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Paul Grobstein's picture

Mental "illness": from spirits to criminality to stigma to ... ?

Submitted by Paul Grobstein on Mon, 09/22/2008 - 9:21am.
Actually, cancer too was indeed stigmatized at one point, as was AIDS. See Susan Sontag's Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors. Maybe there is an interesting pattern here? Maybe human variation is dealt with successively by looking for an external cause, then criminilizing, then stigmatizing, and then .... by acknowledging both variation and complexity and getting down to the particulars of what makes people uncomfortable and what to do about it? And, yes, maybe that's true for both "physical" and "mental" health? I wonder if maybe, by noticing the pattern, we could learn to skip over some of the steps and move directly to "Holistic ... non-stigmatizing ... helping"?

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