You might not believe, or care, or both that I was as far from a disability activist as George Bush is from Dalai Lama. But I know myself for quite sometime at this point, so my personal judgement should account for something.
Anyways, if you take this statement to be true, it's natural to ask why the hell this happened. Why do you live as someone for more than 30 years and then you just migrate to the end of the sprectrum of many of your previously held values.
Some of this process is already described and written in the posts of this very blog. But one of the things I haven't mentioned yet is a book I've read at some point last year. The author is Daniel Kahneman, a fancy Nobel prize winner. This book is very revolutionary, although I must say usually books don't start any revolution despite the fact they can bring a lot of inspiration to the ones who do.
Anyways, "Fast and Slow Thinking" is a brilliant way to make the complex neuroscientific theory that has awarded the author with the Nobel prize, something that non scientist community can read, understand and appreciate. The book brings some staggering examples of real situations in which the limitations of human perception due to evolutionary adaptations to the cognitive aparatus are the ultimate cause for several judgement errors in life and death decisions made on a daily basis everywhere. And yes, it's a hell of a scientific proof of how inadequate the death penalty really is, but that's not all.
Daniel articulates the two mechanisms working together in every human cognitive process and show how the way they split their workload can lead to very bad decisions (although this very interaction has made humans incredibly adapted to life on Earth since we began to exist as a species about 200000 years ago). Looking back, reading this book was a tipping point in the beliefs I've been cursed with in my rehabilitation process. By getting more insight about human perception, I've concluded that:
1- The notion of disability is also governed by these same parallel cognitive mechanisms.
2- Therefore, probably the judgement the society and I had about my own disability must be the object of these same distortions.
That was the scientific window that has opened in my mind replacing the medical truths about disability planted so deep in my mind and soul so early in my life. My point here is that the impossibility of psychotherapy to act therapeutically on me has everything to do with the fact my mindset about my life and condition was highly scientific because it had a strong medical framework as its backbone.
Therefore, I feel compelled to speculate that rather than treating psychological distress related to disability issues in one's life with deep psychotherapy and the likes, a scientific approach can be much more effective, especially as person that has been rehabilitated in the 80's and 90's. At least it was in my case.
Deep psychology approaches fail because they rely on the individual experiences to outline unhealthy inconscient processes. And the cause for distress is definitely much more related to the social framework instead. Failing to recognize that makes psychologists and doctors treat the disabled person as the sick one, again deviating from the healthy person standard, when in reality society has the disease all along.
That's my short attempt to advocate for a sociological solution for individual disability related distress. Because in my opinion, psychological distress is absolutely healthy if one is the object of conscious social exclusion. It would be indeed a sign of lack of self conciousness and awareness of one's surroundings not to feel crushed by this huge pressure. In other words, a sort of madness.
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