It was a good time out for we talked about a lot of things… from critiquing the ecologies of the higher education, to the sharing of ideas about work, to, simply, gossiping. lol
Then, at some point, the topic shifted to the symptoms I live with in my everyday life.
It was, one day last year, when her mother came to visit, did I share in person my experiences with people other than my psychiatrist, the therapist and this friend of mine.
My friend told me tonight that her mom remained to be so very amazed by the degree of lucidity in my narratives about the while nine yards.
She indicated that the informal discourse had also helped her gaining a better understanding about the things we called psychotic symptoms, including hallucinations and delusions.
The matter of the fact is that I could only speak for myself but not for the others.
Yet, through my limited understanding of the world, I have come to be a firm believer that people need to be educated about the nuts and balls about mental health problems. These include both the well-endowed ones to whom living with symptoms is a reality and those lucky ones whom could only live such experiences through vicarious learning. lol
The purpose of my blog, as I have indicated in my profile, is to show that I could live a life with or without of the symptoms.
Furthermore, I have attempted to use the sharing of my thoughts and experiences as a means to provide people an alternative perspective to view those with the problems.
This could be the healthy people’s view of those sick or the sick people’s view about themselves.
I hate to say this and this might just be my imagination or misunderstanding of the world surrounding me….
People have been taking a deficit view about the occurrence of mental health problems.
Regardless of the philosophical stands, I personally prefer to adapt the disease model because, in this case, symptoms as treatable and manageable.
If there should be cross-cultural differences among different cultures, so should there exist similarities.
I bet that people’s belief about mental health patients to be one of the similarities regardless of the culture even though there might be a gradient in the degree of acceptance across cultures.
Essentially, mental health patients are deficit by default and such deficit could result in incompetence.
Is it really true?
Granted, the lack of opportunities for substantial and continuous professional development might result in the inability for some of the patients to develop advanced skills.
At the same time, not all mentals are subjected to such constraints.
Other than the issue of opportunities, the most important factor in sustaining the facts and perception are the facts and perceptions themselves.
If I could categorize people into the normal and the abnormal, the deficit model we held about the mental health patients could be one of the core problems that perpetuate the performance gap in patients and those claimed to be normal.
Worse of all, it is not until the patients to start shifting away from viewing themselves with a deficit model could something be done in making a change to their own life.
I am by no means discounting the realness of the decapacitating, if not dementing, impacts of mental health problems.
I have been there, done that, and I am still living it.
However, I will no longer (when I am not depressed lol) allow myself to accept mental health problems as the cause of my failures. This is because, “what else could I accomplish if I can’t accept the responsibility of having failed for myself?”
I don’t make big money. I don’t even have a full time job.
However, one thing I have is my decision to live and the choice to take the disease model if it helps.
For those of you who are reading, what is your model?
For those of you who has been reading my posting and who might have forgotten me to be one of the psychos, how do you deal with the cognitive dissonance and would a shift in the model help?
Such as the plausible educational implications of my blogs—shall there be anything at all…
Also, you could either agree or disagree.
As long as you respond to my question, my words have been processed in your working memory and, chances are, some part of it might even have been encoded in your long term memory... lol
12:28 AM
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