Posted by LostBoyinNC1 on June 26, 2002, at 0:03:11
In reply to neurology vs. psychology a.k.a World War III on PB, posted by mist on June 22, 2002, at 23:14:21
There are several reasons why the severely mentally ill are not being treated by Neurology vs mental health field. These are:
1) Its simply not possible because the basic brain research does not exist yet. Psychiatry doesnt do much basic biological brain research into severe mental illness.
2) Getting this kind of high tech, advanced brain research to understand mental illness would be very costly and expensive and our society does not consider mental illness to be important enough to spend large sums of money on. By contrast, other diseases and illnesses get tons of money spent on them for research...and its still not enough.
3) Our society does not consider severe mental illness to be "real" or physical. Our society considers mental illness to be "psychological" or "in the mind." Until these kinds of attitudes are totally broken down and destroyed forever, there will never be the aggressive scientific research drive to break mental illness down into pure, hard biological science, like say Neurologists are doing with parkinsons disease, epilepsy, alzheimers or other neuro illnesses.
4) Mental illness is last on our country's list of priorities. The severely mentally ill are "invisible" we dont vote, we dont matter.
5) A lot of people (the majority) cant handle the hard cold truth. That severe mental illness is really really bad and its based in your brain. People are scared of severe mental illness...most dont even like talking about it. They are scared of it because there is not much that can be done about it medically. And the reason there is not much that can be done about it is cause we as a society still think of physical, brain based illnesses (mental illness) as psychological problems.
The whole mental health field is based on a lie. That severe mental illness is a "psychological" problem. The diagnosis and treatment of severely mentally ill people should be divorced totally from social programs and psychology.
poster:LostBoyinNC1
thread:25602
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20020616/msgs/25735.html