Apr 252019
 

Some people have raised the issue of what defines mental illness, which is made clear in my book, Mental Illness Defined: Continuums, Regulation And Defense (https://bradbowinsbooks.com/mental-illness-defined/). Besides not aligning with the true nature of psychopathology, discrete diagnoses are less humanistic than a continuous characterization, whereby mental health problems range from normal to extreme levels. Take personality disorders, where in clinical practice there is an us versus them orientation. My continuous model of personality disorders views these problems as extreme and enduring expressions of common psychological defense patterns. For instance, avoidance is a normal survival defense when applied to dangerous agents, but when it occurs repeatedly in response to agents offering reward potential it is highly dysfunctional—avoidant personality disorder. We all engage in avoidance but it is the degree that counts, so the client and therapist are not all that different. The same applies to psychosis where based on a continuous model psychotic level cognitions represent the extreme range of thought content, thought form, and sensory perceptual experiences. We all experience psychotic level cognitions during sleep when dreaming, but with psychosis they occur repeatedly in the conscious and awake state, due (from my perspective) to impaired regulation over psychotic level cognitions. Hence, a value of my continuous model of mental illness (aside from aligning with scientific research and not pharmaceutical marketing needs plus our preference for discrete entities to simplify information process) is that it is much more humanistic!

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