If you get a moment I highly recommend reading Sun Magazine's interview of Gail Hornstein. In the article Hornstein takes on labeling, questioning whether labeling benefits those being labeled. She also describes her position where she rejects the idea that psychiatric patients, however severe their symptoms, have a physical disease. Hornstein also has been instrumental in starting Hearing Voices Network (HVN) support groups in the U.S. The HVN is an international organization where empathy and non-hierarchical interactions supplant diagnostic labels and the traditional doctor-patient relationship. Hornstein also believes that real life experience can serve as medical evidence.
Read the interview HERE.
This is a terrific article about alternatives to medical understandings of what is currently described as 'mental health'. I do hope we start to hear more descriptions such as 'anomalous experiences' and 'emotional distress' and others that do not resort to medicalising human experience.
Posted by: Ash Rehn | June 23, 2011 at 02:54 AM