Me, my brain and baked beans

Today, in the first in an occasional series of longer form pieces, Peter Kinderman reflects on the interaction between his genetic inheritance and his personal experience, and considers what they mean for his own mental health.  

‘Very nice dear, now, do you want 
baked beans on toast for breakfast?’ 

My wife once came with me on a Saturday morning visit to a psychiatric hospital. I was collecting data for my PhD, and she met me in the car park of a large psychiatric hospital after I’d conducted my interviews.  As I drove away, she stroked the back of my hand and suggested that I could relax my knuckle-whitening grip on the steering wheel. I really didn’t like leaving the residents behind. I wanted to rescue them.

Mad, bad or maybe merely human

Peter Kinderman

Is a mental health diagnosis
necessary to avoid prison?
Photo: Liam Quinn

The British Psychological Society’s report ‘Understanding Psychosis and Schizophrenia’ has challenged many commonly held beliefs about serious mental health problems. While the report has been widely welcomed, it has also prompted questions, particularly focusing on the report’s key recommendation that we move beyond seeing distress as a symptom of disease:

‘services should not insist that people accept any one framework of understanding, for example the idea that their problems are symptoms of an underlying illness’. 

This issue has been addressed on this site on a number of occasions and it’s clearly one that arouses strong feelings. The disease-model of modern psychiatry views emotional distress as the result of illnesses or disorders. Treating such problems in this way, as healthcare issues, is often seen as essential for ensuring that people get the help they need, and vital in avoiding inappropriate treatment.  In particular, some colleagues have suggested that viewing people as ‘mentally ill’ prevents them being blamed for actions for which they are not responsible. Rather than being seen as bad you can be mad (or more accurately sick) and more likely to be treated rather than simply punished.  Removing this protection (the argument continues) may even result in people being sent to prison inappropriately. These are clearly serious concerns and deserve careful consideration.

A national scandal: psychological therapies for psychosis are helpful, but unavailable

Peter Kinderman and Anne Cooke

Can talking therapies be a realistic response
to psychosis and schizophrenia?
Photo: minds2mend.com

For years, drugs were it. If you felt paranoid, heard voices or were diagnosed with schizophrenia, the only thing likely to be on offer was ‘antipsychotic’ medication.  Like all drugs, these have a number of different effects on our nervous system. Some of the effects can be helpful, for example calming us down or making our experiences less intense or distressing.   Others may be less desirable. The unwanted effects – euphemistically called ‘side’ effects – of these particular drugs can be seriously distressing.  For some people, they can be more disabling than the original problem.  Despite the drug industry hype, it’s been a fine balance for many people, and worrying evidence is now emerging that some drugs can cause serious and permanent problems such as brain shrinkage if taken long-term.

Guest Post: In Praise of Creative Maladjustment

We are pleased to have our first guest post. In this entry Peter Kinderman writes about the  role of psychologists and makes a plea for social engagement.

Peter Kinderman

What would he think psychologists
should be doing?
Photo: Discover Black Heritage

“On September 1^st 1967, the Nobel Prize-winning civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. delivered a speech entitled “The Role of the Behavioral Scientist in the Civil Rights Movement” to the American Psychological Association. With eloquence and passion, Dr. King championed the civil rights struggle and spoke about how people like you and me could and should support the civil rights movement.  This speech is particularly relevant today.

“There are some things in our society, some things in our world, to which we … must always be maladjusted if we are to be people of good will. We must never adjust ourselves to racial discrimination and racial segregation. We must never adjust ourselves to religious bigotry.

“We must never adjust ourselves to economic conditions that take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few. We must never adjust ourselves to the madness of militarism, and the self-defeating effects of physical violence. … There comes a time when one must take a stand that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular. But one must take it because it is right…”

If there were a Martin Luther King for 2013, he or she would call on us to speak out, to identify and to condemn those things that should be condemned. We should refuse to tolerate the unacceptable and to act accordingly. That modern Martin Luther King would turn to academics and psychologists and call on us to analyze – using those particular skills and perspectives that we possess – the psychological and social mechanisms that sustain and maintain those unacceptable current realities, and similarly to use our particular skills in psychological science to research social and psychological mechanisms that could support positive change.