The Voices Inside Their Heads

[BridgeTheGap]

As a teenager Gail Hornstein developed a fascination with first-person accounts of mental illness, and in the decades since, she has collected more than seven hundred patient memoirs, autobiographies, and witness testimonies. She likens them to survivor accounts or slave narratives, with patients struggling against the psychiatric system to make their voices heard.

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, approximately one in four Americans suffers from a diagnosable mental disorder. Our society has gone further than any other in classifying unwanted behaviors and emotions as diseases demanding medical — and often pharmaceutical — treatment.

Hornstein, now a Mount Holyoke College professor of psychology, questions whether this labeling benefits those being labeled. She also rejects the idea that psychiatric patients, however severe their symptoms, have a physical disease. Even schizophrenia and other types of psychosis, Hornstein suggests, can result from trauma, abuse, and oppression. She offers a popular course for psychology majors in which they read only books by patients, and she urges a more open-minded inquiry into what causes mental illness and how people get better.

The obvious place to begin looking for answers to patients’ problems, Hornstein says, is with patients themselves. She’s passionately dedicated to uncovering how people experience their own “madness,” rather than accepting what psychiatrists and psychologists tell us. From reading memoirs of those diagnosed as mentally ill, she knows that they often credit fellow patients with helping them recover, and she argues that peer support and empathetic listening can set even severely debilitated patients on the path toward recovery.

http://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/427/the_voices_inside_their_heads

[bemildred]

1. +1.

I think we are all more or less nuts, there are differences of degree, but not of kind.

[supernova]

2. +100