Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness
The judges of normality are present everywhere.-Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punishment, 304an official announcement [reads that] ... nearly half of all Americans experience a psychiatric disorder.... does that mean no one is normal ... ? Or [do] we live in such a crazy-making, sick, impersonal society that it does serious psychological damage t
... See morePaula J. Caplan • Bias in Psychiatric Diagnosis: How Perspectives and Politics Replace Science in Mental Health
Operating under an illness model of care doesn’t just carry powerful implications for the way we conceptualize perfectionism, it impacts the way we conceptualize every aspect of mental health. The slightest pang of sadness, a drizzle of frustration—we register any decline in positive emotion with an assumption of pathology. It’s a cultural tic. The
... See moreKatherine Morgan Schafler • The Perfectionist's Guide to Losing Control
I Was the Poster Girl for OCD. Then I Began to Question Everything I’d Been Told About Mental Illness
Rose Cartwrighttheguardian.com
• To the wider public, mental health is synonymous with mental illness. Our notion of physical health is, however, very different than our notion of physical illness.
James Beshara • Mental Wealth
This is the real tragedy of our cultural psychologization of diseases we don’t understand: the ways such dismissals leave patients to suffer alone, their condition turned into a character flaw.
Meghan O'Rourke • The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness
the more afflicted people that I see, the more I become convinced that illness is not just an individual problem, but a result of the deformation of society as a whole.