Bob, unfortunately reforming the system is not really an option. Because we’ve been reforming it for decades and decades but coercion still is the fundamental basis of it. As my dear departed friend Tom Szasz maintained one must abolish coercive psychiatry tout court and create a voluntary helping system for those who wished to be helped. Calling other things such as bad, violent, or criminal behavior mental health issues simply confounds a variety of human travails that are not the same. The mental health system like all systems principally works to maintain itself and doesn’t actually focus on helping those seeking help to be helped as they wished to be helped but sure pays those in its employ well. Bob, you seem to be working awfully hard to justify a system that is moribund.
Bob, as usual, thorough and acute analysis and was exactly on target. As you know my colleagues David Cohn and Stuart Kirk and I published Mad Science: Psychiatric Coercion, Diagnosis, and Drugs in 2013 regarding most of these issues and the impact of the additional horror of the coercive elements of such “treatments.” The maleficence of both institutional psychiatry and its bureaucratic power will continue as long as the state continues to support its medicalized perspective and supports its unprecedented role as the certified police of deviance of noncriminal although disruptive or disturbing behavior. This is especially so today as central control is more and more supported by the authoritarian elements of our political scene and “mental health” becomes more and more a panchreston of all human travail.
Perhaps the biggest lie by Kendler is “Given the youth of our science and the complexity of our disorders, it is very unlikely that we now possess definitive theories of their etiology.”
Psychiatry and real medicine all became scientific at the same time in 1848 or so with Virchow’s development of cellular biology. Before that we had only non-science based humoral imbalance explanations of all illness, essentially a worthless but impacting theory for some hundreds of years. Yet we have cogent explanations of the etiology of most medical disease processes (cancer, tuberculosis, diabetes and dozens more) yet non for mental illness. It’s not surprising since it is a metaphoric illness as my dear departed friend Tom Szasz so cogently analized some 60 plus years ago. All of Kendler’s arguments are just continued propaganda to justify psychiatry a failed scientific enterprise.
Bob, unfortunately reforming the system is not really an option. Because we’ve been reforming it for decades and decades but coercion still is the fundamental basis of it. As my dear departed friend Tom Szasz maintained one must abolish coercive psychiatry tout court and create a voluntary helping system for those who wished to be helped. Calling other things such as bad, violent, or criminal behavior mental health issues simply confounds a variety of human travails that are not the same. The mental health system like all systems principally works to maintain itself and doesn’t actually focus on helping those seeking help to be helped as they wished to be helped but sure pays those in its employ well. Bob, you seem to be working awfully hard to justify a system that is moribund.
Bob, as usual, thorough and acute analysis and was exactly on target. As you know my colleagues David Cohn and Stuart Kirk and I published Mad Science: Psychiatric Coercion, Diagnosis, and Drugs in 2013 regarding most of these issues and the impact of the additional horror of the coercive elements of such “treatments.” The maleficence of both institutional psychiatry and its bureaucratic power will continue as long as the state continues to support its medicalized perspective and supports its unprecedented role as the certified police of deviance of noncriminal although disruptive or disturbing behavior. This is especially so today as central control is more and more supported by the authoritarian elements of our political scene and “mental health” becomes more and more a panchreston of all human travail.
Perhaps the biggest lie by Kendler is “Given the youth of our science and the complexity of our disorders, it is very unlikely that we now possess definitive theories of their etiology.”
Psychiatry and real medicine all became scientific at the same time in 1848 or so with Virchow’s development of cellular biology. Before that we had only non-science based humoral imbalance explanations of all illness, essentially a worthless but impacting theory for some hundreds of years. Yet we have cogent explanations of the etiology of most medical disease processes (cancer, tuberculosis, diabetes and dozens more) yet non for mental illness. It’s not surprising since it is a metaphoric illness as my dear departed friend Tom Szasz so cogently analized some 60 plus years ago. All of Kendler’s arguments are just continued propaganda to justify psychiatry a failed scientific enterprise.