Mentalities and Society
What good are imbeciles in modern society? - What are the vocations available to people with odd minds. eg - The cretins of Tocachi.
Healing mental/behavioral disorder
Curanderos and Susto
AA and drinkers
M. Bytsura and wife-beaters?
Where do idiots, daft, woe-begone, dumb, touched, simple, fit in?
Mental/Emotional/Spiritual kinds of suffering and dis-ease
| Kinds of Mental Disorders | APA, 1994 |
| 1. Disorders first evident in infancy, childhood, or adolescence | Mental retardation, ADHD, anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, stuttering |
| 2. Organic mental disorders | Psychological or behavioral disorders associated with brain dysfunction caused by aging, disease or trauma |
| 3. Substance -related disorders | abuses of drugs, chemicals |
| 4. Schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders | Disorders with symptoms such as hallucinations, delusions |
5. Mood disorders |
Emotional disorders such as depression, bipolar disorder |
| 6. Anxiety disorders | Phobias, panic attacks, obsessions, compulsions, OCD |
| 7. Somatoform disorders | Psych problems that present as symptoms of physical disease, hypochondria |
| 8. Dissociative disorders | Splitting or dissociation of mormal consciousness - amnesia, multiple personality |
| 9. Eating, sleeping disorders | Anorexia, bulimia, insomnia |
| 10. Impulse control disorders | Symptoms - inability to control undesirable impulses, such as kleptomania, pyromania |
| 11. Personality disorders | Maladaptive personality traits generally resistant to treatment such a paranoid and antisocial personality types. |
Histories of Madness
Not just mental illness, but all illness has a social component - we are sick within a context. Pain and suffering is human, universal, unique, and individual in its experience. History and social milieu determine whether those experiences are disabling; shape a career; constitute a sickness, deviance, handicap;
St Francis, Origen, Jean d'Arc - what would have been career of St Francis
had he lived in a time that understood his actions as something for
which lithium salts would be useful.
Is uncontrolled dilation of the superficial blood vessels biophysical?
Is it an illness? If you are a poker player is it a handicap? If poker
playing doesn't exist does the handicap vanish, the illness no longer
exist?
Mnemosyne - and OBS - Senescence and Poignancy
T Szasz - The Myth of Mental Illness
Foucault - History of Madness - the episteme of leprosy - exile, navis
stultifera; the episteme of the plague, the carceral and the diagnosis.
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Title: Bag Lady, Sydney Name: Thom Petty Email Address: thom_petty@hotmail.com |
Sociology of the Demented
The asylum and the straitjacket - the humane of the 19th century becomes the inhumane of the 20th.
Deinstitutionalization
and "Community"
Community Mental Health Centers
Psychotropic tranquility - whose tranquility - the social use of medication
to relieve the pain that the patient causes those nearby
Federal funding and State funding - SSI, Medicaid and the closing of
the state hospitals
A pill and a prayer - the failure of the Community Mental Health Movement
- the streets, homelessness and then privatization of the asylum: small-scale,
contract based, government regulated (life safety code of 1973)