Mental illness

It was as a high school teacher that I became particularly aware of the tendency to explain every kind non-productive behavior as mental illness. Mental illness definitely exists, but the boundary between it and eccentricity and the wide range of personal difference is vague and the tendency to medicalize everything diminishes individuality, dignity and responsibility.

spiked provides a review by Helene Guldberg of Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness, by Christopher Lane. From the review:

‘In my mother’s generation, shy people were seen as introverted and perhaps a bit awkward, but never mentally ill.’

So writes the Chicago-based research professor, Christopher Lane, in his fascinating new book Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness. ‘Adults admired their bashfulness, associated it with bookishness, reserve, and a yen for solitude. But shyness isn’t just shyness any more. It is a disease. It has a variety of over-wrought names, including “social anxiety” and “avoidant personality disorder”, afflictions said to trouble millions’, Lane continues.

Lane has taken shyness as a test case to show how society is being overdiagnosed and overmedicated. He has charted - in intricate detail - the route by which the psychiatric profession came to give credence to the labelling of everyday emotions as ‘disorders’, a situation that has resulted in more and more people being deemed to be mentally ill.

Some claim that up to 50 per cent of the population will suffer from mental illness some time in their lives. ....

The sad consequence of this state of affairs is that the range of ‘healthy behaviour’ is being increasingly narrowed. ‘Our quirks and eccentricities - the normal emotional range of adolescence and adulthood – have become problems we fear and expect drugs to fix’, Lane writes. ‘We are no longer citizens justifiably concerned about our world, who sometimes need to be alone. Our affiliations are chronic anxiety, personality or mood disorders; our solitude is a marker for mild psychosis; our dissent, a symptom of Oppositional Defiant Disorder; our worries, chemical imbalance that drugs must cure.’

Above all, those who really do need help – who suffer from real emotional or behavioural disorders – are increasingly losing out. .... [more]

An instance I encountered as a teacher was ODD, "Oppositional Defiance Disorder," which meant that the kid wouldn't do what he was told. Such a disability may, I suppose, exist, but in my personal experience the diagnosis was applied to normal adolescent obstreperousness, and needed to be treated as a disciplinary problem. The use of ODD in those instances protected the student from the consequences of his actions - in fact enabling the behavior.

Another failing with the approach was described by C.S. Lewis in "The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment." If we are not responsible for ourselves, but merely victims of mental illness ....

If crime is only a disease which needs cure, not sin which deserves punishment, it cannot be pardoned. How can you pardon a man for having a gumboil or a club foot? .... This means that you start being ‘kind’ to people before you have considered their rights, and then force upon them supposed kindnesses which no on but you will recognize as kindnesses and which the recipient will feel as abominable cruelties. ....

Or which, alternatively, he might come to think an entitlement, or an excuse.

Sin and sinning, accepting responsibility, repenting, forgiving, turning away, growing up, are all affected by our approach to these issues.

Humanity, thou art sick | spiked