Changing the way the facts of mental health and illness are seen

As I wrote in my book chapter (see extract), "From the beginning, the aim of the Philadelphia Association (PA) was to "change the way the 'facts' of 'mental health' and 'mental illness' are seen" (R. Cooper, 1994). Current activities of PA include the support of their two community houses, a low-cost psychotherapy service and a training programme in psychotherapy and other study programmes and events.

Despite PA’s intentions for change, psychiatry still clings to what is really an outdated view of mental health and illness (see eg. last post). Psychiatry has always hoped that a biological understanding of mental illness as brain abnormality is just round the corner. It does now tend to accept that the pharmacological and neuroscientific emphasis of the last 50 or so years has not really progressed practice, but nonetheless refuses to acknowledge that the flaw is its own conceptual foundations.

People have been so indoctrinated into believing that they are their brains that they cannot see the conceptual fallacy in doing so. People’s brains are only part of them, like their other bodily parts. Most mental illness is not caused by faulty brains; it relates more to them as a person as a whole. By thinking of ourselves as machines, we fail to recognise the purposiveness of life.