Mental Illness: A Comparative Analysis

This article focuses on the families ' experiences of mental illness rather than the individual. Boschman explains that having an external party that has seen everything first hand is beneficial in the diagnosis process (2007). LeFrancois and Diamond would note that this actually delegitimizes the individual 's experiences as the individual cannot make sense of their experience for themselves because family members ' accounts are taken as truth (2014). This could also be because 'mentally ill ' individuals are often seen as not being able to take care of themselves. Both articles talk about the framework of performance, where a culturally dominant discourse that is biomedical is a produced effect that is shaped, formed, and reproduced within …show more content…
Authors noted that narrative is a powerful tool that can disrupt dominant discourses and can assist in constructing new discourses that are more inclusive and can work to better meet the needs of individuals (Fook, 2012). I have not done much previous personal research in the field of psychiatry, so this analysis has exposed me to the many problems that individuals face when experiencing mental health stress or trauma and are facing diagnosis. In the field of social work, practitioners and educators reinforce the importance of lived experience as it is unique to everyone and it creates the people that we are. Personal experience and narrative are such an important aspect of social work in that it helps with understanding circumstances, structural barriers, power relations, sites of oppression, and can help enforce appropriate measures for healing. I find it troubling that psychiatry silences this meaningful aspect of social science, and instead focuses on knowledge that was constructed by 'experts ', that further oppresses an individual who has been isolated from society. This comparative analysis has also shown me that when it comes to those who have been labelled as 'mentally ill ', writers are either very supportive of, or very against medication as a remedy. I think that the writers who are very supportive of medication have not been critical enough about when it is appropriate and inappropriate to be administering medication to individuals as some do not need it. There is also much confusion about what is being administered and why, and this needs to be changed (LeFrancois & Diamond, 2014). On the other side of things, writers who are very against medication have perhaps been too critical. Views that were brought forward were that because of so much resistance, the drugs must be doing horrible things to the individual. I side