“Mental Illness vs Brain Disorders: From Szasz to DSM-5”

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Psychiatric Times dips into Thomas Szasz’s thinking, considering the proposition that “By definition, a disease of the mind is impossible. Disease requires a physical lesion; the mind is nonphysical. Ergo, the mind cannot be diseased.”  The author goes on to state “We still do not have fully satisfactory definitions of either disease or mental disorder, and I do not attempt to argue that the current conceptualizations are unproblematic. The aim instead is to show that the conceptualizations have changed in a manner such that Szasz’s assumptions are rendered invalid.”

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4 COMMENTS

  1. Not only do I believe that this shill for the biopsychiatry/Big Pharma cartel says nothing but the usual junk science platitudes to push bogus DSM stigmas and the pseudoscience of biopsychiatry, he certainly fails to disprove Dr. Szasz’ brilliant assessment of biopsychiatry and its bogus life destroying stigmas to prey on typical human suffering, life problems and moral conflicts that Szasz insisted was what biopsychiatry stigmatized as mental illness to rob people of their human rights. Szasz didn’t have a problem with people freely choosing to engage with psychiatry, but that was before the monstrous DSM III paradigm exposed by Dr. Peter Breggin in Toxic Psychiatry.

    Here is Dr. Fred Baughman, Neurologist, exposing the fraud of biopsychiatry and the huge difference between it and neurology/real medicine:

    http://www.politicalwatchdog.com/psych_fraud/baughman.htm

    Dr. Baughman has written countless articles on the web and his site, ADHDFRAUD.net, and bravely appeared before Congress and others to expose this monstrous fraud especially the ADHD/bipolar fad fraud against children.

    It is especially vile that biopsychiatry has stolen a few real brain diseases like Alzheimer’s and syphilis from neurology for its fraud DSM (note the bogus “neuro” placed in front of the word “syphilis” in this junk science article as well as just about everything biopsychiatric to foster the pretense they deal with real neurological diseases: bunk!). As Dr, Baughman explains, anything found to be biological went to neurology before they sold out. DSM III had a caveat that organic disorders were ruled out before giving a DSM stigma. That was removed in the DSM IV with the horrific ongoing expansion of biopsychiatry’s sell out to Big Pharma well described by Dr. Loren Mosher’s resignation letter to the APA:

    http://www.moshersoteria.com/articles/resignation-from-apa/

    This author says nothing about the fact that even Dr. Thomas Insel, Head of NIMH, has been forced to admit that DSM stigmas are totally invalid and totally lacking in any science or medical evidence not to mention the huge harm they do to promote brain/body damage, early death and literal torture treatments in the guise of medicine. So, Dr. Insel sure proved Dr. Szasz, Dr. Breggin, Dr. Baughman and other noble whistleblowers all too right when exposing this fraudulent paradigm for greed, profit, power and status regardless of the huge harm to its millions of victims globally.

    It is ironic that the author tries to define “disease” as suffering and/or problem behaviors when biopsychiatry has inflicted more suffering and harm as well as problem behaviors including suicide and violence than the worst medical epidemics of all kinds, which Dr. Baughman calls the worst crimes against humanity ever. Per Dr. Grace Jackson’s Rethinking Psychiatric Drugs and Drug Induced Dementia: The Perfect Crime also exposed by Dr. Peter Breggin, biopsychiatry has unleashed a huge epidemic of tardive dyskinesia, dementia, brain damage in general, obesity, heart attacks and strokes, diabetes, eye damage, kidney and liver damage and damage to every organ in the body including early death by about 25 years on average.

    Anyway, there is no way that this article in any way detracts from Dr. Szasz’ brilliant exposure of the total fraud of biopsychiatry. Dr. Szasz’ main concern was the use of this fraud to deprive people of their human, civil and democratic rights via coercion as part of the “therapeutic state” that he claimed operated just like the former Inquisition and witch hunts of the church. Like biopsychiatry, the church had its own bogus “witch hunt” manual, Malleus Maleficarum, commonly rendered into English as “Hammer of [the] Witches for “diagnosing” so called witches who were often real coincidentally marginalized, abused women biopsychiatry still mainly preys on today along with children. Women healers were also targeted when men wanted to hijack medicine.

    Finally, this author’s pretense that real medicine and biopsychiatry are the same when bipsychiatry’s main role/goal with its life destroying bogus stigmas or degradation rituals and brain disabling torture treatments a la Stalinist Russia for social control is a total farce since real medicine even with its own excesses can’t force themselves on people with the force of law (at least not yet, but biopsychiatry has led the way in human rights abuses and fraud incorporated into other areas of medicine. With parity and the expansion of biopsychiatry greed, it is now dangerous to visit a GP for fear of getting a bogus stigma and lethal drug). Also, unlike biopsychiatry, most main stream medicine’s diagnoses and treatments are temporary until the person is cured and can’t be used to stigmatize and destroy a person for life.

    Thus, all in all, when biopsychiatry pretends to be real medicine like neurology, I am totally outraged at such fraud and dishonesty in the guise of medicine. Of course, Dr. Fred Baughman has exposed that thanks to the glut of doctors created by LBJ in the 1960’s, other specialties like pediatrics and neurology as well as general doctors have jumped on the bogus, deadly biopsychiatry/Big Pharma band wagon to also profit at their so called patients’ huge expense. Thus, the evil perpetrated by the horrific biopsychiatry DSM paradigm is so huge in its predation and destruction of all of medicine it boggles the mind.

    The following review of the great book, Pseudoscience in Biological Psychiatry, still all too relevant, also does a great job exposing the usual fraud perpetrated by the author of the bogus article cited here:

    http://www.antipsychiatry.org/br-pibp.htm

    Of course, though it is very difficult, it is critical to try to keep up with the biopsychiatry/Big Pharma’s neverending new fraudulent claims to avoid being their next victim. The fact that biopsychiatry continues to lie, deny and cover up the huge harm it continues to inflict on humanity shows that its main purpose is to further enrich this unholy alliance of biopsychiatry/Big Pharma while acting as intraspecies predators against humanity. This is what world authority Dr. Robert Hare describes as psychopathy in such books as Without Conscience and Snakes in Suits with a huge dose of malignant narcissism, which he and other psychopathy experts describe as the worse menace to humanity. One has to question why biopsychiatry does so little when it comes to all the psychopaths and malignant narcissists causing so much suffering and trauma among normal people. Oh, I forgot, it’s easier and more profitable to prey on the victims rather than the perpetrators as Freud did with his so called hysterical female patients while ultimately covering up the incest they suffered to cater to the male perpetrators explained in the book, Assault on Truth.

    http://www.amazon.com/The-ASSAULT-TRUTH-SUPPRESSION-SEDUCTION/dp/0671025716

    Finally, considering that if biopsychiatry was true in that if its victims have permanent brain diseases requiring their lethal brain damaging treatments, this would be horrific for humanity given the millions they’ve targeted if such evidence was found, which it never will be for reasons explained by real experts with a conscience like Dr. Jay Joseph and others debunking this predatory fraud promoted on behalf of the current robber barons. Given that it is all too obvious that toxic social and other negative environments of abuse, injustice, poverty and inequality cause much of the suffering that biopsychiatry stigmatizes as mental illness, the fact that they further prey on such unfortunate people for huge profits while robbing money that could be used to improve social conditions for the needy shows that they have no conscience and violate the most important principle of medicine: FIRST DO NO HARM!

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  2. Wow. What she said. 🙂

    I read the article, or at least skimmed it to see if there was going to be anything vaguely new here,
    as I might any time somone claims to have rendered Dr. Szasz irrelevant.

    What the author keeps going back to is his pretentious assertion that psychiatry has “transcended mind-body dualism,” which is of course unsupported by anything concrete. But the essence of his
    argument seems to be that, unlike in Szasz’s heyday when mental and physical aspects of the self
    were clearly delineated, psychiatry now addresses both and that we now know that “mental illness” has physical/neurological origins. Thus, Szasz’s strict divisions between body and mind and, presumably, between real and metaphorical are no longer valid.

    Problem is, there is no proven causal link between mental/emotional/behavioral phenomena
    and neurological defects, so what’s the point of this article even being printed? Playing with definitions of words and terms which need no redefining, i.e., “disease” and “mental,” may
    be fine for those with time on their hands and a professional reputation to build, but please
    let’s not waste our time trying to redefine the wheel.

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  3. When I was hustled off to a VA mental hospital after reporting a security matter at the weapons facility where I worked, I was able to contact Naval Investigative Service, NIS (now NCIS). When I told the Special Agent about my concern that a certain US submarine might have a missile firecontrol problem, he asked me a very astute question, “Is it in the hardware or the software?” “The software.” I responded.

    If an individual “goes off half-cocked”, the cause of the problem may lie in either the hardware or the software. The difficulty in trouble-shooting this human situation, as opposed to the firecontrol system, is that we cannot re-boot the system with known reliable software to evaluate its performance (not ethically at least, for this would be “brain washing”). All we can do, and this this good electronic trouble-shooting procedure as well, is to examine the circuitry and look for obvious signs of damage or failure, like short circuits or burned components, unusual wave forms, etc.

    Good logical thinking is essential in trouble-shooting. Faced with a situation in which many similar systems are going off half-cocked, without any evidence of “hardware problems” in the vast majority of such systems, logic would spur us in the direction of a close evaluation and de-bugging of the “software”. Of course, this requires that the source code be open and available for all interested servicing technicians to examine. “Backdoors” have been discovered in even the most highly classified systems.

    Hardware “fixes” applied in an attempt to correct what are actually software bugs, limit system performance at best and could pose greater risks of catastrophic failure at worst.

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  4. Please note that comments on the Psychiatric Times that are critical of the argument are being deleted. Now I know that some of my comments are ‘over the top’ but in this instance – arguing about the validity of Szasz’s ideas, they were not. In fact I was very polite to Dr Pies.

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