The Schizophrenia
Schizophrenia as a Paradigm Case for Understanding Fundamental Human Process
It is agreeable that schizophrenia is the most disorganized of the functional illnesses of the mind. It is termed as continuation of very much that can be taken as simply human.
From the perspective of the anthropology which is more concerned with what the nature entails and the meaning of subjective experience it would seem to be common place to claim that a theoretically grounded understanding of the orientation of culture, self, emotions and relations in the society is essential to the analysis of a complex pathological phenomenon such as schizophrenia. Similarly schizophrenia study indicates a relationship between culture and the basic processes of and capacities for experience.
The relationship between schizophrenia and basic processes in human beings is carefully in terms of the particular perspective or situated points of view (Haraway, 1991). Been aware of the particular experience leads to a cautionary note that what is mostly taken to be basic about the processes of human beings may not be their collectively invariant form but rather their culturally constituted form at the most fundamental organizational level.
Also, by examining of ordinary processes and capacities I mean to call attention not only to the extraordinary but also to schizophrenia experience dimensions of everyday.
Conceptualizations of the normal and the abnormal are implicated in the study of both fundamental and ordinary processes. In this perspective abnormality is defined as more of what otherwise might be considered within the limits of the normal experiences of the human beings. (Jenkins 1994). When it is normal it is not easy to visualize.
Culture Theory Schizophrenia and Human Process
The inception of the thinking line took place in the 1920s at the interface of psychiatry and the social science among a variety of scholars who were working on culture.
(Sullivan 1962) located schizophrenia in everyday social life and the situations of culture and such implied that there was nothing for deterioration but rather of a disorder in which the total experience of the individual is reorganized particularly in the field of complex images thinking. The point by Sullivan was not to pathologize the experience of everyday but to put emphasis on the continuity between the ordinary and the pathological in contrast to a too inflexible, categorical distinction that exist between them.
For one scholar thinking about schizophrenia was a productive route for creating a theory for anthropological subjective experience. For example the requirements to contaminant for orienting of consistent to cultural and social circumstances on the other hand and to protect one from instances when they are potentially injurious to each other. One plan to resolve the conflict between the self and the powerful socio-emotional setting is to blot out or deny the external environment over which one has control.
If they are taken together the early conceptualizations serve as forerunners of contemporary anthropological theory of an experienced that has already been lived. (Turner, 1992 et al) identified accomplishment and challenges for the study of experienced that had been lived in the field of anthropological medicine. On the other hand, the current generation is face with the problem of interpreting when they have established the myriad facets of illness that is a social role, strategy of the society of the symbol of the society, and the illness is rein-scribed as human experience.
The review of theoretical developments in medical anthropology offers a critique of notions of culture reduced to behavior that is observable but unmotivated or the cognitive contents imagined residing in the end of someone. He describes the recent theoretical movement away from a medical social science focused on behavior and belief and toward the meaning and experience. If we go beyond culture which characterizes as belief, this formulation includes the daily trafficking in paradoxes, puzzles and characteristics of fluidity of a mood that is subjective.
(Sherry Ortner 1996) has argued that the cultural making of subaltern subjects which imply women, minorities and for mentally ill accomplished in two ways. Firstly categories of culture, forms in history or subjectivity forms are the passive voices which are made or constructed by and subjected to the cultural and historical discourages within which they operate. Secondly it arises from actors view point where the question is how the actors enact, resist or negotiate the world as given and in so doing mould the world. This form of making may amount to reproduction of the same old cultural and social thing or it may turn out to production of similar ancient and cultural thing or it may turn out to production of a new thing although not necessarily as indented by the actor. In fact the intention one has plays a very essential role in the process, because while intention is the central to what the actors seeks to accomplish and therefore must be carefully internalized and the relation it has with the outcome is mostly quite indirect.
The Self and Self-Process
The position that the self is fundamental phenomenon in all psychic life was argued out by (Karl Jaspers 1963) in terms of a confrontation of a subject with an object so as awareness of an object may be contrasted with awareness of oneself. (Hallowell 1955) developed a notion of culture in relation to awareness of one self. In the psychiatric history inquiry into schizophrenia, the location of the self has changed with time. Disorders of the self have been thought to be central to the psychoses in which as suggested by (Eugen Bleuler, 1950) experience becomes constructed self-referentially in a world where symbolization and fantasy are continuously invoked.
The theory of Sullivan on self-system was conceptualized as a constellation of interpersonal mechanisms in service of emotional protection against a toxic emotional milieu. In this case the self is not discrete and fixed entity but instead an inter-subjective creation, a constellation of interpersonal processes which are developed during the childhood the stage of adolescent. However though once regarded as the centerpiece of theoretical formulations, the self recede to the periphery of the contemporary psychological and psychiatric discourse concerning schizophrenia. The customary mental capacities and the strategies we presume all humans to be in possession viewed as diminished or absent in people with schizophrenia.
Social Engagement, Cultural Orientation
Sullivan pictured of mental disorder as an interactive process. As a starting point for cultural investigation, it requires that mental disorder be put into examination within the arena of everyday social life rather than in the brain scan or clinic. The early life theoretical formulation by Sullivan provides a bridge between the subjective experience of the afflicted self and the environment of everyday social interaction. Recent evaluation notes that in the strict sense no subject ever constitutes herself in the absence of other subjects and objects. In this view point I would give the view that when we speak of subjectivity we actually mean to appeal to the notion of inter-subjectivity.
Theoretical reformulation of differences between subject and object, self and others, involve finding a way to account for the difficulty each subject has in recognition of the other as an equivalent center of experience.
Subject in Dispute: The Poetics, Politics and Performance of People with Schizophrenia
Schizophrenia in and as Dispute
People are diagnosed to be having schizophreniatalk back to experts, relatives, the public and the advocates who then write about, treat and otherwise represent them and this has been done for a long period of time now. As perhaps the prototype of psychiatric disorders, schizophreniahas been the protean site for disputes of varied kinds. Conflict and disagreement about the meaning, reality, and intensity may indicate the quintessence of schizophrenia. Narration for protesting and in more forms which are mild what we have called normalizing talk clash over the presence of psychosis, symptoms or disease, (Granger, 1994) raised an alarm over the cruelty and the injustice at the hands of others. There was a proposition to dominate professional models and family explanations and conveyance of compelling and wrenching portraits of anger, failure and suffering. More numerous and less lyrical perhaps and decidedly less widely available are the experimental narrations that are spoken audibly at local and the national gatherings for mental health and found in program to treat, publications for self advocating and collections of stories from individuals which have been published by sources that are individual.
The question is where the mostly unruly expressions of grief, sometimes quiet voices of reasoned despair, and the stories of uncelebrated but superb lives are in the scientific discourse about and understanding of schizophrenia and whether is possible to engage the quintessence of unreason in our reasoned discourse about unreason.
Recently a schizophreniabulletin applies one to three pages per issue to a well edited-person account. Occasionally, clinicians and researchers write forewords to many narratives or mention them in footnotes. This indicates that the mainstream academic press of psychiatry publishes bibliographies of patient autobiographies but not the real accounts.
Dispute Domains
So as to have surety that patients with ailments other than schizophreniacomplain about their care.(Dickey 1970) contrast their desires, sensations and the sentiments with the clinical practices and the presentations of science. Dickey laments that the doctors knows what the problem is but they are hesitant to solve it at times and this prompts the ill to seek solutions for their own including finding ways of treating themselves. What matters to him is the glory and cold beer on a hot summer day. He is of the sentiment that the youthful doctors and their medical knowledge are not on his side and hence not ready to assist him in this problem.
View that One Can’t Get Schizophrenia
There has been mutual unintelligibility about schizophrenia between different groups which can be held accountable to the paradigm held in common by the varied groups. The paradigm can be summed up as: you don’t get it or you can’t get it. From the first perspective the researchers don’t understand schizophrenia. This implies that they don’t even listen, care, understand or have the complete information. At the same time the clinicians and the researchers are not in a position to understand because they have not had the first hand experience or psychosis or treatments such as neuroleptics and their side effects, hospitalization or forced treatment. There is failing in ability and the will to perform.
Form the perspective of the scholars or the clinician individuals don’t get schizophrenia because they are not acknowledging that they have a psychiatric disorder and they do not see the world and understand the rules and meaning which are followed by scholars or clinicians. At the same time there is contention that individuals can’t get to understand because they have schizophrenia, which limits their ability to come in terms with the technical information or they lack the insight and are in denial. Equally there are failures of ability and will or motivation and capacity. In my view, the impasse that was has been created by the paradigm held impoverishes the schizophrenia scholarship.
Authority Begets Authenticity/ Authenticity Begets Authority
A different dimension of the don’t and can’t get it argument is concerned with the arena of professional dominance of the knowledge and clinicians do not know what having and lining with schizophrenia is and they therefore lack sufficient understanding to really understand or to provide effective treatment, their authority to write about schizophrenia and the dictation of treatment is basically challenged. (Clay, 1994) wrote and said that those of them who had experience in the mental illness know in their hearts that something essential is missing in the diagnoses of schizophrenia. What has been endured is not taken into account. Even if the bad chemical or the gene that is defective is at one day found, madness has in itself a reality that needs attention to be directed to it.
Schizophrenia is just a word to most of the psychiatrist.At stake is who has the authority and is warranted for representation of whom upon the resting of this authority and the principles to be followed in assessing of the divergent representations. There is also issue on knowledge can be accessed to the knowledge-producing landscape. Which entail funding for services and research, professional journals and the print and other forms of media.
Schizophrenia: What, Who and How to Respond
At the heart of many first person accounts are series of linked assertions about what schizophrenia is, whether is its career and the type of treatment or response would be helpful or harmful.Some people have the view that one become mentally ill due to crisis in their spirit and becoming healed was very tricky. And due to this they held themselves into despair. The doctor however present view to them that the whole ecstasy of spirit with darkness was irrational and ill advised and without meaning. The spiritual outlook is what could be taken to be the solution to mental problems. It many mental prescriptions can be given but it is only the personal viewpoint that will help the patients of schizophrenia.
Symptoms and Procedure of Treatment
The schizophrenia treatment view that it is very punitive, dangerous and sometimes not effective is the area where there seems to have intensified agreement between the accounts of first and second person.Then a person is suffering from schizophrenia they usually have unsettled mind with thirst to know what is happening in the outside world especially if they are confined in a secluded place. Treating them like second class citizens won’ help the situation. The patients need to be shown love and given the care they deserve.
The Personal Politics of Treatment: Who makes the Rules and Roles
The imbalance in the treatment of the patients cause trauma in them and make them wish if they were at better positions to and in good treatment. When they are at their normal situations they fell ill treated and desire a place where they can be able to get freedom.
Telling Stories: Life Histories, Illness Narratives and Institutional Landscapes
The story develops from a complicated life at the society margins, success in economy and for the health as the ultimate goal. It is marginal in other sense; its narration is done by a person with schizophrenia.
He sense of narrative emerges in this setting is captured by a model which looks like this.
- → Narrative → Text
↑ − ↓
Interpretation
In this model the experience is the wellspring of a narrative which comes out in a text from which a process of interpretation can lead us back to the initial experience. Few researchers who work with a model like this one pretend to be capturing a certain even through a transparent text but many do seem to argue that many individual phenomenology underestimates a narrative, this experience is able to be captured through a process of narrative in both the encounters in the clinical set up in contexts that are general but poses some serious theoretical issues for medical anthropology.
Story Uses
The answers to varied definitions developed in anthropology and related disciplines around the notions of story or narrative. It develops a plot within frame, it is narrated by an agentive subject who has had a sense for his audience, and the main character who is the narrator confronts, and should adapt to other characters intentions in the story.
The story relates what might be called personal experience. The narrator Finbar gives the reader a rich sense of what it implies to feel socially marginal or that one’s reality every day is slipping away or shifting in a way that is extraordinary fashion. He shows a rich phenomenology of emotions that come when one is abandoned, terror, amusement, suspicion and hostility.
The story is bound up with the topology of the institution. We can’t understand the flow of narrative of the story, even the structure therein as well as the humor. It is hard to understand the channels of the institution which restrict the freedom of and giving of shape to and make it possible creation of the story line. This topography in the story of Finbar clearly entails the structure of psychiatric knowledge and praxis which is the institution for Asylum. The object of knowledge in the technologies reassures that the stuff of the psychiatric praxis takes up most of the first part of this fragment. Finbar develops some critique about the institution through different forms of what we can only call knowledge that is institutionalized. He gives voice that voice to the authority of a morality which is clearly connected to the church of catholic.
Suffering and Responsibility
Finbar makes quite a lot of rhetorical moves within what might be called the institutional channels of his diagnosis along the legitimacy and responsibility axis. Firstly a position in the symbolic continuum of personal responsibility that questions the current status of alcoholism as an entity to disease and therefore viewed to be outside the realm will. Finbar implies that those suffering from schizophrenia are really sick and they deserve sympathy in the way that alcoholics are not.
Similarly Finbar enforces on a pint on social justice. He views himself to be much marginalized such that the other marginal people which include the alcoholics, those depressed and mentally handicapped seem to be significantly having more capital culturally at their disposal. Finbar wonders why his plight generates so little sympathy in the hearts and mind of other people. He finds himself to be the lowest. Finbar describes those suffering from the schizophrenia to be the suffering.
Finbar points to the abyss of hopelessness that runs alongside the livelihoods of the most people who have been diagnosed to have schizophrenia in countries in the western region of the globe. He says that people there have a negative attitude to those with schizophrenia. They are perceived to be dangerous and in fact horrible people to deal with. In industrialized countries the rate is much lower than the industrialized ones.
In connection to this feeling of intra-institutional inferiority is a more pervasive sense that Finbar has about seeming always to be at the wrong end of relationships of power which is based on the authority and knowledge. The theme that is more evident in this story is that there is little control exercised over the life of those who are schizophrenia. For instance he is portrayed to have is money provided by the state, home by his father and nearly all his interactions mostly been during his visit to the clinic and when he conducts the fellow people who suffer from the ailment. His life is dominated with label that he has been given in relation to his health.
The feeling of inferiority in keenly felt by Finbar as well as the psychiatry and psychiatrists; a prototype example of helplessness is shown in the sense that psychotropic drugs are all his. This is seen all though from their administration, effects, and their side effects; they emphasize and replicate the feeling of overpowering to Finbar.
The Interviewer Inter-viewed
During the initial part of the conversation, Finbar offers the interviewer several challenges concerning the injustice of his social and institutional positions. This is in relation to the intimate connection between knowledge and authority. This critique is in line to the second theme of this work, which is the putting in text of the life of Finbar in the context of alcoholism, the nature of professional and popular assessment of disorders of the bipolar. Medical knowledge status more broadly and the justice of the authority of experts knowledge are all the subject of comment.There is an issue of institutionalized voiceless ness which Finbar could not avoid and this works as the point for writing down his experience. He is keen to note the problems he undergoes that undermine his dignity in his eyes.
Correlation and Contradictions between the Uses of the Term Schizophrenia in Different Discourses
In the first part of understanding the fundamentals of human processes the cultural grounding of the subjective experience in schizophrenia as a paradigm is case to understand the basic processes of human beings, meaning the centered cultural theory and the Sullivan theory of schizophrenia as it is seen clearly in everyday environment. With the added insights of a couple of contemporary cultural theories, particular processes of self, emotion, social engagement and orientation of culture which are seen to be necessary for the analysis of a complex phenomenon such as schizophrenia.
In this part the self, culture intersection subjectivity and schizophrenia is very intense, most problematic and most basically human. In the domain of emotion schizophrenia has been construed as a state of effective deficit. In the social engagement domain persons with schizophrenia like their colleagues are strongly attracted to relationships in the society
In the second part of subjectivity in dispute, some sort of reckoning especially the view that people don’t get and they can’t get it. This is contrast with the first part.Those diagnosed with schizophrenia have only the experience and they are the only people who understand the problem therein. Those outside are not able to help them in any way because they lack the capacity as well as the experience to help.
Authenticity of experience they undergo is theirs alone and yet the inability of others to offer them the necessary empathy and recognize them is a source of suffering. The same sentiments are shared in the third part where the narrator expresses they pain which he undergoes when he is secluded from the society.
Reference
Dickey, J (1970) Deliverance, USA: Longman
Eugen B (1950) History of psychiatry: UK
Haraway, D (1991) The reinvention of nature: New York
Jenkins I (1994) The Parthenon frieze: UK: Bay producers
(Karl Jaspers 1963) General psychopathology, Chicago; Longman
Saris, J.A. (1990) Telling stories: Life histories, illness narratives and institutional landscapes
(Sherry Ortner 1996) Theory of anthropology since sixties, Michigan: Michigan University press
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