Thread by @MarkOneinFour

This is worth a look about the physical/mental split in ideas of mental ill-health in Western cultures. I kind of feel like there's still a lot to be found out about physical causes and social causes and political causes. I don't think everything is just social environment

https://twitter.com/garwboy/status/1318147286543798272

I say this because brains are also physical organs. I'm thinking about head trauma and mood, about things that crate changes in the brain. I feel like the medication / therapy / social justice axes are super useful, but the debate slices up challenges in the wrong ways

I also think medicine (and society) has problems with any thing that makes someone 'ill' but which doesn't have a direct physical sign. I'm thinking of chronic pain, for example. There's been a shift away from medication for chronic pain, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist

I feel like understandings of mental ill-health come from the history of sorting and categorising, like there were a load of people with a load of symptoms and then they had to be spread out on the living room floor like kids toys and put away in logical boxes

Over the history of psychology and psychiatry the labels on the sorting boxes have changed. Once stuff was in a box, the objective was to see what there was that this stuff had in common with that stuff. That'd be your paradigm. Sometimes stuff got shifted from one box to another

I think there's a big difference between talking about cultures propensity for dividing those who experience altered mental states and functioning from others in terms of society and talking about how these differences are approached medically or therapeutically.

It feels to me like saying 'we shouldn't have a brain/body split' can mean a number of things. It can mean treating everything as physical. It can mean treating everything as medical. Neither is the same as looking at the position of distress in society

I know, it's all super slippery. You don't necessarily want to take an extended journey into philosophical enquiry just because something is happening in your head that doesn't feel right to you. Philosophy of self and science of self run into 'fuck me, I feel wrong right now'

All of human history is a series of hypotheses that are wrong and a current set that feel as right as current conditions allow. It takes a lot to shift a paradigm and replace it. I'm pretty sure we'll find out we categorised much mental ill-health wrongly, used wrong paradigm