Journal of Community Medicine & Health Education
Open Access

Abstract

In 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.

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