Gnosis, Prognosis, Diagnosis

[NB: My bias is based in existentialism and humanism—if ideas herein come across as advancing a spiritual or metaphysical outlook this is only insofar as I view the phenomenal power of experience which is holistic or super-sensual as a basic part of human conscious life.]


Diagnosis (Greek: διάγνωση, from δια dia- "apart-split", and γνώση gnosi "to learn, knowledge") is the identification of the nature of anything, either by process of elimination or other analytical methods.

Gnosis (γνῶσις) is the spiritual knowledge of a saint or mystically enlightened human being. Within the cultures of the term's provenance (Byzantine and Hellenic) gnosis was a special knowledge or insight into the infinite, divine and uncreated in all and above all, rather than knowledge strictly into the finite, natural or material world which is called Epistemological knowledge.


My theory is that Recovery is about putting the human being at the forefront of all his or her interactions with services that would, on face, be designed to help them. (I say on face because psychiatric care and mental health services serve multiple aims and masters both and historically, e.g. male privelege, ‘public safety’, ideologies and hierarchies of power, the hegemony of medical science, even future public prosperity as evidenced by the mass implementation of ‘eugenic’ sterilization in US hospitals.)

I believe it is the human being, in fact it is Being Human, that is at stake in the success of the Recovery Revolution.

The Recovery Revolution mirrors a return to the humanistic tradition of psychology begun in the late 70s as the ‘cognitive’ revolution. In this latter the bleak search for the pure machine of behaviorism was finally abandoned as the major avenue of psychological science with the realization that, no matter how frustrating it is from a positivist outlook to explain or even identify the human mind, it nonetheless plays a significant role in the functioning and lives of human beings, a role which cannot be discounted.

Recovery has now been found and acknowledged worldwide as not simply a good idea but as something actually common and natural. This is to say that even in areas which have little to no contemporary psychiatric treatment or even the most basic of psycho-meds, most people who have significantly debilitating symptoms of the most serious mental illness, recover functionally within 6 months of onset. What’s more people recover faster and better apparently in less industrialized nations. Don’t believe me on this one –believe the World Health Organization. http://www.mindfreedom.org/kb/mental-health-global/sartorius-on-who

Similarly the principal tool of the psychiatrist’s belt, the psychopharmaceutical, has been revealed in most cases to be at best as good as a robust placebo, or actually worse, at least insofar as they give people nasty side effects. This does not stop our pharma companies of course from marketing both disorders and medicines to fix them on a daily basis.

Diagnosis

What we are in fact recovering from is the main project of 20th century psychiatric science itself, an experiment based in a systematic fascination with science and social engineering that swept whole generations into a distorted view of the nature of the human being. This project, like most social epidemics, was wrought largely without malicious intent but also without forethought or insight into its global effects.

What are the effects? We could list them as graves of the unmourned, unmarked and ignored, as families torn apart, suicides completed, ‘missing’ relatives, children sequestered, forced abortions and death or trauma by insulin, lobotomy, restraint, coercion, depection and ECT. We could enumerate or at least estimate the numbers of rapes, functional tortures, dehumanizing conditions. But that would only speak to the parts of this effect.

I feel that the effect is more generalized, the disease more systemic if you will. My diagnosis is schizophrenia, chronic, undifferentiated.

I believe that modern medical psychiatry has caused schizophrenia to occur on a massive scale. A schizophrenia in the true sense of the word, which afflicts most of industrialized civilization. Schizophrenia which has split our people from each other, our families, our being from its uniqueness. This schizophrenia has worst of all divided human beings from that thing which makes us both human and being, our consciousness.

Even as the dead-end of behaviorist science gave way to the cognitive rediscovery of the mind, medical psychiatry must die in order for people to regain their humanity, in order to heal the split that it has caused.

It is dying but it is not going without a fight. I wish I were more convinced that the Recovery Revolution was bound to succeed, that humanity in its grandest sense would ultimately prevail over the forces of fear, discrimination, atomistic science and conformity. That we would all someday embrace the diversity of experience that makes some of us crazy one day, prophetic the next, learned the following.

But power does not cede to other values easily, even where many in power agree with them.

So the transformation goes on. And in the heat of it we cannot know what will finally emerge.

My prognosis is for an unstable course, with an uncertain outcome. But I know I want the patient to live.