Personal versus Medical Meanings in Breakdown, Treatment and Recovery from ‘Schizophrenia’

Abstract

In this chapter we explore the gap between what we call ‘personal’ and ‘medical’ meanings of ‘schizophrenia’, and how this gap may have important implications for the treatment that is offered to those with this diagnosis. In his heuristic (Moustakas 1990) doctoral research, which explored the psychotherapeutic experiences of those with a ‘schizophrenia’ diagnosis (Cotton 2015), one of the authors found that personal meaning – both its loss and its restoration – was central to the participants’ understanding of their ‘schizophrenic’ breakdown and their subsequent recovery. However, it was also found that a crisis of personal meaning in breakdown was unwittingly compounded by medical meaning treatment, which was argued to be grounded in modernist ‘objective’ models of knowledge, whose ‘mass of quasi-theoretical speculation’ has become estranged from the subjective knowledge that is ‘fundamental’ (Bateson 2000: xxvii) to human experience.

[G:51:1] it was [seen as] this arbitrary symptom of mental illness … a piece of biological bad luck to be endured, rather than a complex, or significant, or meaningful experience to be explored. [G:52:1] it was the beginning of this horrendous, demoralising, vicious cycle of exhaustion and hopelessness and loss of self respect that just drains you into this shadow of yourself. [G:42:4] I think I went in [to hospital] a sort of distressed, unhappy teenager, and I came out a schizophrenic.

(Participant (G) in Cotton 2015)¹