Tag: disease model

The ERNI (Emotions aRe Not Illnesses) declaration is based on the idea that distress does not equate to disease, dysfunction, dysregulation, or chemical imbalance.

From Scientific American: The current medical consensus is that addiction is a chronic and relapsing brain disease in which drug use becomes involuntary despite its...

If you loosen the association between the concepts of illness and disease and the body, the words cease to have any discriminative power. They are no longer able to pick out a particular category of unwanted situations and become synonymous with generic terms like ‘problem’ or ‘difficulty’. They become meaningless.

I think it is fair to say that many psychiatrists display an enormous lack of good sense and judgment. Psychiatrists are in the firm grip of a collective force field of an almost fundamentalist belief system that blinds them to the harm they unwittingly do and the human rights abuses they commit.

Faced with behavior different from our own or from our expectations, all of us feel that urge to “do something”—an act that is one of the beginnings of prejudice, a malignant virus that all of us have trouble shaking free of. We doctors, especially, want to do something: It’s what we’ve been trained to do.

From The Good Men Project: "Mental illness" is a misleading phrase that often exacerbates the pain of people in emotional distress. Article →­  

Psychiatrists have invented terms such as “mental illness” and “mental disorder,” the diagnosis and treatment of which is their bread and butter, their supposed area of expertise. People generally trust doctors.

I get a lot of ideas from other advocates from online forums like the Alternatives Facebook discussion group,  where we have a gathering of about...

There are two main problems with the term "medical model." First, it automatically frames the debate in the terms of the oppressor, and secondly, it's confusing. Many people in our community say "medical model" when we mean, "The idea that something wrong in my brain caused my emotional suffering." So why not just use a term that says this? When we say "Disease Model" we can clarify exactly what we are against. With just one word changed we can say we do not believe that a mental "disease" came from nowhere to put us out of action.

If you want solutions for emotional distress, vote NOW! Vote for the distress model and vote for Aunt Bertha. 1) Vote now for the distress...