The category is part of the argument

The corpus uses psychiatric words constantly, but JQD does not grant the phrase “mental health” a neutral or self-evident ontology. Distress, voices, dissociation, panic, unusual perception and changes of consciousness can be real experiences while the institutional categories used to sort those experiences remain contestable.

The current position is explicitly skeptical of psychiatric authority and is described by JQD as vaguely Szasz-like regarding notions of “mental health.” That comparison should remain loose: it identifies a neighborhood of skepticism rather than importing somebody else’s complete program into the corpus.

Classification overload

ADVENT 1.3: I DO. already stages the problem by stacking diagnoses and quasi-diagnoses until the list itself becomes absurdly burdensome. The complaint is not merely “the wrong label was chosen.” The text asks what happens when an experience is forced through rival systems of naming, each carrying its own assumptions about personhood, pathology and authorized intervention.

No clean body / mind border

JQD rejects body//mind dualism as largely foolish. For the same reason, the wiki should stop presenting chemical intoxication on one side and grief, exhaustion, dissociation, religious practice, fear, sex or so-called “mental” states on an opposite nonchemical side. They can have different causes, social meanings and phenomenologies; the human organism does not thereby split into a chemical body and an unchemical mind.

Relationship to plural personhood

Plural personhood should not be converted into psychopathology simply because psychiatric vocabularies can describe experiences of multiplicity. Conversely, psychiatric vocabulary in a source does not become evidence for a metaphysical claim. These systems can touch without becoming mutually explanatory.

What the wiki should do

Psychiatric Vocabulary, Altered States & Self-Description remains useful as a concordance of words the corpus uses. This page supplies the missing counterweight: the institution that produced those vocabularies is itself one of the things the work subjects to suspicion.

Categories: Themes & recurring subjects · Institutions · Personhood