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In the evaluation of persons presenting “symptoms” of mental illness, the words “no insight, poor judgment” appear on the forms for evaluation or case assessment of the client who supposedly is presenting mental health “symptoms.”

Observations of a person having no insight or poor judgment become the reason for psychiatric intervention and resultant incarceration. After-all, the professional is justified since the potential client has no insight and exercises poor judgment.

I want to give a possible refutation for such generalized evaluations that help to castigate character and justify all types of foul treatment of fellow human beings. For even the mentally ill person is a “thinking thing” as Rene Descartes (a philosopher) called that which makes MAN, MAN.

What the professional seems to mean by “no insight” is that the potential client does not see himself in clinical terms and concepts that the professional has learned. The potential client does not see himself as a jumble of “symptoms,” but rather as the total experience that he is. He acts and reacts in accord with his natural proclivities and what has been his experience with his environment, culturally diverse as it is. Many times these ways may not mesh well with societal ideals at all. Hence, they become “sick” ways or “symptoms.”

For instance, my first psychotherapist said I suffered from “separation anxiety” because my marriage was bad and I felt uneasy talking about separation. Yet she was an unmarried black woman. My values, differing from her textbook knowledge, said that man and wife are twain, one flesh that no man should tear asunder. I was [viewed as] quite “sick.”

Our society now labels the husband/wife relationship of oneness as “co-dependency.”

I had no insight into the matter, not seeing my “separation anxiety” and used “poor judgment” by trying to stay with my husband. This clashed with societal standards, but maintained my learned, cultural values. I know this is only one case in point, but it serves to give an example of how the professionals come to see the client as having no insight or poor judgment when the insight and/or judgment may be DIFFERENT, not absent or poor.

Let us call a spade a spade. The official reasoning is that people are incarcerated in mental hospitals and spaces because they are a danger to themselves or others. The truth is that they are incarcerated for behaviors that are misunderstood, unwanted or considered deviant by society or family members.

Let us quit the name-calling (labeling) and try to understand in earnest why each of us say, do or think the way we do. Then and only then can professionals look at us anew and stop writing us off as having “no insight and poor judgment.”