But for some of us it _is_ an illness; it's not negative thinking,
negative thoughts at all. It's something else, clinical; when I get
depressed, I can literally feel a change in my body chemistry. And
I used to get tired of people saying "it's all in your head" or
"you like being depressed," whatever.
I think you have to look at a larger medical model that for years made
a clearcut distinction between "mental" symptoms and those that produced
physical evidence upon the body.
The former, for no reason except for its apparent ontological domain, was
granted only the efficacy of mental origination. The latter led to the
usual or operated within or constituted the usual purveyance of the
medical. Western medicine has been grounded, ever since an "escape" from
shamanism, in the retention of these domains as foreclosed and indepen-
dent.
So it is a relief seeing broad-based "dis/eases" such as fibro, cfs,
depression, the schizophrenias, etc., being taken seriously as perhaps the
result of physical distress. This is a breakthrough, and has nothing to do
with the concept of negative thoughts, whatever. It means in fact that
there's a possibility that numbers of people might be able to live lives
in the future that they themselves regard as healthy.
Alan
URL:
http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/internet_txt.html
MIRROR with other pages at:
http://www.anu.edu.au/english/internet_txt
IMAGES:
http://www.cs.unca.edu/~davidson/pix/
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