“A Mental Disease by Any Other Name”
“You sit with Frank as he receives his diagnosis, schizophrenia, and immediately all sorts of associations flood into your head. In the United States, a diagnosis of schizophrenia often means homelessness, joblessness, inability to maintain close relationships, and increased susceptibility to addiction. Your son is now dangling off this cliff. So you hand him over to the doctors, who prescribe him antipsychotics, and when he balloons up to 300 pounds,1 and they tell you he’s just being piggish, you believe them…
Having a dissolved self can make it immensely hard for a schizophrenic person to present a coherent picture of themselves to the world, and to relate to other, more gelled selves. “Schizophrenia is a disease whose main manifestations are sufferers’ [diminished] abilities to engage in social interactions,” says Matcheri S. Keshavan, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School and an expert on schizophrenia. And yet, ironically, people with schizophrenia need others just as much as socially capable people do, if not more. “A problem with schizophrenia is however much they want [social interactions], they often lose the skills needed for navigating them,” Keshavan says…
“Take a young man with schizophrenia who’s socially unable to engage,” Keshavan says. “In a collectivistic culture, he’s still able to survive in a joint family with a less fortunate brother or cousin … he’ll feel supported and contained. Whereas in a more individualistic society, he’ll feel let go, and not particularly included. For that reason, schizophrenia tends to be highly disabling [in individualistic countries].” Individualist cultures also “[diminish] motivation to acknowledge illness and seek help from others, whether from therapists or in clinics or residential programs.” notes Russell Schutt, a leading expert on the sociology of schizophrenia…
When this happens, the Dagara people begin a collective effort to heal the broken-down person; one marked by loud rituals involving dancing and cheering and with an underlying current of celebration. Malidoma remembers watching his sister go through it. “My sister was screaming into the night,” he says, “but people were playing around her.” Usually, the uncontrollable breakdowns last about eight months, after which effectively new people emerge. “You have to go through this radical initiation where you can become the larger than life person the community needs for their own benefit, you know?” If the broken-down person does not have a community around him or her, Malidoma says, he or she may fail to heal. He believes this is what happened to Frank.”
Related: “Redefining Mental Illness”; “The Concept of Schizophrenia Is Coming to an End — Here’s Why”; “Successful and Schizophrenic”; “When Bad Things Happen in Slow Motion”; “A Depression-Fighting Strategy That Could Go Viral”; “Who Gets To Be The “Good Schizophrenic”?”;
