Heroes Not Zombies

I just came across a paper about “Post-traumatic Embitterment Disorder”. Apparently “embitterment” is a new term in psychological classification and this study aims to demonstrate that by using new questionnaires (what psychologists call “scales” to introduce a sense of measurability to what is a purely subjective phenomenon) they can show  “Post-traumatic Embitterment Disorder” is a “sub-type of adjustment disorders”. What they are trying to show is that some people who are so severely psychologically injured by a life event that they become “impaired” by it exhibit more bitterness about their experience than others do and the claim is that this constitutes a definable category of disorder.

I am so in two minds about this.

Here’s the positive side. I think everyone tries to make sense of their lives. It’s what we do. We want to understand our experience, to make some sense of it, and, unless we do that, it’s hard to be an effective “agent” of your own life. In other words, first we need to understand a situation, then we can make some choices to engage with it differently and so develop our own particular paths forward. If we can’t do that for ourselves, we need to get the help of others. Those others might be friends or loved ones, or might be other people in the community who have different skills and who might be able to help. One of those groups of people in the community is the professional health carers – a doctor, a nurse, a psychologist or a counsellor for example. If you take your story to one of these people, they’ll try to interpret it from a medical perspective.  A doctor, for example, is skilled at making a diagnosis – finding out whether or not you have a disease. But, diagnosis is about more than naming a disease. It’s a kind of understanding. It’s a kind of making sense of a patient’s experience. Without a diagnosis, a doctor can’t treat you effectively. So, if this new “diagnosis” helps some people to be better understood, then it’s useful.

Here’s the downside. First of all, a diagnosis declares an experience as a disease or illness. It’s not a healthy experience. Once the experience becomes classified as a disease or illness, then the way to change it, the way to provide help becomes one of treatment. Treatment of psychological illnesses tend to involve either prescribing a drug, or undertaking a talking therapy of some kind. A talking therapy which releases someone from a stuck way of thinking and therefore helps them understand their situation can well help that person to make different choices and so have a different experience. A drug solution makes sense if you can explain the experience materially – by showing some imbalance of chemicals in the brain for example – in such a situation a drug can be part of a solution too. It can help a person to find new ways of thinking by changing the way the brain functions. But when you take every experience of life and try to classify it and declare some of it as disorder or disease then you risk medicalising life and you risk reducing human experience to chemical imbalances which can be addressed with drugs. I don’t find that either life-enhancing, or a personally empowering way to live.

Bitterness? Is this a medical disorder? Is this a disease to be treated? Or is it part of an experience which needs to be understood in order to release someone from a stuck place? If someone is bitter, they are usually stuck. And without help they can find it hard to see things differently. So bitterness needs to be addressed, but do I need something like the “Bern Embitterment Scale” to be able to see this?

What do you think?