A Take On The Concept Of Manas And Mental Health.
It is oft with regards to psychology that we, the common ones, never truly understand what we are going through, and what we can do. While this stands true for all fields of medicine for us as beings with no knowledge in it, it is primarily in psychology that we make little to no effort seeking out those who understand it.
And coincidentally enough, it is this one field that requires such an understanding from the grassroots. One of the reasons is, of course, the prejudice and scepticism surrounding what is considered to be new medicine, and the other is, funnily enough, fear and ill-understood perception of the subject itself. It is this idea, among others that Dr.Thirunavukarasu explores in A Utilitarian Concept of Manas and Mental Health.
Research papers are to me, intimidating pieces of text that take weeks to disassemble and comprehend.
But this piece by Dr.Thirunavukarasu endeavours to break down the barrier between intellectual and shared understanding, with language easy to comprehend, and concepts truly mind-blowing to understand, all masked in a singular and orderly approach to his ideas. He starts from history, the best teacher. He takes examples both infamous and relatively unknown to put forth inferences which while have been come upon by others, haven’t been explored the way he does.
To take an example right from his paper, the first instance of a misunderstanding of mind that we come across in it is the Rosenhan experiment.
While sir may have explained the proceedings of this experiment for a better perspective on his ideas, the story in itself is a delight to read and feels like something that is not wholly real. To paraphrase, the Rosenhan experiment was performed by Dr.David Rosenhan, to comprehend the legitimacy of psychology, and how difficult it is to distinguish between a ‘sane’ and an ‘insane’ person.
In the duration of his experiment, Dr.Rosenhan had sent a group of people of healthy mind complaining of supposed ‘symptoms’ to mental health hospitals in the area, to test how accurate doctors of psychology were, in diagnosing matters of the mind. To his disappointment, most people in disguise had been diagnosed with conditions like BPD, schizophrenia, among others. After coming out with his study, hospitals around the area, while chastised iterated that such a blunder wouldn’t be committed again. Hospitals were then seen rejected many patients they believed were faking their mental illness. At the end of the month, hospitals boasted that they had seen through Dr.Rosenhan’s experiment. To their dismay, that was when the doctor confessed that he hadn’t sent anyone to the hospitals that month. The patients who had been dismissed hadn’t been faking their conditions.
Dr.Thirunavukarasu goes on to argue through this experiment, that hospitals and doctors aren’t to blame for an instance like this. He says, that though such an investigation and its resulting aftermath could be seen as incompetence on the part of doctors and hospitals, it actually isn’t so. The so-called ‘incompetence’, he says, is a mark of the failure of traditional methods of diagnosis of mental illness.
While diagnosing a physical illness, we look for signs that show the presence of that illness. To declare a person healthy, we look for the presence of their health, in terms of increased immunity, stamina and so on. However, when it comes to mental health, the only sign of a healthy mind is recognized through the absence of every mental illness. Which means there are no distinct markers for the presence of a mentally healthy mind.
In his paper, Dr.Thirunavukarasu says something that interests me, even with us being simply bystanders when it comes to the field of psychology. He says that the mind and mental health are very poorly explained, even to actual working professionals. A very broadly coined term, these two words couldn’t possibly help an intellectual comprehend the essence of everything they encompass. And what is difficult to learn is also challenging to teach. And what is difficult to learn and understand is easy to fear. This and modern media’s tendency to sensationalize what is foreign is what sets mental health and its care at such a disadvantage, as compared to other forms of medicine.
My favourite part of the entire paper is the journey that it takes us on. There’s a lot that we don’t know when it comes to our own body and mind. The author, Dr.Thirunavukarasu, understands this and instead of going above our capabilities, chooses to start at the roots with us and walk us along. The comparison of various historical contemporaries, from Plato to Descartes, gives you a base to form your understanding on, along with a newfound appreciation for their genius. Pages four through six give you a proper perspective of how psychology is genuinely just an amalgamation of various thought processes and conclusions. It also highlights how our imagination to challenge theories is inherently flawed due to the findings our predecessors reached millennia ago.
Dr.Thirunavukarasu, for the majority of his theories, chooses to abandon the Cartesian system in favour of the Aristotelian school of thought on the duality of the mind and psyche. He justifies that this inherent education of psychology in the western Cartesian system of thinking is what makes it incredibly difficult for us to define and differentiate between the mind and manas.
The best way to understand the doctor’s perspective is through his conceptualization of the manas in diagrams. To explain it better, the doctor suggests that we break down core concepts of medicine into three parts — fringe, frontier and core. He suggests that we reject what lies in the fringe and consider the frontier, but use the core as our basis for further formulation.
There was one part of the research paper that I could not bring myself to paraphrase. Dr.Thirunavukarasu endeavours to conceptualize the manas understandably, and what better way than bullet points. Here are the key takeaways, quoted directly from the paper. They are pretty self-explanatory, but the content itself makes you genuinely sit and contemplate.
Every human being has one, and only one personal indivisible manas. Manas is not a substance or matter of any nature; nor is it energy or force.
Manas is a functional concept, i.e., manas is evident only as long as the self functions.
Manas ceases to exist if the self ceases to function or exist. Manas is not immortal.
There is nothing supernatural about the manas; nor does it communicate or interact with anything unnatural.
Manas has no direct effect on anything else other than the self of which it forms a part.
Manas is that part of the self that is primarily diseased in mental illness.
Manas is defined as the single indivisible amalgamation of three substituents, namely — Mood, Thought and Intellect.
A change in any one of these substituents produces harmonious changes in the others.
Without manas, there is no behaviour.
If the manas is not affected, then the condition is no longer psychiatric.
If not read completely, it is easy to confuse Dr.Tirunavukarasu’s ideas and conclusions about what the manas truly is. So to make things simpler to you, just the way sir did for me, I present an example. Sir says that the body can exist without the manas, but the manas can’t live without the body. He compares a human being to a computer — A personal computer can have many operating systems; Mac, Linux, Windows. These pieces of software cannot technically exist without them being present in the pc. However, the hardware of the personal computer tangibly exists regardless of its software. And the same goes for the manas, and the human vessel it inhabits.
The paper is not vast, but the contents it encompasses require days, weeks, even months of contemplation. A piece of brilliance, Dr.Thirunavukarasu seems to pry open the reader’s mind to a possibility of mental existence and maintenance to a level that is not understood to general practice yet. His hypothesis and comparison between the manas and mind, the need for terms replacing concepts like ‘mental illness’, which has come to mean too much to be generalized, are just some of the gems in the entire paper. It took me weeks to finally do justice to this brilliant insight into sir’s ideas. I hope you, my reader, have taken the time and effort to read this article, and I hope that you too, like me have felt a glimpse of the brilliance I have read.
I have primarily taken reference from Dr.Thirunavukarasu’s ‘A Utilitarian Concept Of Manas and Mental Health.’
Other references can be found in the dissertation itself.
