Finding Jesus in the Storm. John Swinton

Finding Jesus in the Storm - John Swinton


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as we have understood that symptoms alone rarely indicate the best choice of treatment. Patients with mental disorders deserve better.33

      Insel urged the field to leave behind the descriptive approach of the DSM and to develop a new diagnostic scheme based on solid, verifiable scientific research that focused on finding the biological roots of mental disorders.

      It is true that the biological quest is intended to find better treatments and to eradicate symptoms. However, what if your symptoms are meaningful for you? If the only description of your situation is that you have a mental illness that is basically the same as a physical illness with symptoms that are meaningless, then your personal experience of your mental health challenges will be discounted as irrelevant. Critical as I have been of the DSM, at least it holds open the possibility that symptoms are more than mere biological malfunctioning. Such a suggestion—that symptoms are meaningful and should be responded to as such—is counterintuitive. For now, I urge the reader to remain open to the possibility. When we look more closely at the lived experience of mental health challenges, we will see the importance of recognizing the meaningfulness of symptoms and the dangers in trying to merge them into a single biological description. Insel is right: patients deserve better. The problem is that within a universe of multiple descriptions, his solution may not be as helpful as he assumes.

       The Danger of Reductive Explanation

      For current purposes, it is important that we recognize the kinds of presuppositions that lie behind reductive biological explanations of mental health challenges and the dangers of uncritically accepting such explanations.

       “Mental Illness” Is Not like Measles


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