So I was thinking about the the way sz is perceived, and wanted to make a comment on the mental health dichotomy from bodily health. Of course in every hospital there are separate units for different areas of medicine, but I was thinking that the erosion of constructs around mental health hasn’t kept up with the knowledge of sz and other psychiatric disorders as a bodily disease. Of course sz affects the head, but there is growing evidence that sz is found in the dna of every cell of a sick person’s body. This should be a consideration in taking emphasis off of mental health.
Another factor is the term mental, which relates to the head, but mainly to nonphysical attributes. Sz is not a set of symptoms, like kinds of thoughts, it is an underlying condition that causes a variety of symptoms. The underlying condition is disorder of bodily functions, that just so happen to occur in the head. Connected to that, there is very little purely mental things a afflicted person with sz can do to treat there illness. Therapies have some success, but truly in most cases medication which affects the body is the only effective therapy. Furthermore, targeting the head is a brutish cultural universal in demeaning the thoughts and behaviors of a person. If the cause of disorder is found in the body and the head, then it is unnecessarily reductionist to refer to mental. It is not technically incorrect to do so, but it is very likely politically incorrect.
Let’s look at practical considerations regarding the mental division of health. Some patients in psychiatric treatment sometimes are put in restraints, but all hospital beds can be fitted with restraints. Patients are sometimes locked in units, but hospital units often host dangerous criminals under police surveillance, but they are not locked in the psychiatric ward if they do not have that health problem. Another obvious issue is the organization of functions and roles in the hospital that necessitates a logical division into another type of health. Obviously this is a consideration, but this could still exist as a subset of bodily health.
In conclusion it is important to think critically about social constructions around sz to improve the lives of sz patients. One major step in doing so is erasing or minimizing the mental health dichotomy. While the nature of sz is still being realized, mental causes of sz such as split mind and other theories are overturned for those related to brain chemistry and genetics. That brain chemistry affects systems in the entire body. On a personal note I would feel better being thought of as physically sick rather than mentally ill.