Abstract
Before I started writing this chapter, one of my colleagues asked me why I was including a discussion on the mentally ill in a book on interpersonal relations. It was a good question, and one for which I did not immediately have an answer. This is not, after all, a book on abnormal psychology. Yet I intuitively felt that this inclusion not only made sense but that it was critical. Accordingly, I begin this chapter by explaining why understanding people with psychiatric disturbances, in addition to being an important topic in its own right, has significant implications for ordinary human relations.
I become through my relation to the Thou; as I become I, I say Thou. All real living is meeting.
Martin Buber1
We, as a society, are estranged from the “mad” in our midst. We fear them and their illness.
Robert Whitaker 2
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Notes
Martin Buber, I and Thou, 2nd ed, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (New York: Scribner, 1958), 11.
Robert Whitaker, Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreat of the Mentally Ill (Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 2003), xiv.
David L. Kahn, “Reducing Bias,” in Hermeneutical Phenomenological Research: A Practical Guide for Nurse Researchers, ed. Marlene Z. Cohen, David L. Kahn, and Richard H. Steeves (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2000), 89–90.
Gerald C. Davison, John M. Neale, Ann N. Kring, Abnormal Psychology, 9th ed. (New York: Wiley, 2004), 635.
Studies of institutionalization include John K. Wing and G. W. Brown, Institutionalization and Schizophrenia: A Comparative Study of Three Mental Hospitals: 1960–1968 (Oxford: Cambridge University Press, 1970)
Edmond Phillips, “The Iatrogenic Environment: A Transactional Framework for Social Research,” Hospital & Community Psychiatry 18, no. 2 (1967): 369–375.
Gerald N. Grob, “Deinstitutionalization: The Illusion of Policy,” Journal of Policy History 9, no. 1 (1997): 49–73. I am grateful to my colleague Erica Lilleleht for bringing Grob’s article to my attention.
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Mental Health: A Report of the Surgeon General (Rockville, MD: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, Center for Mental Health Services, National Institutes of Health, and National Institutes of Mental Health, 1999).
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This trend toward increase in depression is not restricted to the United States but has also been found, with some variation, in locations as far apart as Italy, Lebanon, New Zealand, and Taiwan, as well as in other countries. See, Cross-National Collaborative Group, “The Changing Rate of Major Depression: Cross-National Comparisons,” Journal of the American Medical Association 268, no. 2 (1992): 3098–3105.
George H. Darby, Elliott T. Barker, and Michael H. Mason, “Buber behind Bars,” paper presented at the Fall Meeting of the Ontario Psychiatric Association, October, 1966. Buber’s overall influence on the field of psychotherapy has been substantial.
For an overview of this issue, see Maurice S. Friedman, The Healing Dialogue in Psychotherapy (New York: Aronson, 1985)
Richard Hycner, Between Person and Person: Toward a Dialogical Psychotherapy (Highland, NY: Gestalt Journal, 1993).
The section that follows is based, in part, on a chapter I wrote with Judy Dearborn Nill, “Demystifying Psychopathology: Understanding Disturbed Persons,” in Existential-Phenomenological Perspectives in Psychology, ed. Ronald S. Valle and Steen Halling (New York: Plenum, 1989): 179–192.
James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killings (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 202.
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Oliver Sacks, The Man who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and other Clinical Tales (New York: Harper and Row, 1987): 92–101.
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Harry S. Sullivan, The Psychiatric Interview (New York: Norton, 1954).
See, for example, Frieda Fromm-Reichman, Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy: Selected Papers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959)
Betram P. Karon and Gary VandenBos, Psychotherapy of Schizophrenia: The Treatment of Choice (Northvale, NJ: Arsonson, 1981)
R. D. Laing, The Divided Self (Baltimore: Pelican, 1965)
Garry Prouty, Theoretical Evolutions in Person-Centered/Experiential Therapy: Applications to Schizophrenia and Retarded Psychoses (Westwood, CT: Praeger, 1994).
Martin E. P. Seligman, Elaine F. Walker, and David Rosenhan, Abnormal Psychology, 4th ed. (New York: Norton, 2001), 265–267.
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Mental Health; Nancy Andreasen, “Linking Mind and Brain in the Study of Mental Illnesses: A Project for a Scientific Psychopathology,” Science 275, March 14, 1997: 1586.
Elio Frattaroli, Healing the Soul in the Age of the Brain: Becoming Conscious in an Unconscious World (New York: Viking, 2001), 164
Amedeo P. Giorgi, Psychology as a Human Science (New York: Harper and Row, 1970).
American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th ed., Text Revision (Washington, D.C.: Author, 2000), 305, 309.
Nathaniel Lachenmeyer, The Outsider: A Journey into My Father’s Struggle with Madness (New York: Broadway Books, 2000), 251.
Laura Lee Hall and Laurie M. Flynn, both directors at NAMI, in response to an article by Leon Eisenberg, entitled “The Social Construction of the Human Brain,” in the same journal (152, no. 11 (1995): 1563–1575).
Abigail Zuger, “Drug Companies’ Sales Pitch: ‘Ask your Doctor,’” New York Times, August 5, 1997, sec. C.
Robert Pear, “Drug Companies Increase Spending on Efforts to Lobby Congress and Governments,” New York Times, June 1, 2003, sec. A.
Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Gardiner Harris, “Measure to Ease Imports of Drugs is Gaining in House,” New York Times, July 22, 2003, sec. A.
Cynthia Crossen, Tainted: The Manipulation of Fact in America (New York: Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 1996), 183.
Robert Pear, “Spending on Prescription Drugs Increases almost 19 Percent.” New York Times May 8, 2001, A1.
Sophia F. Dziegielewski, Psychopharmacology Handbook (New York: Norton 2006).
Shankar Vedantam, “More Kids Receiving Psychiatric Drugs; Question of ‘Why’ still Unanswered,” Washington Post, January 14, 2003, sec. A.
David Karp, Living with Sadness: Depression, Disconnection, and the Meanings of Illness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 101.
Gerald I. Klerman, “The Advantages of DSM-III,” American Journal of Psychiatry 141, no. 4 (1984): 542.
American Psychiatric Association (2000), Diagnostic and Statistical, xxx–xxxi.
George E. Vaillant, “The Disadvantages of DSM-III Outweigh its Advantages,” American Journal of Psychiatry 141, no. 4 (1984): 542–545
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Ellen Corin and Gilles Lauzon, “Positive Withdrawal and the Quest for Meaning: Reconstruction of Experience among Schizophrenics,” Psychiatry 55, no. 1 (1992), 267.
Quoted in S. A. Kirk and H. Hutchins, The Selling of DSM: The Rhetoric of Science in Psychiatry (Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter, 1992), 248.
Philip Cushman, “How Psychology Erodes Personhood,” Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology 22, no. 2 (2002): 108.
David H. Barlow, “The Effectiveness of Psychotherapy: Science and Policy,” Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice 3, no. 3 (1996): 236–240.
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William Barrett, The Illusion of Technique: A Search for Meaning in a Technological Civilization (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1979).
Ursala Franklin, The Real World of Technology (Concord, Canada: Anansi, 1992).
David F. Noble, The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998).
Erica Lilleleht, “The Paradox of Practice: Using Rhetoric to Understand the Dilemmas of Psychiatric Rehabilitation,” International Journal of Psychosocial Rehabilitation 10, no. 1 (2005). http://www.psychosocial.com/IJPR_10/Paradox_in_Practice_Lilleleht.html.
Constance T. Fischer, Indvidualizing Psychological Assessment (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Earlbaum, 1995).
Elliot S. Valenstein, Blaming the Brain: The Truth about Drugs and Mental Health (New York: Free Press, 1998), 125.
William Bevan, “Contemporary Psychology: A Tour inside the Onion,” American Psychologist 46, no. 5 (1991): 476.
Joanne Greenberg, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (New York: New American Library, 1964)
Sylvia Nasar, A Beautiful Mind: The Life of Mathematical Genius and Nobel Laureate John Nash (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998).
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© 2008 Steen Halling
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Halling, S. (2008). Experiencing the Humanity of the Disturbed Person. In: Intimacy, Transcendence, and Psychology. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230610255_5
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