AUTHOR’s PROLOGUE:  Western Language-Induced Bipolar Disorder

dear reader,

This essay has been written from the point of view that popular WESTERN CULTURE investigation of ‘psychological disorder’ HAS ITS LADDER UP THE WRONG WALL, as suggested by Cochrane and Sashidharan among others;

From the outset it will be clear that most of the research in this field has followed the conventional epidemiological or medical paradigm by focusing on mental ill health as the dependent variable. It is, therefore, not surprising that there is a lack of empirically grounded research on mental well-being or the psychological resilience and survival of minority groups in this country” — R. Cochrane (University of Birmingham) and S. P. Sashidharan (North Birmingham Mental Health Trust) in ‘Mental Health and Ethnic Minorities’

That is, if the investigation orients to ‘what is wrong with this person?’, it is unlikely to deliver answers to the larger question of ‘what is wrong with us?’ (as a social-relational collective).  Jill Astbury raises the same question in ‘Crazy for You: The Making of Women’s Madness’ in her inquiry into the World Health Organization study showing that women have twice the incidence of ‘affective disorders’ (depression, bipolar disorder etc.) as men;

“The research stemming from this viewpoint had a systemic blindness. It could literally not see what it was doing, as the normative quality of its own presuppositions had made them invisible.” – Jill Astbury

In other words, by orienting the investigation to … ‘what is wrong with these ‘canaries’, we are doing the equivalent of investigating what is wrong with the oddly behaving miner’s canary out of the context of the variations in the ambient conditions (e.g. the web of relations) they are included in.  So long as we pride ourselves on our ability to push on  forward no matter how our actions may be cultivating a more toxic ‘normal’ ambiance (“when the going gets tough, the tough get going”), the more sensitive among us will progressively experience ‘breakdown’ (made less visible through pharmaceutical “numb-down”), a signal that should give us cause for reflection on ‘where we are going’ so that we do not put our children on a bus trip to hell.

The “ticket’ for such a “bus trip to hell” by way of Bipolar Disorder’ comes in the form of a ‘Declaration of Independence’ , the WESTERN CULTURE EGO-DEFINING ABSTRACTION which ‘makes sense’ only where intended in a relational context wherein the INDEPENDENCE is in terms of relational associations within the ONE Great Harmony (the Wave-field) where FIGURE and GROUND are ONE and NOT in the EGO based abstract sense of FIGURE-and-GROUND-as-TWO where the FIGURE is DECLARED INDEPENDENT of the GROUND, a conceptualization of reality which builds BIPOLAR DISORDER into WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENCE.

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