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Introduction: Containing Multitudes

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Trauma and Madness in Mental Health Services

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Abstract

Although the public is led to believe in the foregone conclusion that what is called mental illness is biological and genetic in nature and that medical advancements have led to new discoveries and improved treatments, this is not actually so certain. The field of trauma studies has continued to expand and the findings consistently support instinctual wisdom: people go mad, become aggressive, and are fearful because they have been profoundly hurt. The subject matter of this book is an exploration of the system as a whole, and what people have found to be helpful, both in and out of the system, when recovering from childhood adversity. It is entirely driven by a first-person perspective of those with extensive experiences in the system, including the author. This chapter provides an overview of both the book and the study upon which it is based.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The World Health Organization has done a series of studies beginning in the 1970s evaluating outcomes for “schizophrenia ” across countries. They have consistently found that poorer countries (i.e., those countries that have different cultural approaches to emotional distress and rarely react to such conditions with medical interventions) have better outcomes and higher proportions of recovery than richer, more modernized countries (see Jaaskelainen et al., 2013). Yet, in those countries that have since adopted a Western, biomedical approach to emotional distress, the disparity in outcomes has almost disappeared and a poor outcome is now the norm (Karagianis et al., 2009; Whitaker, 2010). See also E. Watters’ (2010) Crazy Like Us, which documents how the Western view of emotional distress has co-opted other cultures’ frameworks for understanding and dealing with such issues, at times, to their detriment.

  2. 2.

    As may already be clear at this point, I do not believe that diagnoses are valid representations of a true construct, nor do I believe that they are ethical to use considering their established lack of validity or reliability (Chap. 4). Therefore, the study conducted did not evaluate for differential diagnosis or comorbidity, but rather for endorsement of specific phenomena including: feeling like more than one person, extensive memory problems, incidents of possession, and severe depersonalization and derealization.

  3. 3.

    For those interested in the methodological process and the nuances therein can find a copy of the dissertation, entitled “Whose treatment is this anyway? Helpful and harmful aspects of treatment for dissociative identity disorder phenomena?” on ProQuest or contact the author directly. What is outlined here is a brief overview geared for the general public who tend to not have a strong understanding of or interest in various quantitative or qualitative methodological procedures. The methods section of the dissertation is almost 30 pages and explains in great detail how participants were selected, how the coding procedure worked, how repeated ideas and themes were developed, the logic behind the use of mixed methods qualitative analysis, and acknowledgment of researcher bias (and the procedures taken to reduce this as best possible).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. New York, NY, USA

    Noël Hunter

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  1. Noël Hunter
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Hunter, N. (2018). Introduction: Containing Multitudes. In: Trauma and Madness in Mental Health Services. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91752-8_1

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