title: The Potentiality of a Healthy Self: Evaluating Progressively Empowered Internalisation and Diagnosis through the Lens of Existential Epistemology.
abstract: In this article I will examine how the language of diagnosis can engage with existential epistemology to develop a concept of Progressively Empowered Internalisation (PEI). This, I will argue, challenges conceptualisations of diagnosis as articulating and maintaining a static self-concept. It enables the individual to synthesise 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 stigmatisation 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 conceptualisation engages with Kierkegaard's existential epistemology, as a means of using language to understand the task of becoming oneself and relating to others. 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.
authors.affiliation: a St Mary's University , Twickenham , UK.
authors.forename: Anna
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Westin
mesh_terms: D003674:Defense Mechanisms; D005086:Existentialism; D006801:Humans; D019359:Knowledge; D008603:Mental Health; D012649:Self Concept
keywords: Kierkegaard; diagnosis; existential epistemology; mental health; stigmatisation