Presentation Information
[O-16-01]The mourning process and its importance in mental illness: a psychoanalytic understanding of psychiatric diagnosis and classification
*Rachel Gibbons (Royal College of Psychiatrists(UK))
Keywords:
mourning,Grief,Loss
This session brings together the psychiatric and psychoanalytic views of mental illness to deepen the understanding of mental disorder. The aim is to provide a psychoanalytic model by which to understand the nature of psychiatrically diagnosed disorders. Why has this person developed this particular disorder, been diagnosed and classified in this particular way, at this point in their life? Psychiatrists tend to view the mind from the outside and diagnose different disorders depending on the symptom constellations observed, using classification systems (e.g. DSM). Psychoanalysts look from the inside of the mind at the unifying human psychodynamics where mental illness is understood to arise from difficulties in the response to the human experience of loss and grief. In summary, psychiatric illness can be understood to result from ‘pathological mourning’ due to arrests, or retreats, in the passage through the mourning process. The characteristic symptoms of different psychiatric illnesses used to classify disorders can be conceptualised as resulting from the overuse of different constellations of psychic defences used at specific and different stages in the mourning process. Differently classified illnesses have different symptoms depending on the particular point in mourning where the arrest occurs. There is a very well recieved paper that goes with this talk.https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/bjpsych-advances/article/mourning-process-and-its-importance-in-mental-illness-a-psychoanalytic-understanding-of-psychiatric-diagnosis-and-classification/AADC76B72F52556A897A41B131A25D37