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A New Model
One Who Experiences Exceptionally Problematic Obstacles of Perception
Let's compartmentalize everything we've learned up until this point about how to think about mental illness and psychiatric disorders and "insanity". Before fully getting into the details of this potentially better mental concept, let's go over a few important things.
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Categorization and Labeling
We've seen how labeling people as being a part of a "group" can be misleading in terms of how we pay attention to or ignore differences if doing so makes it easier for our brains to easily fit them into a category. If it weren't for the category, we might not notice or notice completely different arbitrary differences that mean that the categories themselves have little prescriptive significance in describing phenomenon. Such problems existed with terms like "insane" or "mad", as well as pathological labels like "schizophrenia" which describe phenomenon that are better viewed as a spectrum. Labeling someone as having a specific disorder, though potentially helpful in regards to some practical purposes, is by a large a misleading tendency that misleads our worldview.
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The new model must minimize assumptions made by labeling and categorizing
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The Individual
Modern education of mental illness emphasizes the importance of seeing the individual person living with (insert) disorder as opposed to seeing a the disorder as describing the person. Although the DSM and modern psychiatry try to be wary of this, there is still an intrinsic way of bypassing the individual in order to fit them into a diagnosis. Some people have had the experience of their clinician being overly eager to diagnose them and subsequently describes their experience in a way that is not authentic to their experience simply for the purpose of simplifying the treatment process. Furthermore we've seen how neuroscience is starting to revel that these disorders which we have defined are most likely dozens or even hundreds of biological etiological phenomena that have overlapping symptoms and thus may be mislabeled and face other problems of categorization.
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The new model must take into account the individual's experience
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Dehumanizing and Pathologizing
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The new model must treat the problem not as a disease but as a cluster of problems experienced by all people at varying degrees
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Variables of the Model
This model understands mental disorders as a function of distressful perceptions in terms of their severity, frequency, and consistency. These perceptions must be rooted in the individuals worldview and be a characteristic of their pattern of perceptual processing. Symptoms are addressed on an individual basis meaning that every individual has their own unique description of perceptual obstacles.
June 2012 - May 2014
Subjective Pain Caused By Perception Ω
Ω is the symbol representing the subjective pain the individual experiences as a direct result of whatever symptomatic perception is being addressed. It is measured by intensity S which describes the level of pain caused by that perception (0-5.0 scale), and magnitude X which describes the frequency it occurs (0-21). SΩX.
June 2012 - May 2014
Subjective Pain Caused by Maladaptive Behavior ɸ
An irrational perception or odd behavior that causes no subjective pain does not rate, however if an irrational perception leads to odd behavior that causes subjective pain to the person engaging in that behavior, then the behavior can be described as a symptom. It is measured just like the other variable by intensity and magnitude. SɸX.
June 2012 - May 2014
Perceptions
Perceptions can encompass a wide range of possibilities, the essentially describe the root belief or experience that is the source of the subjective pain. For example, constant paranoia as a result of persecutory auditory hallucinations might be broken up into several perceptions based on the report of the person experiencing the illness. One might be the voices themselves or even specific voices that they have identified, if they hear one specific voice every day that torments them, then that perception might be described as Primary Demon Voice : 4.5Ω19. That same patient may also become delusional into believing a conspiracy told to them by the voices, this would be a perception in its own right, such as; Delusion of Government Persecution 3.1Ω8.
June 2012 - May 2014
Behaviors
All behaviors are a response to our perceptions about the world. Therefore every maladaptive behavior is the result of a maladaptive perception. Every description of an individuals profile of perceptual obstacles must begin with a perception that either causes direct pain ( ) or leads to a behavior that subsequently causes pain ( ). Some perceptions may cause direct pain AND produce behavior that leads to more pain, such a symptom may have layers of perceptual and behavioral pain variables with additional perceptions all caused by one root perception.
Why This View?
There are a couple of benefits to thinking about mental illness not as a brain disease that labels a person as being damaged, but instead as being a collection of individual perceptual discrepancies that pose challenges to that persons wellbeing and subjective enjoyment of life. Let's break down the term "Facing Perceptual Obstacles". "Person Living With (insert) disorder" is a good because it emphasizes the humanity of the diagnosed person, it still implies an inherent disease and a diagnostic label that can be misleading. The new view suggests that the problem is not that the person has an established disease, but that they are encountering complications in their life that do not describe them or their humanity. None of us feel responsible for the way we perceive the world, its as though it happens to us rather than being something about us. Additionally, referring to symptoms as obstacles implies that there is some way to navigate ones way around these obstacles rather than being inevitable facts of our individual existence. This term focuses our attention on the life story of the person in question and implies that the only difference between us and people with mental illness, is the perceptual obstacles that we face in life. It makes it easier to imagine oneself as being in the position of any given person with a disorder, and thus promotes empathy and understanding.