Context: Emil Kraepelin is credited as being one of the first people to establish assumptions underlying psychiatry.
Through Kraepelin’s life and afterwards, the field of psychiatry continued to gain political power, and for many years now, it has been generally considered to be the highest authority in the field of mental health in the West, especially regarding the psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia.
(Raised the question: does it have to be the highest authority? What was there before psychiatry?)
Although these principles are rarely articulated as clearly as they are here, it is evident that they continue to lie at the foundation of the dominant paradigm in the mental health field today, a paradigm that is often referred to simply as the medical model. When researching long-term psychotic disorders, it’s important to acknowledge that most of the assumptions we have in the West regarding the extreme states of consciousness to which we have given labels such as Psychosis, schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, bipolar disorder, etc., come directly from this model.
Dr. Paris Williams, Rethinking Madness: Toward a Paradigm Shift in Our Understanding and Treatment of Psychosis, 2012
How much of what we put down to the ‘mental illness’ is the stress of this way of living? The loneliness of it, the chronic, grinding fear?
Sarah K Reece, Happiness, 2014