he does is call mental illness something else because he doesn't like the current treatments available for the mentally ill.

Thus what he's actually saying is just that he doesn't believe in the current treatments. And understandable statement, there's a lot of issues with current treatments for whatever mental issue you'd like for an example.

The problem is he gets to categorical about it, and where his stance to be assumed progress would be hindered. Yeah things suck, but guess what? Psychiatry is still in a fetal stage, the human brain is very hard to understand and how are we to learn more if we just decide to give up on trying out meds and new treatments?

I believe some practices — such as forced medication, seclusion in restraints, ECT for toddlers and children and teens and forced ECT for adults, prescribing psych drugs for children — are all human rights abuses. Do you think I have crossed the line by saying so?

It's so easy to say what he says, but there are kids who benefit from medicine, there are people who need to be secluded in restraints in order not to hurt themselves or others while in a psychosis. Forced ECT I can't defend though.

But really, mental illnesses and disorders are understood and diagnosed primarily by their symptoms, thus the unreliability of medications and treatments. In two patients with similar symptoms the root causes may be completely different, thus they may need different treatments despite having similar issues. Trial and error is needed, as cruel as it may sound it is required for things to progress, we learn more all the time. Look at the treatments of the past if you so like.

This Dr. Michael Cornwall also does not seem to understand the ability of a term such as mental illness to fend of social stigma aimed at those whose suffer from it. It has an official ring, and everyone knows you get ill not because you've done something wrong or you're fucked up, you just get ill. If someone's just crazy instead that person would be met quite differently by society.

 

[The Void]

Everyone(me included) is mentally ill by my standard.

 

[Beat Mango]

He says he doesn't see patients through the DSM lens. There's truth to the DSM though. Not complete truth, but some truth.

Perhaps the best thing to do is look at it with multiple lenses.

 

[Jennywocky]

I don't believe in gravity.

I'm up in the air on that one.

 

[Jennywocky]

Wouldn't that mean that her illness was wrongly prognosed as physical, where it was emotional/social?

Yes, in general, I think trying to make a general blanket statement about all mental illnesses and diagnoses of is ill-founded. Not all problematic issues in a person's life stem from the same source, and the same issue in different people's lives could stem from different sources in each.

i.e., it's more a matter of matching up a particular issue with the appropriate resolution and making a proper diagnosis. For example, sometimes medication can resolve an issue in one person that for another person can be resolved by therapy... or some combination of resolutions.

I think Beat Mango was suggesting that as well.

 

[scorpiomover]

I should be lucky I found MBTI before I found DSM, because I instead diagnosed myself as 'INTP who smokes too much weed'. Very scary how that could be easily seen as schizophrenia.

It can't.

The acid test for schizophrenia, is a test to show the tendency to believe things as absolutely certain, based on so little evidence that almost all people, even incredibly stupid people, would not be so certain with such little knowledge. They are supposed to give you a bag full of 100 balls, and ask you to tell the doctor the colour of the majority of balls in the bag. You can take out as many as you want, until you are sure. Most people take about 5 or 6 before hazarding a guess. Schizophrenics take out 1 or 2 and then are absolutely certain. They won't take out more to be sure, even when the doctor prompts them to.

The fact that you were willing to consider both schizohprenia and "INTP who smokes too much weed", shows that you aren't anywhere near that decisive to be schizophrenic. If you saw leprechauns telling you to run down the streets naked, you'd probably think that you might be hallucinating due to too much weed, and might be wrong. That self-doubt alone would keep you from turning schizophrenic.

 

[scorpiomover]

In November 2000, I anxiously stood before the gathered four hundred and fifty mental health professionals, administrators, peers and academicians and said, “Hi, I’m Michael Cornwall and I don’t believe in mental illness!”

Illness simply means that something is unwell. Mental illness means that the brain is unwell. If you're depressed all the time, when you've got no reason to be, then you're unwell in a way that shows the brain is unwell. Not rocket surgery.

If I had believed that madness was a genetic based brain disorder

Ahhh. What you mean, is that the diagnosis for mental illness being purely genetic, is unreasonable. Of course it's unreasonable. If someone put a spike through another person's head, and he lived, but his personality screwed up, like Phineas Gage, that is NOT genetic. But we KNOW that happened. So not all mental illness is genetic. Some are caused by other things.

The problem you are referring to, is that we are now living in a time where we use the genetic fallacy in medicine all the time:

The genetic fallacy, also known as fallacy of origins, fallacy of virtue,[1] is a fallacy of irrelevance where a conclusion is suggested based solely on something or someone's origin rather than its current meaning or context. This overlooks any difference to be found in the present situation, typically transferring the positive or negative esteem from the earlier context.

Genetics is indeed extremely useful, and probably explains most of what happens, and is the cause with the highest probability. However, it's not the only possibility, and by focussing always on the highest probability, we exclude everything that was not caused by that one cause, as not existing. But those other things must exist, or those other possibilities would have a probability of zero, and so no possibility at all. This is another version of the scientific principle, that because something is observed to be a cause often, that it is a cause everywhere, only carried to an extreme, and one that is almost certainly bound to fail in many situations, due to so many cases that our medical systems now deal with.

This has its roots in over-confidence and over-optimism. We hoped that genetics would answer all of our questions. We sought one magic answer for all our ills. So when we found what was the most common cause for our ills, we chose to ignore the rest, to our loss.

 

[Vrecknidj]

I don't believe in gravity.

For Lent this year, I'm thinking about giving up integers.

 

[QuickTwist]

A few points I want to make:

1.) (most important) Not all people diagnosed with a mental illness are dangerous to either themselves or other people (after treatment).

2.) Not all people diagnosed with a mental illness act crazy.

3.) Improper diagnoses happen all the time.

I have never hurt myself or anyone else nor threatened anyone else unless they really had it comin'. There are a lot of people who act almost normal and have a severe mental illness. Some people are very odd and they don not have a mental illness. One common misdiagnoses is when someone tells the the psychiatrist "I'm sad all the time," and this gets diagnosed as depression when really what the person should have said was "Sometimes I feel really helpless and sometimes I think I am ruling the world," which would lead to bipolar.

The subject of mental illness is so complicated that even the smartest person in the world could spend their entire life devoted to resolving all the issues and the wouldn't even get close.

 

[Vrecknidj]

Everything QuickTwist said.

I agree.

 

[sushi]

there is, but then there is also pressure to conform and turn everyone into the same mold in society. (basically the definiton of insanity is erratic behavior that makes no sense to other people)

mental illness would drastically reduce if there is less population and less conformist pressure.
After all the freedom to be insane and freedom of behavior have a strong relationship.

You'll soon grow tired of your own insanity if you are the only person on this planet.

I am a vampire