Mental health disorders, in addition to their personal relevance, function a kind of commentary on the society in which they occur. Depression is a statement that society is either excessively punishing or insufficiently rewarding and generalized and social anxiety are indications that our ordinary ways of doing things are, for some, overwhelming and beyond confident management. Schizophrenia is a marker of recurrent social defeat, exacerbated by a cycle of dysfunction, institutionalization, and ostracization. Gender dysphoria is an inevitable consequence of a culture which requires all expressions of natural human variation to comply with a single correct answer. A complete picture of mental health disorders must at some point come to terms with a notion of cultural responsibility. Biology interacts with culture through the intermediate processes of the mind, and culture is ultimately responsible for a very considerable proportion of the materials of self-relation. Culture sets the critical conditions under which psychological processes are rewarded or punished, and delineates ways in which they can be constructed. It may be, to touch upon only the most apparent of factors, either liberal (but disconnecting), or repressive (but interdependent). These cultural factors produce pressures upon individuals, the psyches of whom may or may not be sufficiently robust to weather the demand. Extreme examples can be found in the pressures associated with racism and gender; examples of moderate strength in pressures of individualism and conformity, and weaker examples associated with the stigmas of obesity or body image. Culture therefore constitutes and modifies the individual, setting the scene for what may with time and aggravating circumstances become a mental health disorder. Alternatively, cultures may buffer dispositional factors, promoting supportive social arrangements in keeping with the psychological variation in their respective populations. Having been raised in the Northeast, the generally tolerant tendency of the Northwest - exemplified by the encouragement “You’re in Oregon, be nice” - is an example the benefit of which I can speak to from personal experience. BMA (the biomedical approach to mental health disorders) is frankly technoscientific and acultural. It also belongs to a modernist and threadbare narrative that has long promised an ever-expanding satisfaction of desire while simultaneously leaving behind all unpleasant notions of cost and sacrifice. BMA views disorders as something essentially private, a genetic problem manifesting itself within the physiological and neurological recesses of the individual. All of this separates the individual from their context, and omits the possibility that illnesses reside in systems larger than the individual physiological unit. And the evidence, as Deacon reads it, supports this: BMA, far from a magisterial display of the power of scientific modernism, is under suspicion of diversion from the needs of those most affected by mental health disorders.
Posted on: Tue, 13 Jan 2015 08:58:14 +0000
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