My life's Adventure

I spent about an hour or two researching health statistics

I used a book from the university library on health statistics to search on-line journals, the WHO and US government health institute for information on health statistics. The US document was here http://www.ncvhs.hhs.gov/21st%20final%20report.pdf, concerning health statistics and health statistics models. I got lead astray at the WHO web site looking for this document on disease classifications http://www.who.int/classifications/icd/en/ which is on-line. I went to something on noise and ended up in Germany at a national occupational health and safety web site here at http://www.baua.de/ which is available in English. So another research adventure over night.

Of course disease classifications included stuff on schizophrenia, so I printed that out from the WHO classification. But to put it in popular language it means we are being put in little shoe boxes by doctors. In academic terms, classifications like the WHO's and the DSM are contested areas and suggest viewpoints that priviledge scientific knowledge above other forms of knowledge. When, in fact, experimental science can not study the whole of life. Even just feelings and emotional reality, or friendships and real human to human relationships, and the effect these have on mental health and mental illness recovery, will be unrecorded as experimental sciences can not record these factors. So these factors will be ignored and left out of a scientific and classifications world view. Thus we need narratives i.e stories from friends, family and professionals like you find around the schizophrenia .com web site to tell a bigger story.