Appropriation or Alienation? The Need of Sense and the Provocative Question on a "Successful Psychosis"

Abstract

Are mental disorders on the rise, or rather the willingness to disclose them and ask for help? Is humanity becoming increasingly ill or is illness becoming more and more human? Which perspective on mental disorders, especially psychosis, helps the patient to integrate their own experience, and others to avoid social distance? Can psychiatry learn and eventually teach to view these distinct human characteristics not only as pathologic foreignness and abnormality, but also from an anthropological perspective, as a profoundly human expression that exists on a continuum? What value can categories such as purpose and happiness have in this context? The paper introduces the example of Hamburg as city of contradictions with high levels of sickness absence, but simultaneously top scores in the happiness index. Then follows an attempt to outline which perspective on mental illness and which therapeutic stance might be helpful, so that illness and happiness are no longer seen as mutually exclusive. The final case history asks the provocative question if there can be a "successful psychosis".