Health & Illness

There has been a lot of work done over the last few years to bring to the foreground how mental health and well-being affects everyone, from every quadrant of society, regardless of their geography, culture, race, or class. And I say, as both an emerging mental health professional and citizen: bravo.

There is, however, something which bothers me in the midst of this accelerated (but otherwise welcome) media awareness campaign. It is the habitually casual use of the term “mental illness”, rather than “mental health”. There is more than a semantic difference between the two.

“Illness” is a medicalized notion. It correlates to somatic cause and effect: the patient’s body is sick, so the patient must take x to get better. When you have an illness, you take drugs to get better. Illness implies sickness, which implies the prescription of medicine. “Health” is a generalized notion, which may incorporate the taking of medication but certainly also encompasses needs which do not strictly apply to treatment via medication.

When we lump such disparate problems as schizophrenia, post-traumatic stress disorder, cigarette addiction, and behavioural/emotional anxiety under a catch-all phrase, that term should not imply that everything which falls under its domain be medicalized or seen as a medical problem.

If you fear that you may have a problem which is affecting the quality of your life, slapping the word “illness” on it is needlessly stigmatizing. Illness = something is wrong. And when “illness” comes after “mental”, it can then seem to someone that they are wrong or somehow broken. In other words, the constant use of “mental illness” as a generalized term for discussion actually perpetuates a needless (and ironic) branding upon those who are affected.

Quite frankly, to use “mental health” is to say that someone who feels that something is affecting the quality of their life is not ill. They may not feel well, but they still have agency. It’s well-documented that what may appear to some as “symptoms” of behavioural or emotional disorders are in actuality subconscious attempts by the person affected to become healthy. We can facilitate this quite easily by not stigmatizing the language around mental health with terms that needlessly cast an onerous light on the problem.

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6 Replies to “Health & Illness”

  1. Makes me think of the medicalization of childbirth in 1950s. Just experienced a horrific intersection of mental illness and its medication treatment which poisoned my body and brain and led to a lengthy “medical” not “mental illness” hospitalization just to re-regulate my body. Last couple of posts. I’m very cognitively slowed. Lots of typos and incoherences. I tried. The mind-body split in the hospital was Kafkaesque, my favorite mind-body metaphor.

  2. Squirrel – I just read your posts (I had to put 2 and 2 together, sorry – the elliptical nature of your comment was a little puzzling). Wow. You’re going through a *lot* right now, and I hope you are being looked after by loved ones. If you would like to talk outside of the blog-comment format, please let me know.

  3. I so appreciate your kind offer. Right now, my life is very small and that’s all that I can handle. I don’t talk to anyone but my husband and kids and doctors about my condition. A part of me is still in shock and a part just accepts it as, well, this is just the way it is. I always liked the concept “Biopsychosocial” for the work I did, even adding a “developmental” at the end. Parsing us into simply mind and body makes no sense at all. Totally counter-intuitive. Very bureaucratic.

  4. Agreed. In the end, we have to take a wholistic perspective to what ails us. It can be a rigged match when the only organizations with the money and resources to raise awareness are the ones who are interested in a strictly medicalized approach to mental health – I appreciate the demystification, but I resent the bias. Que sera.

    On the other hand, those who practice a strictly emotional/behavioural approach to treating mental health issues will inevitably need to familiarize themselves with the inevitable neuro-biological underpinnings which explain *how* talk therapy is curative.

  5. Absolutely. Like the PET scans of brains of people with PTSD before and after treatment, having flashbacks in one part of the brain and normal memories in another. Brain structures also change in patients who go through intensive OCD ERP treatment. It’s all very fascinating an VALIDATING for patients.

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