Mental health Philosphy would like to invite you to engage with your mental health in a proactive, intentional, intelligent, and interactive manner. Ponder if you can have an experience without mental health, any concept, any joys, any attitudes, any opinions without them being oriented in mental health. Mental health pervades all experience and this is why Id like for you to join the conversation from the beginning, your beginning, the beginning of experience.
The beginning of the universe.
The beginning is now.
If you have a mental issue, is something wrong?
What?
What is wrong?
This is the main issue that follows mental health everywhere. From the birth of psychiatry, psychology, neurology, what is wrong has been the central issue in mental health.
Granted, some people over the past 30 or 50 years, realized the problem inherent in a negative concept of mental health. And by the late 1980s someone came up with the great notion of trying to enact some sort of way to counter it. Positive Psychology is the main modality that tries to emphasize health in the good sense. Its basic philosophical position is that indeed there are good and bad types of psychological being and that many mental problems are simply based in our attitudes.
Yes. One possibility for fixing what is wrong with you is try to reframe whatever you think is wrong in a positive light. For example, if I think am depressed because of the state of the political environment, I can do things that make me feel happy, such as eating ice cream, or doing activities that change my internal chemistry, such as excersizing. I am over simplifying, but everything I have seen about Positive Psychology is based on the maxim: Be happy and feel good.
There is nothing wrong with that! (and how ironic!)
The decade of the 1980’s were particularly focused on having everything be happy.
but some of us could see that it was a facade; hence the 1990’s
who cares? I just don’t like this.
Nonetheless, many people find this kind of approach – of “its all good” to be ineffective. Which brings me quickly to my point for this post.
If something is wrong there are only two basic ways that we are able to conceptualize it:
- you did something wrong
- you are wrong
In this light it seems pretty sensible that people would want to get out of the you are bad through and through rut.
But you know what? People who are suffering from mental issues often don’t care about this kind of stuff.
So, let’s just get high? Why not?
We could just as easily have every doing cocaine to feel good as taking Prozac. Why has science chosen psychological medication instead of just prescribing, monitoring, and controlling the substances that were already there?
Well, here we have another whole world of discussion about why the way things are. The story of marijuana and traditional medicine use traces these kinds of reasons.
Nonetheless, I am not worried about those stories here.
Which brings me to another issue that Psychiatry, neurology, and psychology have been trying to contend with since near the beginning of their professions.
What is good?
People don’t want to feel bad. They want to feel good. And, in general they don’t really care what they would have to do to make themselves feel good again.
This is the problem of the modern world.
We can quickly drop into deep and luxurious philosophical discussions here, but if you want to do that, you can fly back to my waaaay earlier posts, like 5-10 years ago.
Very quickly, though…
Good and bad do not arrive in a semantic vacuum. they are not universally meaningful substances of human experience that somehow exceed human experience to be exist in some ideal perfection that human beings are accessing when they feel these adjective qualities in their experience.
However, they also are not merely socially constructed. (How is it possible to know something is socially constructed and that I am a product, a subject, of this societal injunction?)
They are, nonetheless, involved with how we experience things. what I, and philosophy, has historically called the issue of extension.
If I am having an experience that I am calling bad or wrong I am making an ethical proclamation about my ontological status.
This is why, from the modern psychological standpoint, if I have a mental issue, then either I must confess what I did wrong, or do something to correct the wrongness of how I innately exist.
The problem here is that often it doesn’t seem like I did anything wrong. So often therapy is a shade for helping people to figure out what it is that could be going wrong.
But in short, I must admits my wrongs, or alter my body to correct what is wrong with me. This latter part of logic comes out of that fact that if something is inherently wrong with my being then I did not do something to deserve it, but am, basically, cursed.
In this manner of speaking, if I am cursed then it is something that is beyond me, beyond my direct power to fix. So, I must find something that is not me to fix me. And modern medicine is right there to indulge this proclivity for me to seek out some substance that will make me feel right again.
But, oddly, this merely reiterates the mental issue as an unsolvable issue, since I am understanding that it needs to be fixed by something that is not me: I am wrong in a way that I should not have to be responsible for.
But, If I am indeed thinking that, having that version of myself as a way of thinking as an idea, then, in a way, I have done something wrong: I am thinking wrong.
This wrongness is what I call the double-bind of modern psychological reckoning of mental health.
More to come…
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