[Chip1021]

I barely know anything about those movies because they came out when I was a child but I like how they were almost pre social media and inspired audiences to have philosophical debates.

If don't know if you've read my latest reply above yours. It basically answers your question what I'm trying to get at. You insist on this unusual interpretation of psychiatry which I can only describe as an Amish psychoanalyst linguist who hates science. I feel like a gun rights activist; science doesn't kill people, people kill people! It's hard to acknowledge that everyone's condition has at least slightly different causes and steps for recovery. I agree with the idea that we should be taking a more humanist approach to healing mentally ill people, but I'm not ready to burn down the hospital or overthrow the government. I'm more of a reformist. I believe humanity has made progress over the past few centuries including in the field of psychiatry. It is terrifying that gay conversion and lobotomies were performed and I think that should be taught in schools for a long time as a reminder, similar to how the holocaust is supposed to be taught and often isn't unless you're given a Jewish teacher. Humanity isn't out of the woods in terms of extreme inequities and might never be, but continual improvement should be possible.

Fair enough with respect to the film; I found it to be particularly profound, whereas you might not have been as interested in it. But do you understand the point I was trying to make? Do you not think that your own scientific prejudices influenced how you interpreted the movie despite the fact that Shyamalan was repeatedly beating us over the head with what was going on the entire time?

I think I understand where you are coming from, I simply disagree with it. But you don’t seem to understand where I’m coming from, and instead of directly responding to my content your criticism is limited to “but that’s not scientific.” If you simply believe that only scientific, positivistic ideas are valid, and all other ideas that are not scientifically demonstrated or demonstrable are not, then there really is nothing more for us to say to each other, unless you can convince me of your position, which I’m perfectly willing to consider.

My views on psychiatry are certainly unconventional, I fully acknowledge that. But your characterization of my position as that of an Amish psychoanalytic linguist who hates science—while it has some merit as a witticism, is not a refutation, nor is it representative of what I believe. I am, after all, communicating on an iPhone right now and I’m very grateful for all of the advances in medicine, transportation, communication and other technology that was produced as a result of our scientific models of reality. I don’t hate science, nor do I deny that science often offers a very good understanding of its subject matter, most notably in its understanding of inanimate objects. I accept the scientific models of our solar system, big bang cosmology, and structural evolution, for example. I’m no expert in those fields but but from what I do understand those basic models explain their subject matter in a meaningful, simple, and elegant way. They can also make some awesome predictions, which makes that kind of understanding incredibly useful and valuable to us.

But I question many of the foundational premises and methods of the behavioral sciences, including psychiatry, positivist neuroscience, and evolutionary psychology. Those fields, to the degree that they can arrive at a consensus on any models at all, mostly offer highly complex systems that offer some confusing and indistinguishable combination of genetics, structure, material environment and social environment, unable to identify meaningful relationships between these causal factors to explain human behavior, and even their most sophisticated models can predict who will be “dangerous” to a degree better than chance. And most importantly, these interpretations attribute our motion to everything and everything…except for the person who acts. Obviously, I’m suggesting that crazy, heretical interpretation. I frequently hear that the behavioral sciences are still in their infancy. I find that a pathetic excuse. Prior to the scientific revolution of the 19th century, the only of our sciences that made any significant headway was physics and astronomy. But with science’s philosophical and methodological foundations firmly in place, the rest of the material sciences, including anatomy and medicine, started almost overnight to make impressive discoveries and predictions. The behavioral sciences began not more than a generation later. And yet what have they accomplished? What did Pavlov and Skinner discover? That our behavioral responses can be conditioned? We already knew that. After all, how do you think language works? We make symbolic associations between symbols and their referents. The writer of Genesis understood that. And yet, when behavioral science “discovers” the obvious we act like it is new knowledge because it was derived at through a positive scientific inquiry and expressed through that technical scientific language that is so impressive to us. How much solid, new information have we obtained? The 19th and 20th centuries discovered and successfully treated many of the diseases that were making us sick and killing us. How many mental illnesses have we discovered and successfully treated or cured? Well, we’ve certainly constructed many (psychiatric illnesses are not discovered and verified empirically, they are conceptually constructed and democratically voted into existence); but we haven’t found any reliable treatment or cure for any of them.

I am not Amish, nor am I a fan of psychoanalysis. I think that psychoanalysis was to a great degree a pseudo-religious enterprise that concealed its moral pronouncements behind a semi-scientistic language (Freud did claim that his psychoanalysis was a science). And in practice, most psychoanalysts seemed more interested in endless intellectual masturbation instead of actually helping their clients with their problems. So I’m not sad to see psychoanalysis mostly gone, but I don’t think its replacement is much better; in fact, I would argue that it is worse.

You did get one thing right though, I’m a huge fan of general linguistics, semantics, and semiotics. They might not be positive sciences and therefore we tend to view them as inferior or even worthless, but I’m at the present moment convinced that the understanding and treatment of most of what we now call “mental illnesses” should be undertaken by those fields, and not general medicine. If you think I’m wrong, you need to try to convince me instead of claiming that I’m just a science-denier who just refuses to see truth because my reality testing is suffering.

And one last thing. You say that gay conversion and lobotomies were terrifying violations of human rights, but that’s in the past and we know better now. But what was the problem with those interventions, in your view? Is the problem that they are not “scientifically proven” treatments for real diseases? Or is the problem that they were often administered against the person’s will? What is more important to you: the distinction between true and false beliefs? Or the distinction between consensual and coercive relationships? You say that you are a psychiatric reformist. I am not. I make a distinction between institutional and contractual psychiatry. Contractual Psychiatry is politically “good” even if it’s worthless or harmful. And Institutional Psychiatry is positively evil even if it is demonstrated to be perfectly safe and effective. And when it comes to Institutional Psychiatry (the use of coercion and the alliance between psychiatry and the state) I am not interested in reforming it, I am interested in abolishing it.

 

[Chip1021]

Different people come to their understanding in different ways. Some people arrive at their understanding based on resemblances and coincidences. Others take the latest scientific study or meta-analysis as gospel until another one displaces it. I, however, am a huge fan of Occam’s Razor. I prefer my explanations to be meaningful, elegant, and parsimonious. I also value empiricism, but perhaps not as highly as you do. The explanations I accept don’t necessarily have to be empirically-based, but they do have to be empirically valid (that is, consistent with observation).

 

[Chip1021]

What kind of education system were you brought up in where they don’t teach the Holocaust unless it’s a Jewish instructor? I was taught the holocaust in many courses between middle and high school (history, literature, social studies) and we learned about it despite the fact that I usually had no idea what my teacher’s religious or ethnic background was.

 

[Chip1021]

I’m actually a bit confused right now, NoDevils, because I’ve been going through some of your responses to other people’s posts, people who have been saying essentially the same things as I have and you’ve been responding favorably to them. So maybe it’s not really what I’m saying that you’re opposed to, but the manner by which I’m expressing myself. Yes, my criticisms of psychiatry, the concept of “mental disorder”, and scientism might be direct and blunt, but my position can really be summed up by a few bullet points:

- the “mind” is contingent upon, but not reducible to, the brain

- “mental disorder” is an all-encompassing idea that does not have well-defined contours but is nevertheless a powerful social, political, and legal tool for stigmatizing persons and depriving them of their rights.

- there are valid ways of understanding and approaching issues that are not necessarily scientific in their language or methods

 

[Trith]

- “mental disorder” is an all-encompassing idea that does not have well-defined contours but is nevertheless a powerful social, political, and legal tool for stigmatizing persons and depriving them of their rights.

About this, I would say the same thing as NoDevils. The concept of mental disorder has been used to exercise power on people and stigmatize them, as it was done for homosexuality not so long ago. But that doesn't mean the concept is invalid. Things would be easier if it was, because then we could reject it all and it would be much simpler. But I don't think it is the case. That's like saying that the differences between men and women have been used to oppress women for centuries, therefore men and women must be identical and saying otherwise is immoral. Yes, life would be much easier if men and women were absolutely identical, the debate would be much easier to solve, but it's not the case or we have no evidence of either side for many aspects, and we have to deal with the complexity.
Also the concept of mental illness is used to say that some people who did something wrong were not responsible for their actions, like if they were on a psychotic outbreak. So it can be used to defend them too, and not only stigmatize them.
Also it can happen that some people who are just a bit eccentric are judged as mentally ill, meaning in some way that what they do can be discarded, that they don't follow the "normal path" and that ideally they should be made normal again, just because we don't like differences. This is one thing. But take someone who has paranoid schizophrenia for example. Maybe he would feel that people are reading his mind every time he takes the bus, and perhaps he would fight with them to protect himself. Or he would harm himself because some voices told him that if he didn't, certain loved ones would suffer. These are real examples actually. Even in such cases, you are absolutely right, we can make the effort to go in their shoes and understand their point of view. We can praise their courage for taking the bus despite people reading their minds, and we can praise the sacrifices they are ready to make to protect loved ones, we don't need to ridicule them or discard everything. But does it mean we can let it happen? A lot of people, when their psychotic outbreak is over as super grateful for psychiatrists having protected them. And they don't believe anymore what psychosis forced them to believe. Some people say that they would never believe in aliens for example, yet they believe it during each of their psychotic outbreaks. I don't think we can put this on the same plane as someone who is a bit eccentric, or coming from a different culture that we should just respect and stay in inaction. I think we can only consider such things as an illness. But does it mean that when one psychotic guy is just used to kiss the ground every time he enters in the kitchen we have to correct him? (true example) No, we can leave him be, and maybe he is happy with that on the short and long term. And where do we put the limit between the two? That's the complexity I was talking about. We cannot simply discard the concept of mental illness completely. It would be simpler if it was possible, but that's only one side of the problem. In reality we have to deal with a complex situation, and most probably things need to be done on this side to find better limits.
We each tend to focus on the side of the problem we are most emotionally connected to. Perhaps one person has dealt with being labelled mentally ill just to be stigmatized and rejected. Perhaps another person had their mental illness not recognized and they were blamed for the consequences of actions they had little control over, and they wish it was accepted that they have a mental illness. Or someone would like a parent's mental illness to be recognized so that they could find proper help instead of being rejected by institutions for a behavior they can't control. They will each tend to focus more on one side of the problem.

 

[NoDevils]

There's learning about the holocaust and then there's learning about the holocaust, same goes for gay conversion and lobotomy. We can basically figure from the existence of homophobia that there was conversion therapy, but learning about its explicit history is another matter. For example, do you know less than three percent of Jews killed in the holocaust were German? That was 69% of Germany's Jewish population. Do you know JFK had a secret sister who was severely disabled by a lobotomy? Anyway, these subjects are too dark for this forum.

Chip, I'm disagreeing with you because I've never met someone with such stereotyped a view of psychiatry, and that's remarkable considering how harmful the field can be and how mistrustful people are of it. You say you don't like psychoanalysis, but it's a relentlessly popular mode of thought that we default to when we ignore or reject the past century's advancements in psychology. You defaulted to psychoanalytic modes of thought several times in this conversation, saying people with schizophrenia and autism are that way merely because their personalities are too eccentric. You conceded my point about this when you admitted something is probably "wrong" with a person's brain if they truly exhibit schizophrenia or autism. Being pro science when it comes to cellphones and vehemently anti science when it comes to psychology isn't rational. It appears to me like an attitude from a Christian fundamentalist society that believes it can purify itself by rejecting the superstructure it came from and continues to depend on. This has all kinds of bad consequences, like people not getting medicine for their children because they think God will heal them.

I like what you said about paying attention to the way we talk to ourselves. Like, if we become conscious of calling ourselves stupid or trash we should stop doing that and try to engage in more supportive self-talk. This is basically one of the premises of CBT, though the way undertrained mental health professionals conduct CBT is poor. We can also look at supportive self-talk through a more spiritual lens or whatever you prefer.

I think our disagreement is not really over the facts. You basically concede my points when I talk about scientific facts related to the mind and brain (because they're modest and supported by extensive evidence) and I'd loathe to disagree with you about the abuses perpetrated by our mental health systems. What I'm saying is the way out is through. Conservatism tries to solve problems by going backwards in time which is undesirable and impossible. A person can go on a soap box about how absolutely everything is screwed, but that's only going to make matters worse. The people inciting good changes in the world are involved in their communities via philanthropy, professional work, community activism and so on. This can be as simple as interacting with someone who has similar problems or doing a good deed. It's annoying to see so many professors against education, health professionals against medicine, politicians against government. If these people hate society so much they should go live in the woods. I don't need to convince anyone of basic established facts. If someone decides society is burned and we can only fix it by reverting to early modern views, so be it. I've gotta conclude this debate because it's too much of a gish gallop and our egos are clearly tied up in it.

 

[Chip1021]

About this, I would say the same thing as NoDevils. The concept of mental disorder has been used to exercise power on people and stigmatize them, as it was done for homosexuality not so long ago. But that doesn't mean the concept is invalid. Things would be easier if it was, because then we could reject it all and it would be much simpler. But I don't think it is the case. That's like saying that the differences between men and women have been used to oppress women for centuries, therefore men and women must be identical and saying otherwise is immoral. Yes, life would be much easier if men and women were absolutely identical, the debate would be much easier to solve, but it's not the case or we have no evidence of either side for many aspects, and we have to deal with the complexity.
Also the concept of mental illness is used to say that some people who did something wrong were not responsible for their actions, like if they were on a psychotic outbreak. So it can be used to defend them too, and not only stigmatize them.
Also it can happen that some people who are just a bit eccentric are judged as mentally ill, meaning in some way that what they do can be discarded, that they don't follow the "normal path" and that ideally they should be made normal again, just because we don't like differences. This is one thing. But take someone who has paranoid schizophrenia for example. Maybe he would feel that people are reading his mind every time he takes the bus, and perhaps he would fight with them to protect himself. Or he would harm himself because some voices told him that if he didn't, certain loved ones would suffer. These are real examples actually. Even in such cases, you are absolutely right, we can make the effort to go in their shoes and understand their point of view. We can praise their courage for taking the bus despite people reading their minds, and we can praise the sacrifices they are ready to make to protect loved ones, we don't need to ridicule them or discard everything. But does it mean we can let it happen? A lot of people, when their psychotic outbreak is over as super grateful for psychiatrists having protected them. And they don't believe anymore what psychosis forced them to believe. Some people say that they would never believe in aliens for example, yet they believe it during each of their psychotic outbreaks. I don't think we can put this on the same plane as someone who is a bit eccentric, or coming from a different culture that we should just respect and stay in inaction. I think we can only consider such things as an illness. But does it mean that when one psychotic guy is just used to kiss the ground every time he enters in the kitchen we have to correct him? (true example) No, we can leave him be, and maybe he is happy with that on the short and long term. And where do we put the limit between the two? That's the complexity I was talking about. We cannot simply discard the concept of mental illness completely. It would be simpler if it was possible, but that's only one side of the problem. In reality we have to deal with a complex situation, and most probably things need to be done on this side to find better limits.
We each tend to focus on the side of the problem we are most emotionally connected to. Perhaps one person has dealt with being labelled mentally ill just to be stigmatized and rejected. Perhaps another person had their mental illness not recognized and they were blamed for the consequences of actions they had little control over, and they wish it was accepted that they have a mental illness. Or someone would like a parent's mental illness to be recognized so that they could find proper help instead of being rejected by institutions for a behavior they can't control. They will each tend to focus more on one side of the problem.

Consider this a response to both you and as NoDevils said he was finished with this conversation, it will probably be my last as well.

Im not suggesting we abandon recognizing disturbing, undesirable, destructive or self-destructive behavior. The issue that is at the heart of this conversation is not so much about science in psychiatry (although I think it is important, and I don’t think I’ve been denying any basic established scientific facts at all). The real issue at the heart of the problem to me is taxonomy, or classification. How are we conceptualizing and classifying various real phenomena? Because words mean their consequences, what we do about a thing depends on how we are conceptualizing it via the categories that are intrinsic to our langauges. If we conceptualize both natural events and human conflicts in theological terms, then we will respond to those problems by trying to exorcise demons and burn witches. In our time, our models of reality are much better in my opinion when it comes to the results of natural events (like a miscarriage) but they are not much better than the theological model when it comes to the results of human conflicts (like a suicide).

I find that the negative consequences of categorizing certain persons as “mentally disordered” to far outweigh any positive value it might have. Considering that the term is a conflagration between both medical and legal concepts, it is an idea that is intrinsically ripe for abuse. It has been used that way in the past, it continues to be used that way, and it will always be used that way. You, Trith, are genuinely concerned about the stigma that is attached to mental illness. And while your heart is in the right place, your mind (though not your brain) is not, with all due respect. We classify certain persons as mentally disordered either in order to stigmatize them (as NoDevils did when he dismissed my ideas not by reasoned debate but by deploying the language of psychiatry), or we classify them that way because they have already been stigmatized. I do not agree with your (nearly universally accepted) view that the insanity defense is a humanitarian tool for defending persons, because the insanity defense is premised on the idea that, while “normal” people have reasons for what they do, “mentally disordered” persons are caused to be dangerous, which annuls their responsibility. But responsibility, like mind, is not an attribute, it is an attribution. And inasmuch as we deprive a person of responsibility, we are also depriving him of his essential humanity.

I believe that we can and should seek to understand and judge the psychotic criminal defendant in the same common-sense way that we understand “normal” criminals. For example, let’s say a person claims that he killed someone because “voices” in his head told him it was necessary to protect his family, or because he thought those voices would go away if he did what they told him to do. Assuming we accept his claims as a genuine experience he was having, we might understand his actions as a form of self-defense or duress, which might result in a lesser offense or even complete acquittal. However, at the same time, the “voices” he is hearing are his own self-conversations, and I do not believe that the psychotic person is constitutionally incapable of understanding that. The problem is that psychiatry also interprets hearing voices as “auditory hallucinations” despite the fact that every single shred of evidence we have ever obtained—not to mention basic common sense—tells us there is absolutely nothing auditory about that phenomenon. The psychotic is the one who is producing his voices and he could stop producing them or redirect their content if he wanted to, difficult though it kifht

As far as psychiatry is a medical, rather than legal, enterprise, it is founded on the premise that feeling good and acting good are signs of brain health, whereas feeling badly and acting badly (especially if the behavior is bizarre or stereotyped) are signs of brain dysfunction . And that is a ridiculous premise. The current Wikipedia article on Electro-convulsive therapy states that there is no scientific evidence that iatrogenic seizures are in any way harmful to the brain. But the same article acknowledged that ECT is typically accompanied by an inability to remember recent events, disorientation, confusion, and reduced capacity to engage in or sustain goal-directed activity. So according to psychiatric science, I’m supposed to believe that feeling depressed is a sign of brain dysfunction, but confusion and disorientation are not signs of brain dysfunction? It may be the case that those executive functioning problems resulting from ECT are temporary for most people; but its anti-depressant and anti-psychotic effects are also temporary for most people.

Do you know what else can make people feel better or act better? Syphilis. Neurosyphilis, especially in its earlier stages is frequently accompanied by a period of creative euphoria and increased productivity, at least for awhile before he starts descending into horrible dementia. Am I supposed to believe that those spirochetes are helping to reconstruct the brain before they start to tear it apart? Because I think those bacteria are destroying the brain that entire time. It’s just that sometimes brain damage, especially if it is relatively mild, can be experienced in a desirable way.

Materialist psychiatry is and always has been all about giving people real organic diseases and calling their desirable effects on affect or behavior treatments for mental diseases. The tranquillizing chair, oxygen deprivation techniques, insulin shock therapy, “psychosurgery,” electro-convulsive therapy, anti-psychotics, CNS stimulants, and even modern day SSRIs make people feel or act better, even though it is self-evident that they are harmful to the structural integrity or the body as a machine, some more so than others. But I am not opposed to any of them. I think it’s great that people can experience themselves in a better way. What I am opposed to is the use of force and fraud. People should be allowed to try those methods if they think they will help them with whatever their own self-defined problem is, and they should also be allowed to reject them if they don’t find meaning or value in them. I am also against the ridiculous neuromythology that psychiatrists have attached to their interventions in order to convince the public that they are real doctors treating real diseases and not just drug dealers.

I refuse to categorize anybody as mentally disordered, just as I refuse to categorize them as heretics or blasphemers. I consider mental health and mental illness to be both epistemologically invalid constructs as well as tools to define certain people as less-than-fully-human. It’s not that mental illness has been abused to treat people as inferior like sex, race, and ethnicity; mental illness is the label that we attach to those whose ideas and behaviors we are unable or unwilling to understand. In psychiatry, there is a premium on the psychiatrists inability to understand what he is observing. After all, as soon as mental illness concepts like epilepsy and homosexuality became comprehensible as diseases or desires, they were no longer conceptualized as mental illnesses.

If a person has a proven (or putative) disease or the brain or any other part of the body, we should simply say that. But brain diseases are brain diseases, not mental disorders. If a person has violated another person’s rights, he is a criminal, and we should say that. His mental state may be a mitigating or excusing factor, but his actions were still criminal issues, not medical issues. If a person has a conflict, say, between continuing to live and ending his life, then he has an existential problem, not a mental disease that requires rewiring his brain.

What I’m suggesting is not that we deny categorizing the various problems that we have as individuals and as a society. I’m simply insisting that we have the courage to think and speak clearly about what we are categorizing and why, which is why I asked the question “what is a mental disorder” that spurred this conversation in the first place.

 

[Chip1021]

For example, I believe that I probably have a neurological issue, even though tests have not found any neuropathology. Why do I believe that? Because I feel numbness and tingling in my face and extremities, neck stiffness, I have difficulty moving my eyes back and forth, speaking is difficult and painful and I struggle to express myself fluently, I have an imbalanced, awkward gait when I walk, I’m chronically fatigued, and I have breathing and digestive issues. Moreover, I’ve observed that the nature and severity of my issues are heavily contingent on materialist factors, most notably rainy or humid weather. Still, I could be wrong. The problem might be with some other part or system of my body or perhaps it’s not even an organic problem at all.

However, all of the heavy existential philosophical thinking are not issues with my body, nor is the anxiety or suicidal depression I frequently feel. Those are my responses and interpretations to having to live with this horrible condition. But every time I go see a doctor, he insists that my discomforts and executive functioning problems are not symptoms of a disease, but the fact that I become hopeless and suicidal sometimes is a symptom of a very serious disease that requires immediate “hospitalization” and treatment. And I find that to be just silly.

 

[Trith]

Consider this a response to both you and as NoDevils said he was finished with this conversation, it will probably be my last as well.

Im not suggesting we abandon recognizing disturbing, undesirable, destructive or self-destructive behavior. The issue that is at the heart of this conversation is not so much about science in psychiatry (although I think it is important, and I don’t think I’ve been denying any basic established scientific facts at all). The real issue at the heart of the problem to me is taxonomy, or classification. How are we conceptualizing and classifying various real phenomena? Because words mean their consequences, what we do about a thing depends on how we are conceptualizing it via the categories that are intrinsic to our langauges. If we conceptualize both natural events and human conflicts in theological terms, then we will respond to those problems by trying to exorcise demons and burn witches. In our time, our models of reality are much better in my opinion when it comes to the results of natural events (like a miscarriage) but they are not much better than the theological model when it comes to the results of human conflicts (like a suicide).

I find that the negative consequences of categorizing certain persons as “mentally disordered” to far outweigh any positive value it might have. Considering that the term is a conflagration between both medical and legal concepts, it is an idea that is intrinsically ripe for abuse. It has been used that way in the past, it continues to be used that way, and it will always be used that way. You, Trith, are genuinely concerned about the stigma that is attached to mental illness. And while your heart is in the right place, your mind (though not your brain) is not, with all due respect. We classify certain persons as mentally disordered either in order to stigmatize them (as NoDevils did when he dismissed my ideas not by reasoned debate but by deploying the language of psychiatry), or we classify them that way because they have already been stigmatized. I do not agree with your (nearly universally accepted) view that the insanity defense is a humanitarian tool for defending persons, because the insanity defense is premised on the idea that, while “normal” people have reasons for what they do, “mentally disordered” persons are caused to be dangerous, which annuls their responsibility. But responsibility, like mind, is not an attribute, it is an attribution. And inasmuch as we deprive a person of responsibility, we are also depriving him of his essential humanity.

I believe that we can and should seek to understand and judge the psychotic criminal defendant in the same common-sense way that we understand “normal” criminals. For example, let’s say a person claims that he killed someone because “voices” in his head told him it was necessary to protect his family, or because he thought those voices would go away if he did what they told him to do. Assuming we accept his claims as a genuine experience he was having, we might understand his actions as a form of self-defense or duress, which might result in a lesser offense or even complete acquittal. However, at the same time, the “voices” he is hearing are his own self-conversations, and I do not believe that the psychotic person is constitutionally incapable of understanding that. The problem is that psychiatry also interprets hearing voices as “auditory hallucinations” despite the fact that every single shred of evidence we have ever obtained—not to mention basic common sense—tells us there is absolutely nothing auditory about that phenomenon. The psychotic is the one who is producing his voices and he could stop producing them or redirect their content if he wanted to, difficult though it kifht

As far as psychiatry is a medical, rather than legal, enterprise, it is founded on the premise that feeling good and acting good are signs of brain health, whereas feeling badly and acting badly (especially if the behavior is bizarre or stereotyped) are signs of brain dysfunction . And that is a ridiculous premise. The current Wikipedia article on Electro-convulsive therapy states that there is no scientific evidence that iatrogenic seizures are in any way harmful to the brain. But the same article acknowledged that ECT is typically accompanied by an inability to remember recent events, disorientation, confusion, and reduced capacity to engage in or sustain goal-directed activity. So according to psychiatric science, I’m supposed to believe that feeling depressed is a sign of brain dysfunction, but confusion and disorientation are not signs of brain dysfunction? It may be the case that those executive functioning problems resulting from ECT are temporary for most people; but its anti-depressant and anti-psychotic effects are also temporary for most people.

Do you know what else can make people feel better or act better? Syphilis. Neurosyphilis, especially in its earlier stages is frequently accompanied by a period of creative euphoria and increased productivity, at least for awhile before he starts descending into horrible dementia. Am I supposed to believe that those spirochetes are helping to reconstruct the brain before they start to tear it apart? Because I think those bacteria are destroying the brain that entire time. It’s just that sometimes brain damage, especially if it is relatively mild, can be experienced in a desirable way.

Materialist psychiatry is and always has been all about giving people real organic diseases and calling their desirable effects on affect or behavior treatments for mental diseases. The tranquillizing chair, oxygen deprivation techniques, insulin shock therapy, “psychosurgery,” electro-convulsive therapy, anti-psychotics, CNS stimulants, and even modern day SSRIs make people feel or act better, even though it is self-evident that they are harmful to the structural integrity or the body as a machine, some more so than others. But I am not opposed to any of them. I think it’s great that people can experience themselves in a better way. What I am opposed to is the use of force and fraud. People should be allowed to try those methods if they think they will help them with whatever their own self-defined problem is, and they should also be allowed to reject them if they don’t find meaning or value in them. I am also against the ridiculous neuromythology that psychiatrists have attached to their interventions in order to convince the public that they are real doctors treating real diseases and not just drug dealers.

I refuse to categorize anybody as mentally disordered, just as I refuse to categorize them as heretics or blasphemers. I consider mental health and mental illness to be both epistemologically invalid constructs as well as tools to define certain people as less-than-fully-human. It’s not that mental illness has been abused to treat people as inferior like sex, race, and ethnicity; mental illness is the label that we attach to those whose ideas and behaviors we are unable or unwilling to understand. In psychiatry, there is a premium on the psychiatrists inability to understand what he is observing. After all, as soon as mental illness concepts like epilepsy and homosexuality became comprehensible as diseases or desires, they were no longer conceptualized as mental illnesses.

If a person has a proven (or putative) disease or the brain or any other part of the body, we should simply say that. But brain diseases are brain diseases, not mental disorders. If a person has violated another person’s rights, he is a criminal, and we should say that. His mental state may be a mitigating or excusing factor, but his actions were still criminal issues, not medical issues. If a person has a conflict, say, between continuing to live and ending his life, then he has an existential problem, not a mental disease that requires rewiring his brain.

What I’m suggesting is not that we deny categorizing the various problems that we have as individuals and as a society. I’m simply insisting that we have the courage to think and speak clearly about what we are categorizing and why, which is why I asked the question “what is a mental disorder” that spurred this conversation in the first place.

No problem, we can stop here as far as I am concerned. As you know I like debating and discussing this kind of things in particular, but eventhough I enjoy it I can get caught up in it and then think about it too much and it can affect me negatively too, so I am not sure it is always good. What matters is that we get better. I have the impression that most of the time, disagreement on the forum is about having the world view that will cause less shitty things to happen in people around psychiatry, and this applies to ourselves too.

 

[Chip1021]

No problem, we can stop here as far as I am concerned. As you know I like debating and discussing this kind of things in particular, but eventhough I enjoy it I can get caught up in it and then think about it too much and it can affect me negatively too, so I am not sure it is always good. What matters is that we get better. I have the impression that most of the time, disagreement on the forum is about having the world view that will cause less shitty things to happen in people around psychiatry, and this applies to ourselves too.

And for the first time on this particular thread, I can say that I agree 100%. I can get really caught up in this stuff and it’s probably not good for me, but at the same time I’m pretty much completely disabled and these conversations are the closest thing to meaning and purpose in my life. If you want to continue or discuss anything at all, feel free to pm me anytime, but I kind of feel bad because we definitely hijacked and displaced the original subject of this thread, lol.

 

[NoDevils]

Everything Chip just said about drugs and ECT is false. Psychiatric intervention does not necessarily give you a "new disease," though it is possible and in some cases highly likely there will be side effects. The marketing behind ECT as yet another antidepressant and not a last ditch treatment for catatonic depression and the like is a huge ethical blunder in medicine, which we're very experienced with in this glorious free market. It isn't ethical or "politically good" to do whatever you want to a person with their consent. Neither is it unethical to operate without consent under niche circumstances. Depression can actually reach a point where the patient can't consume food or even go to the bathroom, which can be very dangerous. How do you get consent from a patient who can't move or talk? The severity of depression that accompanies such states is also dangerous because these patients are more vulnerable to abuse, suicide, and self-harm. I've witnessed all of this personally. What we're seeing in this thread is a rejection of the idea that mental illness exists and has degrees of severity. Depression may be very mild for one person and deadly for another.

If I'm not mistaken there was a post earlier suggesting depressed people should be allowed to commit suicide. I can't say I'm a major proponent of this guns for the mentally ill initiative. Suicide is a tragic phenomena as is homicide. I'm not saying we should revoke gun ownership or ban euthanasia, but the idea of go ahead, kill yourself just doesn't sit right with me.

Everything that was said to deny the existence of psychosis would be a vile lie were it not something Chip has convinced himself to cope. People with hallucinations don't all have an ability to direct their hallucinations like some kind of personal superpower, neither are hallucinations merely an "inner voice." If anything, they're disturbing because they're a divergence from the normal inner voice. This folkloric notion of what hallucinations are has led people with depersonalization and anxiety to think they're about to hallucinate because their inner monologue has become intense. I also have to restate that it's highly probable psychotic people believe what they're experiencing is real. It's basically a definitional part of the word "psychosis," loss of ability to distinguish reality from fantasy. Just because people in psychosis are seeing or remembering unrealistic things like demons, aliens, or human apparitions doesn't mean they aren't capable of believing it's real.

What we're seeing here is how psuedo science, paranoia, and conservative nonsense takes marginalized people like catatonic and psychotic patients and tries to render them nonexistent. We experience this with depersonalization when someone tells us we shouldn't feel depersonalization or that we're making it up.

I thought the conversation was getting to a closing point where we say our opinions but you put more gish gallop lies in there. Opinions have become irrelevant in this conversation because it keeps sliding into this debate about what's real.

 

[dpdrhaver184]

If you were a multi-millionaire, what would be your game plan for getting a treatment for DP/DR? What would your proposal look like?

 

[leminaseri]

If you were a multi-millionaire, what would be your game plan for getting a treatment for DP/DR? What would your proposal look like?

i would try to find (hire) people like me and get ai supported functional mri scans among us (main requirements like, got dpdr it first from weed, (minor)
childhood trauma, recovered once, relapsed with a depression, emotional blunted) and then looking if there can be found anything in common.