Psychodiversity is a word I’ve made up which is synonymous with mental diversity. Thought, emotion, behaviour, conscious experience (like hallucinations) as well as drug experiences have judgements made upon them by the mental health system. Not just psychiatrists though. The public do too.
Defining syndromes and finding cures is the mainstay of psychiatric research. The public buys into this except when social progress changes attitudes/morals to demedicalise mental illnesses. Commonly used diagnoses of the past are now thought of as important, natural parts of society and civilisation. Each step forward in progress is an increase in acceptable human psychodiversity. This works counter to the medicalisation of ever greater swathes of the human condition and the population such that over half the population could be diagnosed with something at some point.
A lot of people consider this all to be okay but I perceive a farce and, more importantly, a system of blatant injustice. The mental health system is a homogenising system for psychological diversity. It seeks to condition people to become better but it isn’t an illness that’s being healed. It is mental diversity which is being ‘treated’ and individuals are made to become socially or morally acceptable. The extremes were first to become victims of an error which turned medical healthcare into a system of social judgement aimed at creating a less diverse mental humanity. The system speciously assumes biological differences are the cause of mental illness alone and anything which is both associated with worse life outcomes and biological difference is a medical illness.
The easiest way to understand the sheer madness in the idea of human differences being called illness because of biological reasons is to consider skin colour. Black skin comes from simple genetics. Because of prejudice, less opportunity and other factors this is associated with worse life outcomes. A few hundred years ago doctors believed the biological difference was an illness and called it negritude. It obviously isn’t an illness and we can see that now. The same is true of mental illness which like negritude isn’t a real illness.
Bah…what’s the point. You’re all fucking sheep.
We do big ideas 