Catching up with you on this one: powerful and perceptive. I haven't read enough SK to quite follow along as a decently equipped Kierkegaardian with you on this, not having read "Sickness unto Death", yet. But attempting to follow here, picking up on the dialectics of freedom-necessity and infinity-finitude, and the danger of an extreme of limitlessness: "On the other hand, a person caught up in fantastical ideas and desires has so drifted into limitless possibilities that he fails to attend to his immediate bodily environment."
Could we say, perhaps, that someone who redefines mental health so radically that there is no more sickness requiring help, no more problems or breaking-points, is pushing on the "freedom" and "infinite" dialectic too far at the risk of narrating away need? i.e. I have such limitless self-narrating possibilities as to say that even my breaking-points of what others would say are problems related to mental health where I need help are really just the expression of my freedom?
On the other hand, the over medicalization of mental health as if it is only a matter of chemistry and applying pharmaceutical interventions to restore a clinically "healthy" equilibrium, that's having pushed too far in the "necessity" direction, as if there is no self that has to come to terms in the form of one's own life story with the fact of mental health?
Catching up with you on this one: powerful and perceptive. I haven't read enough SK to quite follow along as a decently equipped Kierkegaardian with you on this, not having read "Sickness unto Death", yet. But attempting to follow here, picking up on the dialectics of freedom-necessity and infinity-finitude, and the danger of an extreme of limitlessness: "On the other hand, a person caught up in fantastical ideas and desires has so drifted into limitless possibilities that he fails to attend to his immediate bodily environment."
Could we say, perhaps, that someone who redefines mental health so radically that there is no more sickness requiring help, no more problems or breaking-points, is pushing on the "freedom" and "infinite" dialectic too far at the risk of narrating away need? i.e. I have such limitless self-narrating possibilities as to say that even my breaking-points of what others would say are problems related to mental health where I need help are really just the expression of my freedom?
On the other hand, the over medicalization of mental health as if it is only a matter of chemistry and applying pharmaceutical interventions to restore a clinically "healthy" equilibrium, that's having pushed too far in the "necessity" direction, as if there is no self that has to come to terms in the form of one's own life story with the fact of mental health?