insanity: the journey or the destination?

[lumberjim]

There are different types of mental illness. Some are treatable chemically, and therefore indicate some defect in the patient's chemical balance. Other types are not 'cureable' in this manner, suggesting that the process of thought itself is defective.

I've wondered about this in the past. Could it be that there is nothing 'wrong' with those folks, but with the perceptions of their friends or families as these people go through some kind of awakening or transition of self? In other words, perhaps these people....lets say scitzos, for example......are manifesting personalities that express long repressed facets of who they truly are.

We are raised in an environment that shows us what kind of person our peers EXPECT US TO BE. Obviously, we are not going to turn out that way if we don't embrace those standards and modify our inate behavior to suit. Perhaps the insane have reached a point where they can no longer reconcile the disparity of their true self and their 'accepted' self. So, a subconcious struggle ensues, and the person starts to exhibit conflicting behaviors, which scare them and those around them. So, they realize that they need to get help, and mistakenly interpret the change in them as defective behavior. They go to a shrink, who perpetuates that feeling ( a shrink is there to fix things, right?) they counsel, or medicate based on the belief that they can 'fix' what's wrong.

maybe they should embrace the change, surrender to it, and see who they become when they come out the other side of it?

To present a view that suggests that 'insanity', as in 'schizophrenia', 'bipolar disorder' and 'depression', are not independently arising pathologies in their own right through some kind of innate biogenetic or biochemical 'defectiveness', but are behavioural variations induced in healthy but hypersensitive individuals through their immersion within a 'pathological normality' and are thus the variant, recalcitrant 'children' who are resisting their own assimilation into a 'pathological normality', is a conclusion that has been arrived at by a number of psychiatrists, including Ronald Laing, Thomas Szasz and John Weir Perry

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from this page

which led me here

i have not read them both all the way through, but i saw enough to trigger some of the thoughts i'd had in the past about this.

If we encouraged the kooks to embrace their defects, would they be any worse off than they are struggling against themselves?