By Willow (willowashmaple.sbs, formerly of willowashmaple.xyz)
Oct. 12, 2024
In my previous post,
I related how I might be a malignant narcissist.
Often mental health diagnoses do not get it "right." Many autistic adults have a history of being misdiagnosed for something else and did not receive appropriate resources and help.
In the United States, mental health professionals and the insurance industry rely on the American Psychiatric Association's "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, 5th Edition" (DSM-5). In other countries, they may use the World Health Organization's "International Classifications of Diseases, 11th Edition" (ICD-11) instead.
Either way, these books are seen as a "bible" of mental health.
While this may be useful to statisticians, insurance companies, and public health bureaucrats, it is far from perfect and is ridden with inherent problems.
For one thing, every human experience is unique, and these books by their very nature, attempt to classify various human experiences into numbered and neatly classified categories.
More importantly, the idea of "mental health" is a social construct manufactured by oft-politicized interest groups whose primary goals are to maintain social order, keep people productive, and to help their constituents (mental health professionals, the big pharma, etc.) make more profits.
Hence what were once considered normal childhood behaviors are now medicalized as mental disorders. Modern history is replete with eccentric and creative people wrongly institutionalized and forcibly drugged day in and day out; and in authoritarian, communist countries, political dissidents have been kidnapped and locked up in psychiatric hospitals under dubious diagnoses such as "sluggish schizophrenia."
In this light, mental health (or, more precisely, enforcement of behavioral norms through pathologization) is a tool of repression by the rich and powerful. Ironically, the mental health industry seems to do very little to actually help people achieve true mental well-being.
At the end of the day, the so-called mental health industry often fails to (or maybe refuses to) question why people are traumatized, depressed, anxious, angry, and all sort of other things. Instead, it only tells people how to "cope" in an inherently distorted society that produces distorted people without taking the system to account.
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