“Because if matter can exist in paradox: a particle & a wave…”
In this particular case I think you’re talking about light not matter, and the shortcoming may lie in the conceptual categories (particle vs. wave, some physicists have begun using the portmanteau “wavicle” for this reason).
@l_e_cox
Of what, common sense? Most people think that humid air is heavier than dry air, for example (it’s not, it’s lighter).
Many psychiatrists do like to prescribe drugs for life, but that’s not the same thing as “killing a cure”. And it’s not really doctors that are inventing diseases or at-risk categories/syndromes, it’s the pharmaceutical companies.
(And don’t get me started on people who claim to have cures for everything; it’s a fallacy to believe someone is honest just because they’re mistreated by the mainstream.)
(But I agree the system needs a reboot and is wholly too focused on profiteering.)
I agree that psychiatry needs to be much more transparent about its shortcomings, I’m just also asserting that the methods of the natural sciences may never be adequate to understand/explain human beings and their experiences.
Science is often scientism in reality but common sense is also full of fallacies.
I agree that science has been way overextended to areas where it doesn’t belong, but saying “nothing is science” makes no sense.
I don’t understand why anyone continues to fall for physicalist treatments for psychological disorders (this drug isn’t addictive, this treatment has no long-term side effects, etc. etc.)
I’m saying it’s not really realistic to ever have a “workable technology” that controls/predict human behavior 100% of the time.
I’m not sure that the rest of medicine takes its cue from psychiatry, traditionally the rest of medicine does not even consider psychiatry to be a real medical (sub)field.
Also I think the big money is not really is “killing” (or failing to develop) cures for diseases (you would actually become rich and famous for curing them) but rather inventing and/or creating disease categories which are chronic and uncurable to begin with (e.g., defining people as “at-risk” for developing diabetes and prescribing them preventive pills). (Almost everyone is “at risk” for multiple disorders, part of being alive means you’re at risk of dying lol.)
These criticisms do apply in other fields but in other parts of medicine that there is a much stronger element of external validity compared to psychology; also other fields are not as inherently difficult to fit into an empirical model, nor do they tend to have as many confounding variables.
Even quantum science nowadays acknowledges that there is no such thing as neutral-free observation, even of things like atoms and quarks.
Why should it be possible? Human beings are not things in the same way that circuits are.
I’m not a huge fan of CBT but it’s not simply “trying to reason with people to change their behaviors”, at least not when done by a skilled practitioner (but I agree that there is an irreducible element of mystery to life and people, although I’m not sure parapsychology would be my first choice of dealing with it at that level.)
My sense is that most universities list it as a social science, not as part of the humanities (and many people in psychology try to pretend it has the same external validity as something like physics or math).
(The problem is not that there is anything wrong with the sciences, but with a fish that claims to be a bird.)
Maybe the difference comes down to what you see as primary objective of psychology–if it is to understand (predict/describe) human behavior you are correct.
If it is to help people in psychological distress, I don’t know if the natural science model of so-called objective observation is appropriate.
At the same time, it’s debatable whether the methods of natural science should even be applied to human beings and experiences in the first place–so it doesn’t matter how “authentically scientific” psychology becomes, it’s never the right tool for the job.
Sounds about right, genetic determinism is a pseudo-scientific myth that people hold on to because it gives them the illusion of certainty/predictability/control/etc.
Those who remove meaning, context and/or experience remind me of when I was taking Intro to Psych and the prof said that pain was an electrical impulse that gets transmitted to the brain at certain times…I wondered, has anyone who has ever caught their hand in a door, torn ligaments or had their nose broken experienced it as “an electrical signal travelling to their brain”?
At the same time you can’t deny the successes that have occurred in the material world as a result of positivism (nuclear power, going to the moon, the Internet, etc.)
Just looking at the positivism in psychiatry by itself is overly narrow; it takes its cue from larger society just as Freud’s mechanistic model was derived in part from the dominant paradigms of the Industrial Era.
ok np, in retrospect i’m not even sure myself if my argument about the abuse of power being the issue rather than simply holding power over others is 100% accurate (but i would dispute the notion that suicide, or at least highly self-destructive behavior, did not exist in so-called indigenous societies).
It’s unbelievable to me how people in the field themselves admit it’s bogus but the average “layperson-expert” will call you crazy (or worse a Scientologist) if you raise these points…
Just not in so many words.
Well they can also point to things like lobotomies (aka psycho-surgery) and ECT, unfortunately.
I agree, but psychiatrists and so-called scientists will engage in endless double-talk about things like “clinical efficacy” and “known unknowns” until they are blue in the face.
To paraphrase Mark Twain, don’t expect someone to admit the truth if their ability to earn a paycheck depends on them denying it.
Knowing a relationship exists between two variables doesn’t mean the exact nature of all the relationships is known, especially between two large and complex phenomena such as poverty and mental illness.
I have no sympathy for someone who thinks treatment consists solely in prescribing drugs, especially to children, so I’m with you on that.
Your post is wrong at so many levels I don’t where to start. (Do you think there’s no relationship between poverty and mental health, or that the U.S. supplies all its citizens with clean water?)
Not only that, but it’s arguable that if and when psychiatry does discover anything empirical about our brains, then by definition it falls under the purview of neurology. Ergo, psychiatry is the field of medical science that addresses things that *aren’t* known by definition.
They listen like lawyers listen, they pay attention but they’re filtering everything you say into whether it fits into a certain set of very narrow criteria as to whether it means anything.
They’re not even peering inside people’s minds, they’re peering inside people’s brains (or at least trying to) and then acting like the brain and the mind are the same thing.
What do you mean? If getting reducing radical reductionism means getting rid of scientistic fallacies that undergird the entire biopsychiatric structure it goes a long ways towards deconstructing the very notion of mental illness itself (of course in practice the industry will continue to hang on and fight back).
A small number of people do seem to benefit from them although the reason may be psychological rather than biochemical; in general it’s like Mark Twain said, don’t count on someone to tell the truth if their ability to earn an income depends on the truth not getting out.
Yes, if it’s done in a way which overgeneralizes from one aspect of their being.
Removed for moderation.
Why would they? Did the author propose an “either-or” schema?
I didn’t understand the point of this article beyond perhaps saying that abolishing biopsychiatry in favor of purely psychosocial approaches may itself be reductionistic…if things like neuroscience want to be integrated into the new paradigm(s) then they need to prove themselves first, and anecdotal and/or correlational “evidence” doesn’t count.
Sounds about right, when Thomas Insel stepped down as the head of the NIMH in 2015 he admitted that despite spending around twenty billion dollars on brain research during the thirteen years he was in charge they did not improve one measured outcome in mental health in any significant way.
Are you trying to be ironic when you talk about genetics? Deconstructing one scientistic fallacy by introducing another doesn’t make much sense.
(Anyway the problem is not simply one group holding power over another, it’s the abuse of that power that makes it a problem.)
The brain and the mind are not the same thing.
Also it’s extremely difficult to move to a new society as an adult and completely internalize all the unspoken rules–someone who grew up in the U.K. and moved to Poland (as an adult) might feel similarly bound by the myriad things they’re just “supposed to know”.
Removed for moderation.
The West conquered the rest of the world using the methods of the natural sciences; it’s going to continue using them *directed* against its own people until they destroy themselves or a better way is found.
Or limited to something like pharmaco-neurobiology?
The worst are “enlightened” liberals who think they are being humanistic by adopting a (patronizing) medical model.
Actually many forms of religion are flourishing, such as Roman Catholicism in Africa.
Don’t let your secularist-supremacist biases delude you.
Depends what you mean by “treatable”.
My prediction is that the old wine in new bottles already exists; it’s called neuroscience.
At the same time it’s difficult to address the subject in any other way as most if not all of the terms normally used for it derive from a medical model.
This along with things like weeding out certain participants preemptively, fudging the statistical calculations and publication bias, all mean that the professional literature should be taken with a giant grain of salt.
Perhaps human beings need to be studied using different methods (or not “studied” at all), or the entire field of mental health needs to be reconceptualized away from its current rationalist-individualist-biomedical paradigm(s).
Most people “shade the truth” I think…does that make them “liars”? Maybe.
Maybe human beings cannot be studied the way objects can, and all a researcher can do is present his or her theory and let people decide if they want to engage it–no more talk of “evidence-based”.
At the same time I’m not even sure being “evidence-based” is something psychology should shoot for…human beings are so complex they may not be amenable to the same kind of epistemological methodologies that are used for thing like chemicals, bacteria, and so on.
I agree but to be clear psychotherapy is nowadays 100x more the purview of psychology rather than psychiatry.
Excellent article; there are many things wrong with this analogy.
P.S. I think you meant “reifies” rather than “ratifies”? just fyi
Do you know about ISEPP? Maybe you don’t need to be hidden in the shadows as much as you think.
The phrase “necessary but not sufficient” comes to mind.
Give them some credit, those aren’t the arguments they use, rather it’s that high prices and patenting “me too” drugs are necessary to fund further research (even though most if not all of them spend more on advertising than they do on R&D–so why not undo the legalization of DTC [direct to consumer advertising]; they would save all that money and suffer no comparative disadvantage because it would still be a level playing field for all of them).
Sounds good to me–schizophrenia is the biggest label bomb out there methinks–Japan dropped the terms years ago iirc.
Which ones would you choose?
That seems too high though, the author’s figure seems impossible (3 out of 10 Australians take antipsychotics?)
Yes I don’t think these myths have been debunked in the public’s mind at all.
To me it sounds like you’re just covering up your own pain by denying its personal component and focusing exclusively on social justice issues.
In Fighter’s defense there is an irreducible quality to the interpersonal nature of reality, as well as power being at the heart of all relations (in my opinion), so that public/political actions can be an incredibly powerful (and healing) response to injustice, however dismissing everything else as simply “reactionary” or “part of the problem” goes too far (to me s/he sounds like a undergraduate Marxian who has discovered [and fallen in love with] a metaphorical hammer with which to diagnose all human ills.)
You sound like you can’t tell the difference between sympathy and empathy.
So not coercing others is a form of denial, as you complain about being coerced by others. Got it.
That’s not his point at all, you’re just twisting everything people say into an affirmation of your oversimplified “insight”.
Interesting that you didn’t say you respect other people’s right to pursue change as they see fit, just that you can’t change them (all?).
In any case I can’t help shake the feeling that you’re (deliberately?) defining the concept of recovery as unnaturally narrow in order to posit it as a kind of strawman-lightning rod that enables you to call for revolution (which is your real agenda, not to help those diagnosed with psychiatric labels).
(Increasing political awareness is itself part of recovery, for me.)
So interestingly (and predictably) you didn’t even address the single point of my post: Do you or do you not grant others the right to decide what they think needs to be done and/or the means (and pace) by which it is to be achieved?
Lol of course “following Foucault” as if a single postmodern French thinker has the final word on reality itself…you still haven’t said a single thing that doesn’t make me suspect your definition of recovery is overly narrow.
I said what I said, that in my experience lefties (by which I meant more people who say that politics is the answer to every question, in my experience this assertion tends to come from the left much more often than the right) often have no sense of history (in fact I’ve had many discussions with such people who argue that studying history is simply a valueless distraction from political engagement).
But you’re right there’s also a deep kind of historical ignorance often found on the right as well.
So two wrongs make a right?
At the same time individuals have the right to pursue and seek change at their own pace, in a way that feels right to them, or do you not agree with that?
Anyone who knows history however (which tends to be not too many leftists in my experience) knows that mental health movements predate eugenics and aren’t simply continuations of it (no matter how “provocative” [and therefore politically useful for certain objectives] such an assertion may sound to some).
Yes I have spent time in various 12 step programs and I have no idea why you would limit your definition of the recovery to them (I find the programs to be self-blaming/shaming, moralistic, and trauma-UNinformed).
My experience has been that people who tell us the “true nature” of all our problems and what we *must* do about them always have their own (self-serving) agenda.
I guess we’re defining recovery differently, I would categorize recognizing the truths you speak as part of recovery as well.
(I agree there’s a simple formula of defining extreme distress biomedically and then turning it into a “project” as you say of personal development, but it can be broader than that.)
I’m with you on psychiatry and some of psychotherapy and recovery but can you be more specific? There’s a lot of good in the last two (in fact one could argue this site, and your comment at it, are two examples.)
Yes it does the raise the question of whether psychiatry as a discipline should even continue to exist, in my opinion.
After a hundred years of looking at it primarily from a biological and/or neuroscientific viewpoint don’t you think it’s time to try a different approach?
Good article, I’d heard of this before but was interesting how the author described the researchers’ inability and/or unwillingness to consider the implications of their own findings.
Know what it is? They can’t even define it.
That’s the Catch-22–how do you become aware of something of which you’re not aware? (metacognition, perhaps facilitated by meditation and/or metacognitive therapy [done only by a couple guys in Manchester UK afaik?])
Agreed, in part it’s because of our Calvinist-Puritan heritage that we can’t admit that people take drugs simply to feel better*, and/or that feeling good is a *necessary* part of the human experience.
*So we call them “medications”.
ad ho·mi·nem
ˌad ˈhämənəm/
adverb & adjective
1.
(of an argument or reaction) directed against a person rather than the position they are maintaining.
“vicious ad hominem attacks”
2.
relating to or associated with a particular person.
“the office was created ad hominem for Fenton”
There’s enough injustice to go around, we need not turn it into a competition methinks.
Having said that Democrats are also sometimes too quick to embrace a biomedical version of mental illness because it fits their self-image of being compassionate and humanitarian.
What a surprise–drug people nonstop to avoid their emotional states and then wonder why there are negative consequences.
Psychodynamic psychotherapy is not delivered by a medical provider.
Mental health (itself a misnomer) shouldn’t be defined as a biomedical speciality in the first place, ergo psychiatry *should* be in trouble and in need of redefining itself.
(At most psychiatrists should be neuropharmacological consultants to a team of other professionals like caseworkers, psychologists, nutritional advisors, job coaches, and others; they should have no more standing than anyone else).
(While we’re at it why are dental students (along with psychiatry majors) forced to learn everything medical students are, unless it’s related to the mouth they rarely if ever use it once in their careers.)
Great article, it reminds of the time when Carl Whitaker was supposedly asked the secret of his ability to reach certain schizophrenic patients and he replied “My lack of professional training” (he was 0b-gyn before going into psychiatry).
I agree completely, that was a little bit of the flip side of my saying it can feed into people’s manias or delusions (feeling like you have to become famous in order to be an “ok” mentally ill person, if you know what I mean).
Good point, never thought of that.
Great point about the possible downside of citing famous individuals purported to have mental illness…while I understand the goal of decreasing stigma, I’ve often wondered if it might not also feed into some people’s delusions of grandeur and/or (hypo)mania?
Restorative Justice can be a part of recovery.
But eugenics-based sterilization wasn’t just for those who “cannot care for themselves”, it was for people for example who were convicted of multiple crimes (in order to “weed out” the criminal genes from the next generation, not even the people at the time claimed it was for their own benefit themselves.)
Exercise helps but (in my opinion) mental disorders are rooted in dysfunctional psychosocial patterns, especially in the family of origin.
Her first point was that correlation does not mean causation.
Sounds excellent, virtually all therapies (except Positive Psychology which is fairly new) are mired in a highly negative mindset in my opinion, starting with Freud (in other words since the beginning).
Issues like these need to be studied but it’s also important to keep in mind that the larger issue is that mainstream treatment of schizophrenia tends to be iatrogenic (i.e. makes things worse)…it’s not implicitly racist to diagnose African-Americans with higher rates of a mental disorder, every “demographic” lives under somewhat different conditions in general and therefore can be expected to respond and cope differently with their lives…if psychiatric care were truly enlightened, the subtext of this headline would be that blacks are *privileged* compared to other ethnoracial groups when they meet with a psychiatrist.
Don’t worry, the genetic connection is spurious.
In both cases, ideological and public-political factors played a major role in the diagnosis.
Thanks for writing and posting the article, I’ve thought for a long time that so-called mental illnesses were just maladaptive coping strategies but it’s since to see it broken down in more detail…would love to see more examples of your paradigm, for example in terms of OCD, various personality disorders, and so on.
(Also good to see that some of these perspectives are making their way into the system insofar as they count for Continuing Education credits, is there a light at the end of the tunnel?)
@snowyowl
“Because if matter can exist in paradox: a particle & a wave…”
In this particular case I think you’re talking about light not matter, and the shortcoming may lie in the conceptual categories (particle vs. wave, some physicists have begun using the portmanteau “wavicle” for this reason).
@l_e_cox
Of what, common sense? Most people think that humid air is heavier than dry air, for example (it’s not, it’s lighter).
Many psychiatrists do like to prescribe drugs for life, but that’s not the same thing as “killing a cure”. And it’s not really doctors that are inventing diseases or at-risk categories/syndromes, it’s the pharmaceutical companies.
(And don’t get me started on people who claim to have cures for everything; it’s a fallacy to believe someone is honest just because they’re mistreated by the mainstream.)
(But I agree the system needs a reboot and is wholly too focused on profiteering.)
I agree that psychiatry needs to be much more transparent about its shortcomings, I’m just also asserting that the methods of the natural sciences may never be adequate to understand/explain human beings and their experiences.
Science is often scientism in reality but common sense is also full of fallacies.
I agree that science has been way overextended to areas where it doesn’t belong, but saying “nothing is science” makes no sense.
I don’t understand why anyone continues to fall for physicalist treatments for psychological disorders (this drug isn’t addictive, this treatment has no long-term side effects, etc. etc.)
I’m saying it’s not really realistic to ever have a “workable technology” that controls/predict human behavior 100% of the time.
I’m not sure that the rest of medicine takes its cue from psychiatry, traditionally the rest of medicine does not even consider psychiatry to be a real medical (sub)field.
Also I think the big money is not really is “killing” (or failing to develop) cures for diseases (you would actually become rich and famous for curing them) but rather inventing and/or creating disease categories which are chronic and uncurable to begin with (e.g., defining people as “at-risk” for developing diabetes and prescribing them preventive pills). (Almost everyone is “at risk” for multiple disorders, part of being alive means you’re at risk of dying lol.)
These criticisms do apply in other fields but in other parts of medicine that there is a much stronger element of external validity compared to psychology; also other fields are not as inherently difficult to fit into an empirical model, nor do they tend to have as many confounding variables.
Even quantum science nowadays acknowledges that there is no such thing as neutral-free observation, even of things like atoms and quarks.
Why should it be possible? Human beings are not things in the same way that circuits are.
I’m not a huge fan of CBT but it’s not simply “trying to reason with people to change their behaviors”, at least not when done by a skilled practitioner (but I agree that there is an irreducible element of mystery to life and people, although I’m not sure parapsychology would be my first choice of dealing with it at that level.)
My sense is that most universities list it as a social science, not as part of the humanities (and many people in psychology try to pretend it has the same external validity as something like physics or math).
(The problem is not that there is anything wrong with the sciences, but with a fish that claims to be a bird.)
Maybe the difference comes down to what you see as primary objective of psychology–if it is to understand (predict/describe) human behavior you are correct.
If it is to help people in psychological distress, I don’t know if the natural science model of so-called objective observation is appropriate.
At the same time, it’s debatable whether the methods of natural science should even be applied to human beings and experiences in the first place–so it doesn’t matter how “authentically scientific” psychology becomes, it’s never the right tool for the job.
Sounds about right, genetic determinism is a pseudo-scientific myth that people hold on to because it gives them the illusion of certainty/predictability/control/etc.
Those who remove meaning, context and/or experience remind me of when I was taking Intro to Psych and the prof said that pain was an electrical impulse that gets transmitted to the brain at certain times…I wondered, has anyone who has ever caught their hand in a door, torn ligaments or had their nose broken experienced it as “an electrical signal travelling to their brain”?
At the same time you can’t deny the successes that have occurred in the material world as a result of positivism (nuclear power, going to the moon, the Internet, etc.)
Just looking at the positivism in psychiatry by itself is overly narrow; it takes its cue from larger society just as Freud’s mechanistic model was derived in part from the dominant paradigms of the Industrial Era.
ok np, in retrospect i’m not even sure myself if my argument about the abuse of power being the issue rather than simply holding power over others is 100% accurate (but i would dispute the notion that suicide, or at least highly self-destructive behavior, did not exist in so-called indigenous societies).
It’s unbelievable to me how people in the field themselves admit it’s bogus but the average “layperson-expert” will call you crazy (or worse a Scientologist) if you raise these points…
Just not in so many words.
Well they can also point to things like lobotomies (aka psycho-surgery) and ECT, unfortunately.
I agree, but psychiatrists and so-called scientists will engage in endless double-talk about things like “clinical efficacy” and “known unknowns” until they are blue in the face.
To paraphrase Mark Twain, don’t expect someone to admit the truth if their ability to earn a paycheck depends on them denying it.
Knowing a relationship exists between two variables doesn’t mean the exact nature of all the relationships is known, especially between two large and complex phenomena such as poverty and mental illness.
I have no sympathy for someone who thinks treatment consists solely in prescribing drugs, especially to children, so I’m with you on that.
Your post is wrong at so many levels I don’t where to start. (Do you think there’s no relationship between poverty and mental health, or that the U.S. supplies all its citizens with clean water?)
Not only that, but it’s arguable that if and when psychiatry does discover anything empirical about our brains, then by definition it falls under the purview of neurology. Ergo, psychiatry is the field of medical science that addresses things that *aren’t* known by definition.
They listen like lawyers listen, they pay attention but they’re filtering everything you say into whether it fits into a certain set of very narrow criteria as to whether it means anything.
They’re not even peering inside people’s minds, they’re peering inside people’s brains (or at least trying to) and then acting like the brain and the mind are the same thing.
What do you mean? If getting reducing radical reductionism means getting rid of scientistic fallacies that undergird the entire biopsychiatric structure it goes a long ways towards deconstructing the very notion of mental illness itself (of course in practice the industry will continue to hang on and fight back).
A small number of people do seem to benefit from them although the reason may be psychological rather than biochemical; in general it’s like Mark Twain said, don’t count on someone to tell the truth if their ability to earn an income depends on the truth not getting out.
Yes, if it’s done in a way which overgeneralizes from one aspect of their being.
Removed for moderation.
Why would they? Did the author propose an “either-or” schema?
I didn’t understand the point of this article beyond perhaps saying that abolishing biopsychiatry in favor of purely psychosocial approaches may itself be reductionistic…if things like neuroscience want to be integrated into the new paradigm(s) then they need to prove themselves first, and anecdotal and/or correlational “evidence” doesn’t count.
Sounds about right, when Thomas Insel stepped down as the head of the NIMH in 2015 he admitted that despite spending around twenty billion dollars on brain research during the thirteen years he was in charge they did not improve one measured outcome in mental health in any significant way.
Are you trying to be ironic when you talk about genetics? Deconstructing one scientistic fallacy by introducing another doesn’t make much sense.
(Anyway the problem is not simply one group holding power over another, it’s the abuse of that power that makes it a problem.)
The brain and the mind are not the same thing.
Also it’s extremely difficult to move to a new society as an adult and completely internalize all the unspoken rules–someone who grew up in the U.K. and moved to Poland (as an adult) might feel similarly bound by the myriad things they’re just “supposed to know”.
Removed for moderation.
The West conquered the rest of the world using the methods of the natural sciences; it’s going to continue using them *directed* against its own people until they destroy themselves or a better way is found.
Or limited to something like pharmaco-neurobiology?
The worst are “enlightened” liberals who think they are being humanistic by adopting a (patronizing) medical model.
Actually many forms of religion are flourishing, such as Roman Catholicism in Africa.
Don’t let your secularist-supremacist biases delude you.
Depends what you mean by “treatable”.
My prediction is that the old wine in new bottles already exists; it’s called neuroscience.
At the same time it’s difficult to address the subject in any other way as most if not all of the terms normally used for it derive from a medical model.
This along with things like weeding out certain participants preemptively, fudging the statistical calculations and publication bias, all mean that the professional literature should be taken with a giant grain of salt.
Perhaps human beings need to be studied using different methods (or not “studied” at all), or the entire field of mental health needs to be reconceptualized away from its current rationalist-individualist-biomedical paradigm(s).
Most people “shade the truth” I think…does that make them “liars”? Maybe.
Maybe human beings cannot be studied the way objects can, and all a researcher can do is present his or her theory and let people decide if they want to engage it–no more talk of “evidence-based”.
At the same time I’m not even sure being “evidence-based” is something psychology should shoot for…human beings are so complex they may not be amenable to the same kind of epistemological methodologies that are used for thing like chemicals, bacteria, and so on.
I agree but to be clear psychotherapy is nowadays 100x more the purview of psychology rather than psychiatry.
Excellent article; there are many things wrong with this analogy.
P.S. I think you meant “reifies” rather than “ratifies”? just fyi
Do you know about ISEPP? Maybe you don’t need to be hidden in the shadows as much as you think.
The phrase “necessary but not sufficient” comes to mind.
Give them some credit, those aren’t the arguments they use, rather it’s that high prices and patenting “me too” drugs are necessary to fund further research (even though most if not all of them spend more on advertising than they do on R&D–so why not undo the legalization of DTC [direct to consumer advertising]; they would save all that money and suffer no comparative disadvantage because it would still be a level playing field for all of them).
Sounds good to me–schizophrenia is the biggest label bomb out there methinks–Japan dropped the terms years ago iirc.
Which ones would you choose?
That seems too high though, the author’s figure seems impossible (3 out of 10 Australians take antipsychotics?)
Yes I don’t think these myths have been debunked in the public’s mind at all.
To me it sounds like you’re just covering up your own pain by denying its personal component and focusing exclusively on social justice issues.
In Fighter’s defense there is an irreducible quality to the interpersonal nature of reality, as well as power being at the heart of all relations (in my opinion), so that public/political actions can be an incredibly powerful (and healing) response to injustice, however dismissing everything else as simply “reactionary” or “part of the problem” goes too far (to me s/he sounds like a undergraduate Marxian who has discovered [and fallen in love with] a metaphorical hammer with which to diagnose all human ills.)
You sound like you can’t tell the difference between sympathy and empathy.
So not coercing others is a form of denial, as you complain about being coerced by others. Got it.
That’s not his point at all, you’re just twisting everything people say into an affirmation of your oversimplified “insight”.
Interesting that you didn’t say you respect other people’s right to pursue change as they see fit, just that you can’t change them (all?).
In any case I can’t help shake the feeling that you’re (deliberately?) defining the concept of recovery as unnaturally narrow in order to posit it as a kind of strawman-lightning rod that enables you to call for revolution (which is your real agenda, not to help those diagnosed with psychiatric labels).
(Increasing political awareness is itself part of recovery, for me.)
So interestingly (and predictably) you didn’t even address the single point of my post: Do you or do you not grant others the right to decide what they think needs to be done and/or the means (and pace) by which it is to be achieved?
Lol of course “following Foucault” as if a single postmodern French thinker has the final word on reality itself…you still haven’t said a single thing that doesn’t make me suspect your definition of recovery is overly narrow.
I said what I said, that in my experience lefties (by which I meant more people who say that politics is the answer to every question, in my experience this assertion tends to come from the left much more often than the right) often have no sense of history (in fact I’ve had many discussions with such people who argue that studying history is simply a valueless distraction from political engagement).
But you’re right there’s also a deep kind of historical ignorance often found on the right as well.
So two wrongs make a right?
At the same time individuals have the right to pursue and seek change at their own pace, in a way that feels right to them, or do you not agree with that?
Anyone who knows history however (which tends to be not too many leftists in my experience) knows that mental health movements predate eugenics and aren’t simply continuations of it (no matter how “provocative” [and therefore politically useful for certain objectives] such an assertion may sound to some).
Yes I have spent time in various 12 step programs and I have no idea why you would limit your definition of the recovery to them (I find the programs to be self-blaming/shaming, moralistic, and trauma-UNinformed).
My experience has been that people who tell us the “true nature” of all our problems and what we *must* do about them always have their own (self-serving) agenda.
I guess we’re defining recovery differently, I would categorize recognizing the truths you speak as part of recovery as well.
(I agree there’s a simple formula of defining extreme distress biomedically and then turning it into a “project” as you say of personal development, but it can be broader than that.)
I’m with you on psychiatry and some of psychotherapy and recovery but can you be more specific? There’s a lot of good in the last two (in fact one could argue this site, and your comment at it, are two examples.)
Yes it does the raise the question of whether psychiatry as a discipline should even continue to exist, in my opinion.
After a hundred years of looking at it primarily from a biological and/or neuroscientific viewpoint don’t you think it’s time to try a different approach?
Good article, I’d heard of this before but was interesting how the author described the researchers’ inability and/or unwillingness to consider the implications of their own findings.
Know what it is? They can’t even define it.
That’s the Catch-22–how do you become aware of something of which you’re not aware? (metacognition, perhaps facilitated by meditation and/or metacognitive therapy [done only by a couple guys in Manchester UK afaik?])
Agreed, in part it’s because of our Calvinist-Puritan heritage that we can’t admit that people take drugs simply to feel better*, and/or that feeling good is a *necessary* part of the human experience.
*So we call them “medications”.
ad ho·mi·nem
ˌad ˈhämənəm/
adverb & adjective
1.
(of an argument or reaction) directed against a person rather than the position they are maintaining.
“vicious ad hominem attacks”
2.
relating to or associated with a particular person.
“the office was created ad hominem for Fenton”
There’s enough injustice to go around, we need not turn it into a competition methinks.
Having said that Democrats are also sometimes too quick to embrace a biomedical version of mental illness because it fits their self-image of being compassionate and humanitarian.
What a surprise–drug people nonstop to avoid their emotional states and then wonder why there are negative consequences.
Psychodynamic psychotherapy is not delivered by a medical provider.
Mental health (itself a misnomer) shouldn’t be defined as a biomedical speciality in the first place, ergo psychiatry *should* be in trouble and in need of redefining itself.
(At most psychiatrists should be neuropharmacological consultants to a team of other professionals like caseworkers, psychologists, nutritional advisors, job coaches, and others; they should have no more standing than anyone else).
(While we’re at it why are dental students (along with psychiatry majors) forced to learn everything medical students are, unless it’s related to the mouth they rarely if ever use it once in their careers.)
Great article, it reminds of the time when Carl Whitaker was supposedly asked the secret of his ability to reach certain schizophrenic patients and he replied “My lack of professional training” (he was 0b-gyn before going into psychiatry).
I agree completely, that was a little bit of the flip side of my saying it can feed into people’s manias or delusions (feeling like you have to become famous in order to be an “ok” mentally ill person, if you know what I mean).
Good point, never thought of that.
Great point about the possible downside of citing famous individuals purported to have mental illness…while I understand the goal of decreasing stigma, I’ve often wondered if it might not also feed into some people’s delusions of grandeur and/or (hypo)mania?
Restorative Justice can be a part of recovery.
But eugenics-based sterilization wasn’t just for those who “cannot care for themselves”, it was for people for example who were convicted of multiple crimes (in order to “weed out” the criminal genes from the next generation, not even the people at the time claimed it was for their own benefit themselves.)
Exercise helps but (in my opinion) mental disorders are rooted in dysfunctional psychosocial patterns, especially in the family of origin.
Her first point was that correlation does not mean causation.
Sounds excellent, virtually all therapies (except Positive Psychology which is fairly new) are mired in a highly negative mindset in my opinion, starting with Freud (in other words since the beginning).
Issues like these need to be studied but it’s also important to keep in mind that the larger issue is that mainstream treatment of schizophrenia tends to be iatrogenic (i.e. makes things worse)…it’s not implicitly racist to diagnose African-Americans with higher rates of a mental disorder, every “demographic” lives under somewhat different conditions in general and therefore can be expected to respond and cope differently with their lives…if psychiatric care were truly enlightened, the subtext of this headline would be that blacks are *privileged* compared to other ethnoracial groups when they meet with a psychiatrist.
Don’t worry, the genetic connection is spurious.
In both cases, ideological and public-political factors played a major role in the diagnosis.
Thanks for writing and posting the article, I’ve thought for a long time that so-called mental illnesses were just maladaptive coping strategies but it’s since to see it broken down in more detail…would love to see more examples of your paradigm, for example in terms of OCD, various personality disorders, and so on.
(Also good to see that some of these perspectives are making their way into the system insofar as they count for Continuing Education credits, is there a light at the end of the tunnel?)