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I completely agree with your overall analysis, as well as the main point of the original article. The one thing I would add or clarify is that even the phrase "
by mindgam3 8y ago
I completely agree with your overall analysis, as well as the main point of the original article. The one thing I would add or clarify is that even the phrase "mental disorder" may not be the best way to refer to this class of symptoms/behaviors. I believe that "mental injury" would be both more accurate, and more conducive to healing.
A substantial portion of the things we refer to as "mental illness" are the after-effects of trauma. When you break your leg and you can't walk for 6 months afterwards, people don't say you have a "leg illness". It's not some unspecified thing which caused your leg to stop performing like most people's legs. It's a fracture. If set properly and given time to heal, it will resume normal functioning. If it's never set, or if it gets reinjured, it may lead to a permanent disability.
Minds can be broken as well. Any one who has ever experienced an abusive relationship knows this. Survivors of child abuse know this. A "mental fracture" isn't primarily physical, like a fracture of the leg, but it has a similar effect in terms of impairing the organ to perform its role correctly.
But mental injuries can be "set" and healed, just like physical ones. Perhaps not 100%, perhaps there will always be scar tissue or some version of impaired mobility where the injury occurred. But injuries heal with time, given proper care.
I am aware that this concept is fairly at odds with the western conception of mental health with its myriad disorders, all of which are unexplained and presumably lifelong diseases. I attribute this entire weird world of DSM pseudoscience with its gargantuan and ever-growing list of labels to the massive social pressure against dealing with the actual problem of trauma and abuse.
Correctly diagnosing someone with a "mental injury resulting from trauma/abuse" would lead to some extremely difficult conversations, which most people (even the ones experiencing the abuse) would prefer not to have.
- arandr0x 8y agoHow exactly would you "set" a mental injury?
- mindgam3 8y agoIt's like setting a physical injury, but significantly harder because usually you're not dealing with it at the time of injury, only much later. You find the original source, some event or series of events that caused the psyche to fracture. By fracture I mean caused the mind to operate according to some models that were necessary to survive at the time of crisis, but are no longer adaptive in the normal/real/adult world. You then update your mental model to one that is more aligned with reality. In other words: go to the source of the pain, unlearn whatever lesson you learned at the time to deal with the situation, learn a different/healthier way of looking at it, and then practice a lot until the new mental model is firmly in place. This is hard. But it gets easier with practice. And it's much easier than trying to set an injury by taking lots of pain-killers.