Article by Kirk Schneider on PsychologyToday.com
I was just informed about Dr. Kirk Schneider's article in Psychology Today on "The Peril is Not Mental Illness but The Polarized Mind" posted five days ago. He was pleased to report that the piece already had over a thousand views in the first two days. Dr. Schneider offers a critical under-appreciated perspective on mental illness, society, and well being.
For those of you who are not familiar with Kirk's book, The Polarized Mind, this article will provide a nice summary.
by Juanita Ratner - Saturday, 15 March 2014
The Peril Is Not Mental Illness but the Polarized Mind
The social catastrophe that gets repeatedly overlooked.
"There is a reason that many of the most twisted and destructive people on this planet are not seen as “mental patients.” They tend to be ordinary or even celebrated individuals—and their brains are as “normal” as the rest of us. Does this not tell us something glaring about the inadequacy of our current diagnostic system, as well as the culture out of which it arises? We have no language for the malady that both supersedes and in many cases fuels the diagnostic categories we conventionally term psychiatric illnesses, and our reduction of them to brain abnormalities almost entirely blinds us to their deeper cause. This cause is overridingly environmental and the product not of sickness but of unaddressed, unacknowledged fear—which leads individuals and societies to become rigid, narrow, and destructive."Read the full story on Awakening to Awe at PsychologyToday.
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