LABELS & DNA/ December 6, 2007
This is the last blog for this year. The next blog will come out on Thursday, January 3, 2008. Between now and then I have a week long seminar I am going to, two special family functions I will be attending, and the normal holiday season celebrations. Since I try to write something worth reading twice a week, I simply will not have time to do it justice and I don’t want to feel like I have done less than my best.
You may want to look at Project Dream Again’s web page since I hope to do more work on it during this time off from writing the blog or look back at some of the blogs at one of the sites listed below where they are archived.
I feel like the blog has been going well. I have heard from many folks and only a few have been in a negative vein. I wish all of you a wonderful Holiday Season!!!
I am alive and maybe even feeling a bit like a person. I am even looking forward to next year which isn’t bad for a person who usually spends November and December fighting depression and suicidal thoughts.
One reason is that I have a new concept for a drop-in center which I hope to work on getting started here in Burke County, NC next year. More about the concept later.
You know I could not end the year without touching on two of my pet peeves.
First, labels or what mental health professionals call a diagnosis. Over the years, I have had about all of the ones found in the “bible” the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM). At present they are using the DSM-IV-TR. The TR stands for text revision. DSM-V is not expected out until 2012.
Michael Craig Miller, M.D., editor in chief of the Harvard Mental Health Letter, said this about DSM-V in NEWSWEEK, “DSM-V authors will approach their work with a generous attitude toward human nature, and will create a diagnostic system consistent with today’s scientific knowledge. They will offer it, not as the last word, but as a tool for testing hypotheses about mental suffering. After all good science is about getting it both right and wrong. And wisdom-with all due respect to the Greeks-is about appreciating how much we do not know.”
Consumers of mental health services and their families have been wise a long time. We know how much is still to be learned. We appreciate the advances, but we see the flaws and the lack of funds for services and fundamental research.
My second pet peeve is reductionism. One concept from reductionism was just blown out of the water. Again I am quoting from NEWSWEEK, “there is much more to our nature than the plans laid in the genetic code.”
Then just a little further in the article we read, “Biologists have known about methyl groups for decades, and since the 1990’s they have discovered several other types of chemical switches that can turn genes on and off. But only recently have they begun to understand that these switches are a crucial link between the DNA and the outside world. Their findings are now challenging some of science’s most basic assumptions about the way life works.”
Wouldn’t it be nice if someday they understood that we were bio-psycho-social-spiritual beings and that to understand us they will have to understand and treat the whole person? The first person I talked to this about was Dr. John Baggett then Executive Director of NAMI NC and later Director of North Carolina DMHDDSAS. He got it. Then later I had a chance to talk with Dr. Bill Anthony of Boston University. He got it. Why do so few get it? Because we train folks in specialties and do almost no cross training.
My prayer for the New Year is that more of my fellow sojourners will find someone who will see them. Really see them. See them as a person.
You can reach me directly at [email protected]
