The "Huw Diagram" applied to mental illness

I have given examples of these diagrams which already illustrate what can happen when the conscious "distance" between the sensation and unconscious "lines" is painfully small.

These would represent facets of the personality where an irrational response is most likely from the subject, due to the lack of sufficient conscious mediation between stimulus and response.

The worst cases imaginable would be ones where the conscious "area" between the lines vanishes. In this case, you are interacting with the subject and one of these issues arises (not necessarily in a clinical setting): their response will be utterly irrational, expressing their unconscious reaction to the stimulus, which will be organized after whatever fashion their mind has been using to file away unprocessed or unprocessable information. Almost anything could follow an occasion like this, certainly including, but not restricted to, emotional repsonses completely out of proportion (or even relation) to the events immedaitely preceding the triggering.

While I do not feel that this model is sufficient to explain all forms of mental illness (there are, for instance, chemical problems which may cause issues in the diagram but are not "psychological" in the way the diagram approaches the mind), it can probably be used fairly well in most non-organically sourced issues. What I mean by that are issues that originally arose due to experiences processed by the mind, as opposed to physical trauma or biochemical imbalances. Of course, the resulting illness is a physical problem in the patients head, so it may be "measureable" in several different ways.

An emotionally produced psychosis may very well result in neuro-chemical problems which will seemingly yield to direct treatment, or likewise a genetic, injury, or diet caused imbalance may be clearly visible and seemingly treatable based on the diagram theory. It may be difficult, but it is obviously important to get to the true source of the illness, even if treating the symptoms one has found, based on ones method of looking, seems to succeed.

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© Huw Powell
printed 29 March 2024

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