When the Body Attacks Itself
Amit Nahoum Shaty
The role of the immune system is to protect our body against foreign invaders, much like an army responsible for preventing infiltrators or an enemy force from entering. In the case of our body, there are, on one hand, external infiltrators — viruses, bacteria, or parasites — and on the other hand, enemies that can come from within.
To fulfill this vital role, the immune system must recognize and identify who is foreign and who is "one of ours." The terms used for this are Self and Non-self. At the root of autoimmune disease lies a failure of the ability to identify who the enemy is from outside and who is "one of ours." As a result, the immune system attacks our own tissues.
My many years of work as a social worker within a psychiatric setting brought me to a renewed look at social processes affecting the discourse currently taking place around the social work profession.
I listen to the social-political movements stirring in the country, and understand how social discourse is reflected in how a person in mental crisis is treated. Lately there has been much talk about psychiatric hospitalizations, about rooms with bars and locks, about neglect, overcrowding, and a lack of adequate response in the community.
A question arose in me: is hospitalization truly meant to treat the individual — their psychological distress and suffering — or perhaps to remove the voices of madness from every seeing eye and hearing heart?
References to silencing and destroying madness already existed in the Middle Ages. Prejudice and lack of knowledge only reinforced these positions and created a psychiatric hegemony against madness. This hegemony has been breaking apart in recent years with the passage of the Rehabilitation Law, the regulation of the family's status, and the entry of egalitarian therapeutic approaches that promote recovery.
On one hand, society placed the treatment of "the mad person" in the hands of psychiatrists. Their illness was perceived as a foreign threat, even compared to a "contagious infectious disease." This tacit alliance was accompanied by neglect and a lack of adequate resources. Madness is not the domain of a low socioeconomic stratum — it touches every layer of the population.
When the body attacks itself, it is a failure of recognition. When a society denies its painful parts, it is the same failure. The question is whether we can, at last, recognize "our own forces," even when they are wounded.