Redefining mental illness

Psychological researchers are finally making some major and much-needed changes in how they look at and classify anxiety, psychosis, and other problems:

Two months ago, the British Psychological Society released a remarkable document entitled “Understanding Psychosis and Schizophrenia.” Its authors say that hearing voices and feeling paranoid are common experiences, and are often a reaction to trauma, abuse or deprivation: “Calling them symptoms of mental illness, psychosis or schizophrenia is only one way of thinking about them, with advantages and disadvantages.”

The report says that there is no strict dividing line between psychosis and normal experience: “Some people find it useful to think of themselves as having an illness. Others prefer to think of their problems as, for example, an aspect of their personality which sometimes gets them into trouble but which they would not want to be without.”

In the US, decades of research failed to find unique biological underpinnings to diagnostic categories such as depression, schizophrenia, and PTSD. Now brain researchers are abandoning that approach. Instead of studying anxiety, they will look at the neurological basis of fear.

These new developments are long overdue, in my opinion. I’m delighted the mainstream psychology establishment is finally starting to catch on to what a lot of us in the trenches have known or suspected for a long, long time.

Read the entire New York Times article

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Redefining mental illness — 3 Comments

  1. Personally, I’ve started to wonder how interlinked these mental health problems really are. I was talking to an adult autistic client yesterday and had one of those aha moments when I saw links between all of them and it makes me wonder. The problem most with autism struggle with is the sensory integration issue, everything is either too intense and sensory is either sought or avoided depending on how intense, yet while their emotional experiences are present, they have a hard time defining theirs and others emotions. On the other hand, a true Schizophrenic can relate how disconnected they are from their world around them, and can describe the voices or things they see fairly well, believing them in many cases to be real, yet if you ask them how they are feeling in the middle of an angry outburst, they’ll say “I’m fine, thank you.” It made me wonder yesterday if they are two sides of the same coin. You can see this disorders potential when you talk to children of someone with Schizophrenia in that they also have trouble from a young age with social interactions and with connecting with their emotions. Is perhaps the cure for these tied up in the two extremes these involve? Could there be a way we can mesh the treatments for these problems in a way that helps them deal with the misfiring neurons? I believe medication isn’t the answer for most, especially with compliance being so low in many cases, but perhaps we can use the same sensory integration techniques with a Schizophrenic that we use to help decrease or improve the experience of an Autistic person. Perhaps even the Biofeedback which has shown to be effective in treating sensory overload in an Autistic child. What do you think?

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