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conferenceseries
.com
September 25-26, 2017 | Atlanta, USA
2
nd
World Congress on
Medical Sociology & Community Health
Volume 7, Issue 4 (Suppl)
J Community Med Health Educ, an open access journal
ISSN:2161-0711
Medical Sociology 2017
September 25-26, 2017
J Community Med Health Educ 2017, 7:4 (Suppl)
DOI: 10.4172/2161-0711-C1-028
FURTHER EVALUATIONS OF POTENTIALITY AND HEALTH: PROGRESSIVELY
EMPOWEREDINTERNALISATIONANDDIAGNOSISTHROUGHTHELENSOFEXISTENTIAL
EPISTEMOLOGY
Anna Westin
a
a
St. Mary’s University, London,UK
I
n this paper I will examine how the language of diagnosis can engage with existential epistemology to develop a concept of
Progressively Empowered Internalization (PEI). I have previously argued that this way of engaging with diagnosis in mental health
challenges conceptualizations of diagnosis as articulating and maintaining a static self-concept. It enables the individual to synthesize
the language of a particular mental experience within the wider engagement of their own active process of self-becoming. I will
suggest that this construction of PEI addresses the limitations of stigmatization and static self-concepts. In seeing the language of
diagnosis as a helpful tool for understanding a part of one's self-experience, it presents an alternative to the illness-based model of
mental health. This conceptualization engages with existential phenomenology, as a means of using language to understand the
self-experience. Furthermore, it explores how mental health diagnosis requires communal engagement to enable the wellbeing of its
members. Diagnosis is thereby seen as a process of further empowering the individual with the language to explain a particular part
of their experience within the overall movement of developing an integrated self-concept. The paper will conclude by problematizing
one-dimensional diagnostic readings of health experiences, suggesting that health is engaged with individually and holistically.
annawestin.ethics@gmail.com