Whose mental health?

I just read a very interesting article concerning our mental and emotional health: Good Grief! Psychiatry’s Struggle to Define Mental Illness Goes Awry. Psychiatrists primarily use a manual (called the DSM) to categorize and diagnose mental illness. This manual describes patterns of behaviors and clusters them into mental illnesses of one sort or another. In an effort to keep current, a panel of psychiatrists constantly revises the DSM and every so many years publish another update. Things gradually change in the DSM (in one of the more famous examples, early editions of the DSM defined homosexuality as a mental illness), and this article reports about a controversy in the upcoming edition. The DSM editors want to label ‘grief’ as a form of depression, primarily with the goal of prescribing anti-depressants to treat it, but others worry this makes an ‘illness’ out of a normal psychological process. Indeed, one of the critiques of the DSM relates to psychiatrists tailoring the DSM diagnoses to fit into a medical model, designed to maximize drug prescription!

It’s important to recognize that the doctors writing the DSM have their own biases and agendas, leading to certain conclusions about mental health which may not be truly objective. So who then defines and determines our mental health? From the point of view of awareness, we do! Awareness gives us a very powerful tool for working with our minds and emotions, enabling us to see our mental activity directly, without the need for labels or experts. As we begin to increase our space of awareness, we recognize that it forms the basis for insight (literally inner sight). Insight gives us the ability to reflect on our thoughts and emotions, and over time understand our psychological make-up, with its’ strengths and weaknesses. Of course there may be times when we seek some outside assistance (such as a counselor or a psychiatrist) to assist us with some of our issues, but through awareness we become the source for knowing and improving our mental health. On our path to wellness, that’s not a bad place to start!