Link to article on NASNIcares Medium:
How Physical Illness Became “Mental Illness”
First and foremost, do not conflate “Mental Health” with Serious Brain Function Disorders. Poor Mental Health and Serious So-Called ‘Mental Illness’ are increasingly talked about as if they mean the same thing but they do not!
It is common to see statements like this on the web :
Stigma surrounding mental health issues is a real problem in our society. Nearly one in five adult Americans has experienced mental illness in the past year.
A statement that starts out with the term “mental health” flows into talking about “mental illness” as if they mean the same thing. In some cases, this is done out of ignorance, but in other cases, it is a strategy stemming from the Mental Hygiene, Psychoanalytical, & Consumer Movements that sought to blur the distinction between the terminologies in order to infuse the idea into the minds of the populace that so-called mental illness is a product of childhood adversity (a buzzword these days of “trauma-informed” ideology), psychological injury or maladaptation to life’s difficulties. It is also a falsehood that 1 in 5 Americans, adult or child, has experienced a “mental illness” – unless, of course, someone is using the term “mental illness” when what they really mean is mental health condition.
The conflation of Mental Health and so-called Mental Illness is also a strategy of stigma-busting activists. Mental health applies to every single one of us, but serious neuro-cerebral illnesses (so-called mental illness, a patently ridiculous term) afflict a relatively small number of us. For example, the percentage of people that are diagnosed with “schizophrenia” (another of psychiatry’s hideous and misleading terms…renamed Jacobi Fleming Nasse Syndromes, or phonetically ‘Jayfin Syndromes’ by the founder of NASNIcares) is between 1 to 2 percent. Through the magic of wordcraft, if we conflate ‘mental health’ with so-called mental illness, it can then be said that the vast majority of us will experience a diagnosable mental illness in our lifetimes. If any of us could become so-called mentally ill, that does wonders for stigma-busting!
What is Mental Health?
Mental Health is about being well adjusted socially and emotionally and the ability to cope with life’s difficulties. Mental Health pertains to the psychosocial mind. The term Mental Health refers to non-medical psychological and emotional well-being, something that pertains to all of us, but has increasingly been used to refer to what are biological medical conditions. At this time, so many people, including medical doctors, are using this term improperly that anyone pointing out that it is incorrect to conflate poor mental health with so-called mental illness is ignored as someone fixated on a meaningless semantic quibble or someone that is just off the range. This conflation is the product of ignorance and intentionality…a strategic deployment of Mental Hygiene Movement ideology.
What is (So-called) Mental Illness?
It is the position of Due Justice Project that medical conditions such as bipolar and so-called schizophrenia (renamed by eponym Jacobi Fleming Nasse Syndrome by NASNIcares) should be classified as genetic neurodevelopmental encephalopathies – in the most generic sense of the term and that the term encephalopathy should not be reserved by the medical establishment – meaning, excluding what they refer to as “primary psychiatric”. The construct of primary psychiatric needs to be done away with, given that the only reason for its existence is the misconception hatched by some disordered minds long ago that so-called mental illnesses where not organic. So-called antipsychotic (the lexicon of psychiatry is weird, metaphoric, and stigmatizing…which is a paradox, given this profession’s professed concern with stigma) medications are in fact treating, although with brute force, an underlying medical condition. Brute force because the underlying conditions are poorly understood by medical science, and the pharmaceuticals were serendipitous, not the product of insight-driven research.
Definition of Encephalopathy: A term that refers to brain disease, damage, or malfunction.
So-called “Mental Illness” pertains to the brain’s semblance of mind, the brain structures and the bioelectrical, chemical, metabolic, hormonal factors that regulate brain function, giving rise to consciousness, cognition, perceptions, the sense of selfhood, volition and its actualization, the sense of ones habitus, metacognition, the sense of others and their identities and the meanings attached to them, and so many other aspects of this semblance of mind. There are a host of medical disorders (such as seizure disorders, encephalopathies, metabolic disorders and disturbances, etc.) that can disorder the brain’s semblance of mind.
Symptoms such as hallucinations (auditory, command, gustatory, tactile, and visual), neurogenic dysmentia (mentation that is disordered due to neurological separation from reality, a disordered state of consciousness…..”psychosis”), disinhibitions, delusions, autism-spectrum symptomatology, misidentification syndromes (of the self and others), anosognosia (unawareness that one’s thinking and behaviors are disordered) are all neurologic phenomena. These are not mental health conditions! All of these neurological symptoms can present in a vast array of neurological conditions, including Parkinson’s Disease and Dementias. This should be “the medical model”, a term from the lexicon of of psychologizers (people wired to perceive neurological phenomenon as having a psychogenic cause) that is intended to have a derogatory meaning.
It is this constellation neurologic symptoms that get people swept up into the criminal adjudication system. Some of the most gruesome neurobehaviorally-driven acts of harm can occur when the brain is neurologically detached from reality – a disordered state of consciousness that causes dysmentation….akin to someone trapped inside a goulish parasomnia. It is a tragic injustice that some of the most blistering sentencing condemnations from judges on the bench have been directed towards convicted persons who were “locked in” this neurological status when they committed acts of harm.
The term “mental illness” is a misnomer, and it is also a metaphor just as the term mental health is a metaphor. The metaphorical use of the term health is what underlies the construct of parity between “mental health” and physical health. The “mind” is an abstract thing and cannot be ill. The brain’s semblance of mind can certainly be ill in that all the structural and systemic factors that enable and regulate this semblance can be disordered – physiologically. So-called mental illnesses are physical illnesses in that they affect the functioning of the brain organ. Cerebral illnesses (such as so-called schizophrenia, bipolar, and neurologic “depression”) should not require parity in health coverage because they are medical disorders just like epilepsy, parkinson’s, dementia, and MS.
It is only because the faction of psychosocial psychiatry has held the diagnosis, treatment, and hypothesis generation about the cause and essential nature of these disorders captive of fallacious beliefs for generations, that these so-called mental disorders continue to be psychologized and strategically conflated with Mental Health by those with ideological interests.
The failure of the medical establishment to aggressively curtail these misguided ideas that have psychologized cerebral illnesses has kept the populace steeped in ignorance about the behavioral consequences of these grave medical disorders, leading to warped, dysfunctional, and harmful public policies (like the unscientific and discriminatory IMD Exclusion)- and ultimately unjust punishment under the criminal adjudication system.
Hypothesis that “Schizophrenia” is an REM Disorder”
Take for example the fact that it has been observed that there are features of “psychosis” in general and so-called schizophrenia in particular that strongly resemble the REM state of the brain. This raises the possibility that “psychosis” is a disorder of consciousness. Some of the bizarre behaviors could all be explained by REM intrusion into a waking state of the brain, including unlawful or assaultive (whether paroxysmal or goal-directed) behaviors. Neurobehavioral symptoms that present with the most serious cerebral illnesses are what get people caught up in the criminal adjudication system – prosecuted, and punished unjustly. The idea that someone can be guilty but so-called mentally ill is a fiction, dreamed up by people whose concept of “psychosis” is a thousand miles away from the reality of how the brain’s semblance of mind operates. Psychosis is a neurological symptom.
Because people of this troubled psychological phenotype are unable to process (cognitively) this construct of “schizophrenia” as a biological disease with biological or hereditary root causes, they have continually grafted new scientific discoveries and observations onto their troubled belief systems of traumagenesis or stress. This translates to lack of progress in research and misunderstanding of cerebral illness within the criminal adjudication system.
Pathologic beliefs about the essential nature of so-called mental illnesses are literally killing people due to the fact that healthcare models, public policies, and criminal justice are all informed by these fallacious belief systems.
The Term “Mental Illness” Needs to be Abolished!
Due Justice Project believes that ‘mental illness’ is a deeply problematic terminology. Part of the reason why the antipsychiatry movement came about is because the medical profession never ‘rescued’ people from having become victims of the psychologization of neurological illness that afflict the brain’s semblance of mind after it became clear to competent physicians and neuroscientists that the “schizophrenia” symptom complex was a neurodevelopmental disorder, not the product of trauma, childhood adversity, or bad parenting.
We are still living with the legacy of the Mental Hygiene Movement (premised on false beliefs) and of Sigmund Freud and the psychoanalytical movement with its bizarre beliefs about psychogenic causation and the miseducation of medical doctors is it relates to functional vs organic “psychosis”. Today, we are in the throes of a crisis of misclassification, of lexicon, and of psychologization and traumatology (operationalized in the construct of trauma-informed). The broader scope of medicine beyond “psychiatry” is still operating under misguided notions of functional neurological disorders.
About Functional Neurologic Disorders
Yesterday’s Mental Hygiene Movement is today’s Mental Health Awareness.
The mental health industrial complex has done a masterful job of cloaking their underlying beliefs or slyly inducing them into the public’s consciousness and duping policy-makers in the process. Take the concept of Trauma-Informed that so many American institutions have incorporated into their operational processes and mission statements. Trauma-Informed purports to convey that we should look at what has happened to a person rather than what is wrong with that person. That is not an unreasonable social justice policy informant, particularly where historically oppressed and mistreated population groups are concerned. However, it is masking a deeper ideology, that of traumatology…the false belief that psychosocial adversities cause so-called mental disorders…the core tenet of the Mental Hygiene Movement. The traumatology movement has exploited people of color, with their histories of traumatic systemic oppression in order to propagate their beliefs.
Traumas and life’s adversities (childhood and adult alike) cause psychological and emotional damage, not the symptoms of what should be classified as genetic encephalopathies.
The mental health industrial complex includes psychotherapists (psychologists), academics, a faction of the medical profession known as psychiatrists, practitioners prefixing their credentials with “forensic”, and the peer specialists with “lived experience” who have pushed with ever-increasing assertiveness into the realm of the clinical. There are elements in the psychiatry and psychotherapy communities that have also run wild with the theory of epigenetics – unchecked by mainstream general medicine, as a mechanism of transgenerational trauma. People that believe these things may represent a psychological phenotype that is oriented toward psychological ideas and unable to conceptualize “psychosis” as a neurological disorder. When confronted with evidence that challenges their beliefs, they are not disabused of fallacious beliefs, they just graft the new information onto their psychologized perceptions and they confabulate ideas like transgenerational trauma as causation for “mental illness”.
Some Advocates are Calling for Reclassification of Serious so-called Mental Illnesses out of Psychiatry
DJP’s position is that the medical community needs to rename and reclassify these so-called mental illnesses as idiopathic encephalopathies or neurodevelopmental encephalopathies with other applicable qualifiers.
Advocates in the DJP founder’s network also disfavor the term psychiatric or even neuropsychiatric because these terms lead people to believe (despite the neuro prefix) that these are afflictions of the soul or the spirit…or manifestations of psychological injury or other environmental/psychosocial root causes amenable to psychotherapies and other grossly inappropriate non-medical interventions. We can only push the envelope so far without the leadership of the medical establishment, which thus far, does not even seem to be aware that there is a crisis.
This site has moved away from the term “mental illness” and as much as possible, away from neuropsychiatric. The problem is that the term psychiatric has a great of baggage and sometimes the mission of enlightenment calls for us to respect the powerful connotations attached to certain words in common parlance. Psychiatrists are medical doctors. Medical doctors should be concerned with the evaluation and management of the brain’s semblance of mind -and the semblance of mind concerns the neuro-electro-chemical and physiological functioning of the brain. Medical doctors should not want to call themselves “psychiatrists” given the historical roots of the profession by that name.
Psychiatry Split from Neurology
According to a wiki entry:
Neuropsychiatry: A branch of medicine that deals with mental disorders attributable to diseases of the nervous system. It preceded the current disciplines of psychiatry and neurology, which had common training, however, psychiatry and neurology have subsequently split apart and are typically practiced separately.
The problem is that when psychiatry branched off, it took neurological illnesses with it! An advocate in DJP’s network shared an account of a running joke between Chairs of the Departments of Psychiatry and Neurology at a prominent medical school – that ‘neurologists take psychiatric diagnoses and move them to neurology as soon as the pathophysiologies or etiologies are understood by researchers’.
That might be a joke but it is also a tragedy. Neurological symptoms like delusions, hallucinations, command hallucinations/automisms, disinhibitions, neuro-dysmentation, and anosognosia should translate to an implicit diagnosis of an ideopathic neurologic disorder or ideopathic encephalopathy in the absence of a more determinative diagnosis and not be classified as so-called Primary Psychiatric.
A very troublesome cohort of the psychiatry and psychology community thinks that illnesses like “Schizophrenia”, and Bipolar (unlike all of the encephalopathies that can cause neurogenic dysmentation) are in their domain. So-called Schizophrenia is theirs – they retain ownership over it to misconceptualize and mistreat therapeutically through endless theoretical perturbations.
A faction of that community is even misappropriating neuroscience in order to legitimize their misguided psychosocial ideologies. This commentary does not mean to cast aspersion upon the entire community of psychiatry…remembering the psychiatrists attend medical school and are medical doctors. Within that community there are competent medical doctors who conceptualize cerebral illnesses in accordance with modern medical science. Too many others in the field continue to be influenced by historical psychoanalytical ideologies. Others believe in a hybrid theory, the biopsychosocial model (which involves nonsensical beliefs about the etiology of psychosis, psychosocial interventions, and CBT). It is ridiculous that there is any such concept as the so-called medical model in this day and age. We don’t speak of the “medical model” of heart disease, or cancer.
The purpose of this page is to drive home the message that these illnesses are not psychosocial, emotional, or behavioral disturbances in that those distinctly classified disturbances and disorders do not involve neurogenic dysmentation or altered states of waking consciousness. The medical community needs to stop using terminologies such as “mood disorder” and “depression” to describe altered states of consciousness caused by severe brain function illnesses. There is a crisis of classification and nomenclature that is directly responsible for destroying lives.
SED – Serious Emotional disturbance, A Politicized Diagnosis Just for Children
What is Serious Emotional Disturbance (SED)?
Federal Register 1993 – Definitions
Excerpt from the preceding link:
…Some comments suggested that any definition of “serious emotional disturbance” and “serious mental illness” must include specific language that these are brain diseases with a neurobiological basis.
That explanatory language never made it into the federal definitions and of course, the backward and disturbed beliefs systems of the psychosocial psychiatry sect have been waging an entrenched battle against science for over a hundred years.
DJP opposes the cobbling together of emotional and psychological disturbances with what it believes should be classified as neurodevelopmenal encephalopathies. SED is a federal register definition. Reference sources indicate that the SED definition was employed because SMI (Serious Mental Illness) was considered to be too stigmatizing for children. Once again, those who are most concerned about the dimensions of stigma (negative stereotypes, devaluation, and discrimination) are the ones that participate in stigmatization. Distancing oneself from something that is stigmatized can perpetuate and substantiate the stigma. Moreover, using the terminology SED caused further confusion that continues to percolate to this day. Educators continued to grapple with the fact that SED excluded ‘social maladjustment under the SED or EBD (emotional behavioral disorder) label. Children are diagnosed with cancer. Medicince does not have an alternate name for cancer when the diagnosis is given to children. Only psychiatry, an oddball within the community of medicine, would devise such a nonsensical idea as SED.
The solution to stigmatizing children with a so-called mental illness diagnosis would be to eliminate the ridiculous concept of “mental illness” altogether.
The Stigma of Childhood Mental Disorders
Mental Disorders vs. Behavioral Disorders, What’s the Difference?
LINKS TO RELEVANT CONTENT
How Suicide in Clinical “Depression” is Misunderstood
Excerpt:
“The chemicals win in these situations. The illness wins. It’s not about killing ourselves. It’s about an illness killing us.
That is a different kind of suicide”
Link to article: This disease has been misunderstood for 4,000 years.
Brain’s Entire Communication System Disrupted in Schizophrenia
Misidentification Syndromes in Schizophrenia/Seizure Disorders
*** The Links and Reference Page has Content about Lesser Known Symptoms of Schizophrenia.***
Why I’m Not a Mental Health Advocate
A personal story – What it’s like to experience psychosis
Psychiatry’s Guide Is Out of Touch With Science, Experts Say
Excerpt :
Dr. Insel said in the interview that his motivation was not to disparage the D.S.M. as a clinical tool, but to encourage researchers and especially outside reviewers who screen proposals for financing from his agency to disregard its categories and investigate the biological underpinnings of disorders instead. He said he had heard from scientists whose proposals to study processes common to depression, schizophrenia and psychosis were rejected by grant reviewers because they cut across D.S.M. disease categories.
“They didn’t get it,” Dr. Insel said of the reviewers.
Brain tumor linked to religious delusions
Psychosis – It used to be all in the patient’s head ‘ALL IN THE PATIENT’S HEAD’
Temporal lobe epilepsy and violence
Understanding “Schizophrenia” as a disorder of consciousness
“Psychosis vs criminal thinking”
Excerpt from Psychosis vs Criminal thinking:
Post deinstitutionalization: Between 1988 and 2008, the proportion of Vermont state hospital admissions accounted for by forensic patients increased 50 percent; in Massachusetts, 281 percent; in New York, 309 percent; and in Pennsylvania, 379 percent.
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