A New Paradigm for People with Mental Illness in Development

A NEW PARADIGM FOR PEOPLE WITH MENTAL ILLNESS.

That which gives pain places us perpendicular to the moon.

The will to be free and unrestrained by socially-constructed standards and rules of speech is alive. We hear it in music and we see it in graffiti written on walls. Language is like music motivating a retrieval of feeling. We live in different frequencies of sound that affect our emotions. It is this fact that binds language to the most intimate part of ourselves and the ability of each person to own their experience of life and recreate a new dimension of sound relationships to new meanings and feelings.

When we speak we hear ourselves and when we hear ourselves we know that we are alive. Language is a mental form of life moving us beyond the boundaries and priorities set by technology, science and the accumulation of capital. Language represents intellectual labor and the rich conceptual worlds that explain and give meaning to human existence.
It is within the context of language that cultures maintain and stabilize their identities. As the locus of social struggle, language forms the basis of ideological conflict and social transformation. It has a generative effect on human will in taking ownership over any and all forms of social change. In the midst of destruction there is creation. While there is the story of human exploitation, there is also the story of human emancipation through transformation. We can only be enslaved if we lose our creative will to be free.

We each have the stories of our experiences in life. I have many stories of my struggle to own myself with signs , symbols and patterns of speech that identify me as a person with a mental illness. I want to capture the language and meaning of people with mental illness. There is a place and a moment in time when they will not retreat back into the books and the definitions of abnormal psychology, but will free themselves from this ideology and captive place of definition.
People with mental illness are understood in different contexts. Our lives and our subjective experiences are told in worlds within us and in worlds without us. For some we are misunderstood, for some we are beyond understanding and for others we are understood, loved and cared for wherein we learn to care for ourselves.

The people who understand us understand our courage, our struggles, our faith and our love. It is in faith and love that we belong. We learn to belong in love and faith in this world. I know that love and faith have guided me. The faith I have had in the steps we take in this world and the love I have given and taken. For we give and take love from each other. This is the very core of our being.

The context for understanding people with mental illness has often been the medical model of psychiatry. This is the language that has defined us. Psychiatrists use the “medical model” to understand the chemistry of the brain. Freud was a medical doctor but in essence he was a seeker of the “mind”, emotional processes and behaviors that can be understood (or misunderstood) as related to the brain. His understanding came from a philosophical relationship to the scientific paradigm of his time as a medical doctor. This understanding has certain limitations. These limitations are characterized by a drive to get beyond a science and philosophy that contain the mind in a certain place in time. Our task is to get beyond this place and time of understanding and re-work the conditions of emotional abandonment to the self.
The condition of emotional abandonment to the self resides in a place, a direction that is fed into the body, related to the movement of breath, given up and caught in the chest, hardened by time and misdirection and needing to flow and move gently from within. The medical model must adjust to this understanding if it is to take into account the changes in meaning that contain a new beginning to being more whole and not divided between mind, body and soul.

Faith, therefore, necessitates a process, a redeeming quality of the soul. Faith places the body of the person, presenting this body to the world as a renewal of self. The mind is not caught between what is solid and liquid in it, but what renews itself as a whole. These phases of selfhood do not deny the actions which destroy selfhood, but allow them to work in reverse. Thereupon, reducing and reframing all destructive actions, whether they be toward self or other. From a destructive self comes the creation of self and being with others in a more creative world. Faith is not magic, but is magnified in a manner beyond discourse and reason. Love allows faith to blossom as a real substance in the world.

Love is the gravity of discourse. No being can exist without love, although some would allow facts and figures to interrupt the process of love. Love breaks through, like matter, to the place of illness, confusion and despair. When we interrupt the process of love, we pull, like reins, the animal of our incarnation.

A new language that incorporates the courage of people with mental illness gives faith and love a direction. With the language of courage we are able to co-create a reality that we live in for ourselves. This co-creation lives parallel to the linear reality constructed today by the languages of people with mental illness. This parallel place of creation merges with the medical reality in questionable relationship to itself. The medical reality might be seen as concrete but it is mixed with the matter of selfhood saved from itself. In this way we know ourselves within and beyond medicine as a matter of fact. New languages and our courageous places of understanding direct themselves in this way for us to better know ourselves and for others to learn our languages.