More Redemption in the Mines of Madness

[usuakari]

Dear LJ, for my birthday I actually to got to break free from the psychiatric ward I've been spending time in for the past month. Freedom included discussing more mentally ill people living in the community in the morning, and then hooning around parts of the Derwent Valley in the afternoon pumping people full of antipsychotics. Sounds like fun,

Comments

[usuakari]

This is only a small fraction of what we've been up too, but I was feeling professionaly reflective.

[alecto23]

I've always thought the border between "sane, but with some problems" and "mentally ill" is far too grey and woolly for comfort. Even if you try to put other layers on it, such as "Is the person able to function in their day to day life or are their mental problems massively disrupting it?", it's still far from clear-cut. I think the things that bother me most are the impermeability of the border - as you say, once classified as schizophrenic (and presumably other things as well), it's hard to get rid of that - and also the stigma associated with mental illness. For all that some high profile people have come out of the depression closet, it's still not something I feel comfortable admitting to. And it has repercussions on my recovery as well - because I think I shouldn't be so depressed I'm trying really hard to deny/overcome it. Sometimes this is counter-productive - you can't bypass it, you have to just go through. Anyway, if we thought of mental illness really as an illness, something that needs treatment and care and you can get

[usuakari]

I've always thought the border between "sane, but with some problems" and "mentally ill" is far too grey and woolly for comfort. Even if you try to put other layers on it, such as "Is the person able to function in their day to day life or are their mental problems massively disrupting it?", it's still far from clear-cut

IMHO, it's very, very thin. It's actually quite easy to see the porous border between what we'd classically regard as 'normal', 'neurotic', and 'psychotic' issues and how one can become the other, and vice versa. Especially if you look at the same thing on a different day, or use different tools to assess a given issue.

As a partial aside, the Global Assessment of Functioning (Axis 5 on the current DSM IV TR) is an interesting attempt to quantify the ability of someone to function in the real world. It can be mildly hilarious to see in use - almost as much fun as doing a Mini-Mental State Examination on someone with dementia, which often produces weird results. My favourite on the MMSE is the surprisingly large

[usuakari]

For all that some high profile people have come out of the depression closet, it's still not something I feel comfortable admitting to.

Anyway, if we thought of mental illness really as an illness, something that needs treatment and care and you can get better, and sometimes a hospital may be the best place to provide that treatment and care whereas in other cases, outpatient treatment is fine, maybe it would be easier for people to get the help they need and not to get stuck in places where they might not need to be.Ah, such an interesting conundrum. If we make it an illness and medicalise it, do we restrict some avenues of dealing with it? Are spiritual practices a help, or a hinderance, in dealing with psychosis, for example? Do we also keep slicing and dicing with terms and definitions, deciding that X is pathological and requiring treatment (even if we don't fully understand the cause or the proposed treatment) and Y is just an ordinary experience or feeling? What about next year when we discover a positive correlation between

[sealwhiskers]

Whoa, setting the universe right by stopping his heart for a few secs, what a fascinating idea!
Interesting read, I hope you write more in here!

[usuakari]

The delusions that people come up with are fascinating, as is the idea of recurring themes. What is it that's going on in the heads of the many psychotic people that claim to either be God, be on a mission from God, or have miraculous abilities or knowledge that render them godlike? One too many superhero comics at impressionable age?!?

Given I currently have a mountain of school work to finish, registration as a nurse to finalise, a new job to find and feel pretty damn awful more may be a while coming. But it will.