Week 8 - Anna Le, sect. 4

I have mixed feelings when it comes to the differing perspectives of how society should view mental health/illness. I understand that some people need to cling on to labels and identify themselves as "bipolar, anxiety, BPD, OCD, etc.," and how the other side would like to do away with labels and see it as pathologizing and harmful. Talking about mental health isn't easy and a lot of people have different opinions/perspectives on the topic, and it can bring about strong emotions in others as well. It's a sticky topic to discuss, but as I continually educate myself on mental health and the psychological explanations of how the mind works, I begin to see that it's important to still abide by the scientific understanding of mental illness, but also to take into consideration the cultural/societal and individual's perspective on mental illness. 

We still need to understand mental illness/health in terms of science. It's hard to ignore something that has been proven over and over again that something like depression or anxiety could have causes that are both environmental and biological. One doesn't trump the other, both nature and nurture matters. In my observation, what confuses people the most is that mental illness is purely biological and that one cannot help themselves to illness. This is not true.

A person could develop anxiety as a learned behavior, for example, if someone who's had an anxious parent(s) growing up, this person could learn to adopt those anxiety-provoking thoughts and engrain that way of thinking into their personality. Conversely, this parent might have a genetic predisposition to being more "anxious" and it could be that the offspring inherited a sensitivity in their brain (i.e. amygdala) that is easily activated or aroused, making this person more prone to emotionally overreact to situations. Yet, it gets more complicated, the environment itself can causes changes to the brain (i.e. chronic stress or trauma). (I can go on and on, but I'll stop with the examples there). You could either be born with a predisposition to develop a mental disorder, or the environment itself causes someone to develop a mental disorder (with enough stress, trauma, and a mix of personality as well). There is a complicated interaction between nature and nurture that are constantly at play in our lives. It's unfair to single out one cause and it's false thinking to assume that a singular cause is more important than the other.

But we shouldn't say that because someone has a mental disorder that something is inherently wrong about them or with them. As I like to see it, it simply means that someone is having a hard time coping with the stressful nature of life, whether it is because they're born with a predisposition, experienced trauma, or their personality has led them to their diagnosis. I see "diagnostic labels" as the type of suffering that a human is undergoing, and these "labels" are important for treatment. Someone with anxiety might not be treated the same way as someone with bipolar disorder, but if two individuals are diagnosed with depression, they might not comply with the same treatment either. One person could get better from cognitive therapy, but someone else might do better in a humanistic approach of therapy. It all depends on the individual level as well. 

Human beings are complicated and it's hard to make generalizations to individuals who have different circumstances, personalities, and emotions. They might experience similar symptoms (aka DSM diagnosis), but the way they experience their depression on an individual level, for example, is completely different from the next person. However, some individuals might really need to rely on medications to be able to cope with the mental anguish and properly live a good life (ex: bipolar disorder or schizophrenia). 

My perspective is that people should try to understand mental illness/health from a scientific understanding (biological, cognitive, psychological) and to some extent, spiritually as well. Before we start identifying ourselves with labels and seeing that it is all that we are, we should try to understand how we got to the diagnosis in the first place. Once we do that, I think that we can understand that suffering is a human condition and we all experience psychological grief to varying degrees. With mental illness, to me, it is categorized as intense and unbearable mental/emotional suffering that is hard to cope with and overcome on one's own (whether or not the suffering is due to biological or environmental causes). We should focus on helping individuals cope with their individual experience with suffering and go from there, instead of pathologizing individuals and saying that they are stuck like that forever due to biological reasons and it is somehow their fault or their luck/fate (although this can easily be viewed this way since some mental illnesses are very much due to biological causes, but it still doesn't mean we should tell them that they can't live a good life). 

Another thing about labels is that mental illness has long been stigmatized, to claim a diagnosis as their identity, is to say to society that "we are broken" since society has already deemed mentally ill people as broken misfits. Is it good to reclaim this narrative? To say to society, that "yes, we are in fact broken"? Or is it better to reframe mental illness as a biological/cognitive mishap that could happen to ANYONE (to varying degrees, of course)? 

References:

• Seong, J. (2018). [Nature versus nurture illustration]. Retrieved from https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-nature-versus-nurture-2795392
• Haydock, S. B. (2016). I WOULD ALWAYS RATHER BE ABNORMAL THAN HOLISTIC: NINE MICRO-ESSAYS. Open in Emergency: Asian-American Mental Health, 7(2).