We all to some degree acknowledge that stress influences how we feel, and to some degree that its manifestations can be occult or indirect. However, many symptoms of distress can be labeled disorders or diseases that we are not able to find a direct physiologic cause for. Thus, become labeled judgmentally and pejoratively, such as hysteria (wandering uterus causing distress), pseudoseizures (faking seizures), etc (it’s quite an extensive list). The current euphemism for unexplainable symptoms is “Functional Neurologic Disorders“, but that just makes me wonder, for whom do they work?
Dr Suanne O’Sullivan, a western trained Neurologist has traveled the world to explore some of these syndromes, and described them in her book The Sleeping Beauties. Of particular note is “grisi siknis“, a trance or seizure like state quite specific to the Miskito tribe of Nicaragua. Her interpretation of this syndrome was that it is in a sense a socially recognized way to call for help. For example, a young woman in an uncomfortable situation around an older man might have this spell, then others would know to extract and support her, and heal her through a ritual.
Whereas, during my overly skeptical, rigid, reductive past I would have dismissed this, I now recognize the importance of having Ritual to heal, if not necessarily the specifics of any particular ritual. While I feel it is important to exorcise superstition from our models of healing, there is absolutely much to learn about how to socially care for one another. What we have lost in the over medicalization of psychosocial problems is the importance of context and community in our mental health and shared understanding of suffering. An individual in the western medical model is the one with disease, rather than someone reacting to profoundly unhealthy circumstances. This may be the contrapositive to “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” (Kirshnamurti?)
As a family physician, I feel that 50% of my patients’ complaints are more the downstream effects of social illness rater than a primary physiological disorder. Eg: diabetes is really poor diet options and education; much of anxiety is due to social structures not adapted to a hunter-gatherer social primate brain. Part of the challenge is the social expectation to get an answer from the doctors. Doctors are then incentivized to generate labels or call things diseases to “have an answer”, thus inappropriately pathologizing an individual’s responses to threat and trauma. Additionally, there’s an undue influence from agents such as the pharmaceutical industry to have diseases to medicate, or the insurance industry to have label to attach payment.
What if we are able to blur the lines between education, health, and social support and provide safe spaces for children to learn how to deal with the inevitable harm and pain of life. What if the unified spaces prevent and reduce some of the inevitable pain? Might we individually and collectively be better able to express a need for help in ways that are less baffling?