Philoso-psychiatry
As someone with an interest in post-modernism and over-thinking, I often turn my attention to the very interesting field of medical science, psychiatry. I found it humorous that in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy the evil antagonists were the Psychiatrists, but not much explanation was given for this role. Without any understanding of this plot decision the bemused reader could only acknowledge this choice with paradoxical laugher, a symptom of mental illness. I'm not completely certain what Dougals Adams thought about this, but psychiatry definitely does have an aura of evilness about it which is hard to define. My own impression is that it exists as sort of an obstinate force against developments in human rights and liberties, but I guess in the context of Adams' book it is against, at least symbolically, the kind of insanity the book(s) is written by. That is the subtextual meaning I infer from that choice of antagonist, as the narration of the book is off-the-wall.
This leads me to contemplate an interesting contrast between psychiatry as 'medicine for the soul' and the vulgar notion of 'laughter as best medicine'. It seems that many mental illnesses are the result of past traumas or physical conditions of the brain, and that madness is in a manner the 'medicine' of the body attempting to heal itself. This is manifest in behaviors like laughing, or shouting, and other emotional instabilities. This is an intuitive conclusion based on the naturalistic ways people deal with better understood physical and emotional traumas, e.g. when they are hurt they cry or laugh etc. So, the message I ultimately glean from this work of madness is that there is an inherent symbolic conflict in 'medicine for the soul'.
Those two preceding paragraphs are just an interlude, to this topic "Philoso-psychiatry" which I suppose means "love of wisdom as medicine for the soul". In many post-modern writings, such as those by Foucault or Deleuze, Psychiatry plays a similar antagonist to writings of symbolic madness: an equivocation can and has been drawn between post-modernism and schizophrenia. Now that the institution of psychiatry has become the forgone conclusion of mental disorder, it has become part of the course of bodily illness that affects the mind in replacement of the body's own often inadequate healing mechanisms. It seems that psychiatry as body attaches its soul to those of the bodies of the mad, so engaging in this kind of philosophy or anti-psychiatry becomes part of this mixed-up 'medicine for the soul'. However, the question is whether this body that attaches itself and its soul to its host, is symbiotic or parasitic.
Psychiatry does in fact help many people from the relationship, like a symbiant, but over the long term its practices and treatments cause illness and death like a parasite. In both cases it grows stronger with resources and knowledge of its subjects. But the knowledge it produces is not philosophical, it is a subset of science. The host is the one that engages in philoso-psychiatry and tries to heal through transcendental thoughts to try to escape its harm. If there is any question as to which is host or parasite, the mad or psychiatry, one need only ask "who made who?".
This leads me to contemplate an interesting contrast between psychiatry as 'medicine for the soul' and the vulgar notion of 'laughter as best medicine'. It seems that many mental illnesses are the result of past traumas or physical conditions of the brain, and that madness is in a manner the 'medicine' of the body attempting to heal itself. This is manifest in behaviors like laughing, or shouting, and other emotional instabilities. This is an intuitive conclusion based on the naturalistic ways people deal with better understood physical and emotional traumas, e.g. when they are hurt they cry or laugh etc. So, the message I ultimately glean from this work of madness is that there is an inherent symbolic conflict in 'medicine for the soul'.
Those two preceding paragraphs are just an interlude, to this topic "Philoso-psychiatry" which I suppose means "love of wisdom as medicine for the soul". In many post-modern writings, such as those by Foucault or Deleuze, Psychiatry plays a similar antagonist to writings of symbolic madness: an equivocation can and has been drawn between post-modernism and schizophrenia. Now that the institution of psychiatry has become the forgone conclusion of mental disorder, it has become part of the course of bodily illness that affects the mind in replacement of the body's own often inadequate healing mechanisms. It seems that psychiatry as body attaches its soul to those of the bodies of the mad, so engaging in this kind of philosophy or anti-psychiatry becomes part of this mixed-up 'medicine for the soul'. However, the question is whether this body that attaches itself and its soul to its host, is symbiotic or parasitic.
Psychiatry does in fact help many people from the relationship, like a symbiant, but over the long term its practices and treatments cause illness and death like a parasite. In both cases it grows stronger with resources and knowledge of its subjects. But the knowledge it produces is not philosophical, it is a subset of science. The host is the one that engages in philoso-psychiatry and tries to heal through transcendental thoughts to try to escape its harm. If there is any question as to which is host or parasite, the mad or psychiatry, one need only ask "who made who?".
Comments (125)
From frontal lobotomies which is akin to trepanning or blood-letting in the other side of medicinal science which is concerned with body rather than mind problems.
Whilst the body only side of medicine is able to make good use of the scientific method, psychology still remains in the dark ages unfortunately.
With the bigger interests of pharma at play in providing so called cures for various non-physical/mind ailments it makes it hard for real progress to occur in this field at the moment
The question I'm asking "who made who" is just to reinforce which body is host and which is parasite. A host can make parasites, but a parasite can't make a host. I appreciate your comment, but as irony is a religious level belief to me, I have to always root for the underdog.
That may be the case, but this is a different subject. You may as well pose this question about any human discipline - does science create facts, does medicine create sickness, does physics create laws? And to some extent all disciplines hold an element of creativity and self-generation.
We know that people who have mental illnesses frequently have no insight - they are in denial even as the voices are telling them to harm themselves or someone else - and are fearful of psychiatric services as a result. Much easier for many people to pretend that there is no mental illness and that psychiatry is fraudulent. And no doubts some of it poorly practiced, as is the case for many professions.
Quick question. If by self admission of hearing voices an individual commits harm toward another is handled by psychiatric institutions then why does the other type of criminal behaviour where no voice is heard handled by the regular justice system.
What is the difference here between two killers for example who both commit the same crime but one claims he heard voice/god/Steve Jobs tell him to do it and the other committed the murder as per standard killer behaviour.
Why should there be two distinctions ?
Because the mental illness and the resulting risks are treatable. When a person with a significant psychiatric illness (psychosis) is taking medication they are likely to not commit crimes and develop insight and get on with things.
Here's an example. I worked with a pregnant woman who heard voices. She was untreated for schizophrenia. She became convinced that the baby inside her was a 'child of satan'. Voices told her to kill the baby. She then took a razor blade and began to cut the baby out of her stomach. She was admitted for treatment after losing a lot of blood. She was provided with treatment and recovered from her psychosis. She developed insight and was able to develop a normal and loving relationship with her child.
How can you distinguish the inner monologue that each human being is born with, with the schizophrenic voice?
I have done my research Im checking if youve done yours. Avoiding the question says to me you havent got a clue.
You havent, most likely have misconstrued my tone.
At this point I accept that no scientific answer is forthcoming.
Although, I am riled as I had a brother who committed suicide in such an institute.
I'm sorry to hear that. Please accept my condolences.
I have lost three people who have gone off medication and completed suicide as a result.
It sounds to me like you are angry and that discussing this may descend into a personal attack. I am not interested in pursuing such things.
https://www.madinamerica.com/2022/10/i-went-undercover-to-expose-abuse-at-a-mental-health-hospital/
Hes timid and thats fine.
They never could turn crap into gold.
The problem with this particular field which so badly wants to be accepted as a science is the illusion of progress.
That is not long ago human beings were tortured, beaten up and killed all in the name of therapy. And as the link Ive posted above demonstrates its still going on.
The profession up to and including director level of such trusts and establishments needs to reflectively ask itself am I really required here? Am I helping my fellow member of the human species or am I imprisoning them?
And if those questions do not play on their conscience ask am I making a profit from their misery ? Will my next car be a Ferrari or an Aston Martin?
Off topic?
[quote=Ranjeet]A thousand apologies.[/quote]
The picture you so nicely depicted in an easy-flowing, yet thought-provoking and at times hard-to-follow script is this (to recoup for my own interest) : psychiatric illness is a healing mechanism that is used in bodies of people whose body needs healing, but the body can't provide that healing. The psychiatrist affects the mind of his patient; he acts as a body that healed itself and therefore no more mental illness is needed. Except, of course, it puts the donkey in front of the cart: healing the mind is futile, when the body is still damaged. (This is a bit of a criticism of the theoretical aspect or approach.)
Being a mind-healer, the field of psychiatry becomes the body that heals the mind, and the mind of the field of psychiatry attaches itself to the mind of the patient to effect the healing process.
So the question becomes, does the psychiatric profession as such CREATED the concept of mental disease, which mental disease is in effect a form of an attempt to heal physical ailments; or else the mentally ill created the field of psychiatry, inasmuch as it created a sort of healing apparatus to help itself?
It is an interesting theory, and in a way it's true. Modern psychiatry has gone away from the "healing by talking" of the schools of Freud, Jung and others; that route has been renegaded to the profession of psychology. Modern psychiatry pushes drugs, and their role has reduced to 1. finding the right meds for their patients, and 2. finding the right dosage for the same. So in fact your theory is right on, inasmuch as the healing's focus by psychiatry has been re-routed from trying to heal the mind (by talking) to heal the body (by medication).
In a way that's true. No psychiatric patient ever achieves full recovery. The recovery percentage (which I define as a spectrum, similar to the spectrum of autism: some get much better compared to their acute stage, some get just somewhat better, and some never get better; and at the onset of disease, at the acute stage, it is impossible to predict how the patient were to fare) is variable an unpredictable on an individual basis. The rate of recovery quality can only be established on a statistical basis.
I like to quote this: (A mother talking about her schizophrenic son) "Oh, Johnny is getting much better, he is starting a program that will get him a job." Ten years later, same mother, same son: "Oh, Johnny is really getting better, he started a new program that will get him a job and he has a nice new girlfriend." Yet in another ten years: "Oh, Johnny is really well, he is starting a new program, and has a new girlfriend, a very nice girl".
The miraculous thing is that Johnny IS getting better year-by-year, yet, on a decade-by-decade basis, he is the same. It is not that he is on a constantly recurring loop of getting better then worse; no, there is no loop. This is in a way a paradox, a self-contradiction, that he is constantly getting better, yet his condition does not improve. Yet it's true. A bit of an unexplained or unintuitive phenomenon, like those we hear of happening in Quantum Physics; best not to try to explain, but to accept as an inexplicable fact.
Didnt know I was in the fiction section of the site. It seems to me than that all conclusions and accepted facts of this field are not in fact so but narratives of the field itself clinging on to existence by self-justification to the point of inventing and making up lies.
Lies that are easily seen for what they are. Such bold assertion are not philosophical but made up bullshit by uneducated and ignorant minds.
When such uneducated and ignorant minds are practicing psychologist then its harmful and dangerous.
1. Whom are you addressing?
2. You are asking for proof. That's a tall order as science itself can't provide proofs. (Many threads on this forum about that, so look them up; not interested in discussing this claim here.)
3. Philosophy is not about empirical proofs; it is about a priori proofs, which it does on empirical stuff, once it establishes some premisses assumed to be true, (but not proven to be true) on which it builds logical conclusions.
I and the Opening Poster did not practice psychologist (to use your vernacular) at all. We talked about psychiatry in a vein of philosophical approach. We never purported to offer a cure, a treatment. We did not promise to make anyone feel better. We simply discussed how the profession's mechanism could be looked at from a philosophical point of view.
It is, of course a mere dogma that identity is or ought to be unitary, and that dogma, that demands that 'other' voices be silenced, does tend to make those voices antagonistic and sometimes violent; which then becomes the 'evidence' of pathology.
The hearing voices approach is supported by all the psychiatrists and mental health services I know of here. I think it is well understood that not all voices are problematic.
I'm very glad to hear it. Shame you waited for me, a rank amateur, to point it out. Such support, mind you, is a rather recent development.
Well I was talking about psychiatry, not psycho-social and peer support which is where this comes in.
The distancing is noted. and it seems, therefore, that the dogma of unitary identity remains in psychiatry. and the 'support' you speak of is that condescending kind that give not an inch of power but 'allows' what was previously forbidden, because it is conveniently cheap.
That is the application of thought and vision control that Orwell so predicted.
Welcome our new masters the psychotherapists who are the thought police.
They need help but do not admit it.
Hypocrisy of Hypocrisies
Do you have some evidence for that? I have presented a particular criticism of psychiatry that it legitimises unitary identity and delegitimises divided identity, without any justification. Your response is not to attempt any justification, but instead to delegitimise my view by fiat and without argument. That seems to me to be prejudicial on your part.
Lets just legalise eugenics next
Quoting unenlightened
Quoting unenlightened
Quoting unenlightened
Quoting unenlightened
Peddle the psychobable and prejudice all day it wont make it right.
Self-reflection on your part is required with introspective honesty.
Perhaps then you might offer some fresh insight and pioneer new ideas for your profession rather than parroting the same old outdate concepts.
Quoting unenlightened
This was the actual argument I started with, which you passed by, and continue to pass by. The evidence is already linked to on the hearing voices network site, that when 'voices' are engaged with and responded to, they are less likely to be negative and violent.
I'm not a psychologist, or psychiatrist, so I can't really take offence.
Quoting Deus
Err... what prejudice? What psychobabble?
I work within psycho-social context which is mostly an alternative to psychiatric or clinical hospital services, and we generally argue that people often don't need psychiatry or clinical services and are more likely to need housing, meaningful activities and purpose. We encourage peer support and the principle that the client is the expert on what they need.
Quoting unenlightened
Yep, hearing voices is useful and those groups are well attended and supported. Much better always not to use medication or clinical treatment.
But you'll note -
Quoting unenlightened
So not always, and probably not even mostly. And for some of these folk, treatment is the only thing which works. But maybe some day better ways of supporting people in this situation will be found.
Forgive my hasty assumption then in that case although you work in a related field I believe you can still exert some influence on the psychology-psychiatry field and can be a force for good.
I hope
It's philosophy that's the output of the chemical mix in the brain. To put it simply: a person suffering from depression is a pessimist and a successful person enjoying life is an optimist along with a schizophrenic who feels the evil is advancing in the World.
Though there are problems with corrupt psychiatry and that a schizophrenic psychiatrist will not be able to pull out of one's insanity by oneself. There are objective criteria for psychiatry found in blood samples, specific descriptions of symptoms and the computer-AI analysis.
So who is healthy? Perhaps the easiest answer says those who are young, but they have also the least information to rely on vis-a-vis the old age in terms of accumulated information and IQ.
What to think of a person who walks in for a philosophical consultation, i.e., the conversation to clear things up? Well, for most, they are their brain-chemistry. Therefore, I feel philosophy falls short in terms of "medicine for the soul".
Edit: Note on hearing voices: The danger with schizophrenia is not hearing voices, I guess we all do, but them generating voices in their heads and then acting on them blindly.
So, Information is Brain State = [the physical brain;(mental content)]
Where the square brackets [ ] represent an irreducible unit and the semi colon parentheses ;( ) represents mental content's dependence on the physical brain. This relation is universally present when information is present.
In the case of psychosis:
-a delusion is information as the physical brain and mental content.
-a false belief is information as the physical brain and mental content.
-a conspiracy theory is information as the physical brain and mental content.
-also memories, time perception, fears of the future, on and on, are information that exists as the
physical brain and mental content.
In troubleshooting a psychosis case this relation always should be considered.
And there are no animal psychiatrists. Diagnosing a mental illness in humans requires the human mind of a trained individual.
Remember that when a trained animal in a circus all of sudden becomes a killer, no one says it's gone insane. What do we always say? It's unpredictable. Animals are unpredictable and become aggressive from time to time.
[quote=Ms. Marple]Most interesting.[/quote]
Why? Oh, ok, just a hunch!
I didn't short you on the philosophic details. They're in my previous comments.
If psychiatry has a good working understanding of what information is or theories of mental content in psychosis cases then what are they?
Psychosis is good in my humble opinion. We should all be given an opportunity to taste from the pool of madness! Please kindly refer to the safety manual before you do though.
Within psychiatry this could be ignored or resisted since research study funding is coming largely from the pharmaceutical industry. Even claimed philanthropic funding traces to big pharma through undisclosed donations and doner restrictions.
There is also a problem with the general public and scientists who know little about information
believing everything is information and information exists everywhere in the universe. Unless you put some rigor into this problem you will be unaware that information is brain state and only brain state. For example the term genetic information is a term that should never have been used. Genetic processes are entirely physical both in expression and replication so why would the use of the term information even be needed? More of a false projection of our minds onto our environment than anything real.
In the case of psychosis we are dealing with information in its true form. A physical brain and mental content. An example of how ridiculous the psychiatric profession is is the symptom of conspiracy theories. Clearly mental content but often used as a basis for forced drugging. And forced it is. If you observe these cases going through the courts there is no doubt people are being drugged against their wills with the backing of governments without knowing how bad the underlying science really is.
The concept of mental content as emergent from biological brains is key to understanding what the problem really is. In our person to person communication there certainly is a transfer of mental content but no transfer of physical matter. Some dualists might like this as their instincts are correct but the best understanding of this is that information is a special case of unique abilities that emerge from biological brains. Given that so many are lost in the subject of information a good reset would be that psychosis is universal to our existence.
Quoting Agent Smith
I see Smith is suspended. That was a pretty dickish post right there.
Quoting Mark Nyquist
So we should allow a catatonic schizophrenic incapable of consenting to taking medication to languish when we know that putting them on some good old Clozaril will benefit them cognitively?
What about someone so deluded they cannot even understand that they are mentally ill? Should we not intervene and help them readjust to society and recover some functionality via medication and therapy, even if it is initially forced?
Quoting Mark Nyquist
What does that even mean? Are you saying that psychiatrists are conspiracy-theorists? Or that people center conspiracy theories around psychiatrists? You are not writing clearly.
Quoting Mark Nyquist
It is designated as information because it regulates the characteristics that are passed on to offspring. Yes, information might be ubiquitous, but some collections of information can be understood as being essential for understanding certain processes and, thus, such linguistic distinctions are useful and not so redundant.
A Turing machine can implement any computer algorithm that supplies a table of instructions for where symbols are to be printed on strips of paper. Would you say that calling the instructions for where the symbols are printed on the strips of paper information would be redundant? I certainly wouldn't, as the instructions are a collection of rules - which are a form of information - demarcated solely to execute said processes, and thus it is not redundant to designate it as a form of information, even though it reads physical instructions and executes its functions physically.
I mean I can read self-help books about quitting smoking and then quit smoking. Quitting, while it may be a physical process, is indeed a function of the physically stored information in the book, yet you wouldn't not call a book a book, would you?
Dictionary definitions of information reflect common usage and there are many uses. I'm suggesting that to place information in physical reality we need to examine the form in which it exists. Brain state and brain state only seems to be the best definition if you would like to study information in its physical form.
Interesting. I do think there is something not quite right about psychiatry. Consider this, we do not understand how consciousness works, how one experiences, behaves or believes what they believe.
With that in mind how does one "treat" the subjective experience with objects (drugs)? It doesn't really have much logic behind it if we don't understand the link between the subjects experience and the object - that which is being experienced/reality (the hard problem of consciousness).
If I stunt a mania or depression by forcing someone to not feel anything, to be numb, to be zombified and depleted of agency. Is that moral? And is it considered a cure?
Does medicating the mentally unwell enslave them to a forced "neutrality"? It is clear from the numerous side effects of psychiatric drugs, some arguably worse then the condition they're treating, that there must be better ways of approaching one's mind.
Furthermore the use of the word "delusional" by a psychiatrist to justify medicating is somewhat a comical irony in that the psychiatrist doesn't know what "reality" truly is to justify judging another's as delusional. That's somewhat of a god complex of the psychiatrist to take control of another's mind without understanding it. It lacks empathy. And thus feels sinister.
I think psychology is the more prudent approach. Without an arsenal of vaguely useful drugs not fully understood in their action, the psychologist must contend with an unwell mind through discourse, conversing and offering therapy through communication. This seems much less invasive and controlling. And has been proven to have good results.
The only time I think drug therapies are appropriate is when someone is of immediate harm to either themselves or others. In the case of actively attempting suicide or murder. Only in these cases is using a drug to blunt a person's consciousness justified to simply buy some time to allow psychologists to help them.
But the drug must be removed from the therapy at the earliest possible moment when signs of clinical improvement are accerlating beyond the danger zone and back to the safety zone.
I think it is a key institution to criticize philosophically as an exercise in freedom.
We understand quite a bit about the brain, actually, if not what gives rise to consciousness. We know that people, for instance, can undergo radical changes in their personality when they receive frontal lobe damage. We know that neuroplasticity allows one to form and reorganize synaptic connections in response to learning or injury. We also know what risk factors predispose one to developing schizophrenia, and that, for instance, trauma can actually have a strengthening effect (post-traumatic growth).
We know so much about the brain and psychology, enough to diagnose illnesses that can be identified by the symptoms that manifest certain behaviors and patterns of thought or other criteria. Furthermore, using medication and therapy in tandem actually produces positive effects greater than either in isolation. Adding medication to therapy is as they call it a "force multiplier" - with a fairly high coefficient, usually.
Quoting Benj96
I cannot disagree more. Taking medications such as antipsychotics, although less than ideal, help establish some stability that lends itself to life-changing therapy. But that therapy can often only be accomplished across a relatively long timeline, and one may need the medication that whole time before they are in a good enough headspace not to take it.
It can take tremendous therapy to make a person with schizophrenia understand they are schizophrenic and can only be done with meds usually. If you want people to not have to deal with taking antipsychotics for their whole life, you should be in favor of them taking them until they are stable enough not to ruin their life/hurt themselves/hurt others/break laws, etc., which goes beyond just taking them until one is not of immediate danger to themselves or others.
Quoting Benj96
If I said that aliens are coming to earth to steal our gold reserves to create conductors for their spaceships as they go on an unstoppable galactic conquest to snatch all sentient species' cannabis, would you say: "I don't know if I can say that your reality is any less valid than mine?"
Quoting Benj96
And medication has been proven to have good results. But I agree - if one can avoid taking medication one should. But many people really need to.
It does seem like a case of "the road to hell is paved with good intentions". I think psychiatry tries to do something good but is misguided in carrying out that intention. My advice... If you are medically inclined don't become a psychiatrist haha. And if you're legally or politically inclined and see a glaring error... It would be apt to campaign for a better way forward, or at the very least notify those of relevant authority as to your concerns. That would be most noble path. But that's just my opinion. I'm more curious to know yours.
Perhaps you're are right, I'm willing to concede that I'm a little "cut and dry" on the subject. But it is nice to see there is commonality between us in that we both believe if someone is a harm to themselves or others only then can we intervene with forceful medicating. The time span is what seems to differ here. Which I shall not comment on further as you have good reason of your own.
Quoting ToothyMaw
Of course I would think it implausible in a "literal" sense based on our collective understanding of the current state of affairs.
However at the root of their belief - the sensation that "something alien/something unfamiliar" is coming or occurring in which our values (precious gold reserves) are being eroded (stolen) to do something sinister (theft - in this case cannabis) seems to be plausible.
It can be reduced to a fundamental feeling that there is an "unrecognised threat that has the potential to corrode our values to commit crimes against us". This is much more logical at a base level but is only considered when we overlook the absurdity of the literal description in pursuit of the underlying fear/anguish. One that is quite reasonable in its own right.
I think then, that schizophrenics articulate genuine humans concerns that we all frequently suspect, but are unable to use sensible means to describe them. Their imagination runs wild with descriptors. But what they are describing is still comprehensible. We just lack the compassion to trust they have some logic deeply engrained in their superficial absurdities.
The question is then why has their brain failed to use useful language to describe their anguish? It appears as though their innate language model has departed from their limbic system (emotions/instinctual threat perception).
This is a more useful paradigm then simply determining that they're speaking total gibberish. This is about empathy, deeper investigation and patience/tolerance of the doctor.
Make it a completely legal process at every step. No detainment or forced treatment unless the person commits a serious criminal act, especially not at the speculation of potential harm. The view on reality should be that subjective experience is reality: the reality is the person is hearing voices and the reality is the psychiatric interpretation; the reality is the patient thinks he is God. There are a number of reasons for this, but the main reason from a philosophical standpoint, is it is not a good precedent to set that there is a standard of objectivity for the subjectivity of the underdog in a conflict while the favorite has different rules where his subjectivity is real (subjectivism). This is a philosophical challenge. There's more obviously, but I am interested particularly in why psychiatry takes such a powerful advantage against vulnerable and sick people. I think if it wasn't so keen on infringing people's liberties, people would be much more well behaved in dealing with them. I guess there are no lessons to learn from history about people's desire for liberty and their violent defense of it, and it is merely convenient that taking it away escalates and empowers them to force treatment.
Given the history of this profession why would peer review mean anything and why should they be trusted. So what causes psychosis? Put your cards on the table. Chemical imbalance? Genetics? Combinations or subtle mechanisms seem to show up a lot lately. So much has been debunked.
You chaps don't have to entirely invent a new frame for psychology alone. There has always been resistance to the reductive, chemical/mechanical medical model, and there are alternatives out there.
The social model:
https://www.mentalhealthforum.net/forum/threads/david-smail-1938-2014-pioneer-of-the-social-materialist-analysis-of-psychological-distress.130996/
[quote=J. Krishnamurti]It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.[/quote]
Thomas Szaszhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Szasz has the best critique of the socio-political position of psychiatry, and takes @introbert's position about coercion.
There is also a development that is something of a synthesis of psychiatry and anti-psychiatry in Trauma Theory. My old thread has some interesting links you might like to pursue.
I forgot to mention also, the Open Dialogue approach.
Maybe you won't find don't find it humorous, if you consider the reason for that. Psychiatrists appear as enemies of humanity in other novels too.
Indeed, Douglas Adams's novel was a masteripiece, maybe the funniest novel I have ever read, but a lot of novels and films that picture psychiatrists and psychiatry as enemies of the world, as e.g. "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", "The Silence of the Lambs", "Battlefield Earth". And of course, dozens of books written against psychiatry. There's no other medical field or profession that has been so much accused for human abuse as psychiatry.
Psychiatric abuse: 195 million results in Google
Anti-psychiatry - 217.000.000 results in Google
Psychiatrists are behind every massive human abuse. Psychiatry during the Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union (from the Stalinic period and after) are the two most characteristic examples. Until these days, patients are abused in a most horrible way by psychiatry. And they don't damage people with ETC, lobotomy and other horrible procedures, they do it with drugs, damaging people's lives, based on DSM, psychiatry's bible, listing over 300 mental disorders, most of them actually imaginary (nonexistent), based on which and a psychiatrist's opinion unconstitutional coercive retention takes place.
Priests spring to mind. How do you feel about Catholic priests who are also psychiatrists?
You actually think we shouldn't try to get people who hear voices and think they are God to understand that their beliefs, and the voices they hear, aren't rooted in reality? We should just encourage people to listen to whatever instructions their voices give them, if they give instructions? Why wait until a serious criminal act has been committed to detain someone who might be obviously mentally ill and dangerous to themselves or others? Why not nip it in the bud before people or property might get hurt or damaged?
Does a comparatively small evil of taking away a measure of freedom really outweigh the good of helping someone get healthy? What if you were an unmedicated person with schizophrenia? Would you rather pull a butter knife on an officer and get shot or get talked down and taken to a hospital where you might be medicated for your own good, even if it is against your will?
The collective idiocy in this thread is astounding. The only person who put forth anything valid was Unenlightened, and even then, the theories in that post are far from mainstream.
edit: Benj made a good attempt at contributing too, sorry for the reductive comment
Yes, I can come up with those for days. I suppose you are right insofar as the logic and reasoning is somewhat valid, even if, taken literally, it is nonsense.
Quoting Benj96
Right. You don't seem to be talking about psychiatry so much as the way we treat the mentally ill, or how they are misunderstood.
Quoting Benj96
This sounds like it might actually be true. Never put that much thought into it myself.
Have you studied psychology/neuroscience at all? Or is this conjecture?
Regarding your other opinions about nipping it in the bud, and lesser of two evils: that's the status quo. It is not hard to defend the status quo or normality and call those who oppose it idiots or mad. The exercise of criticizing psychiatry is to put yourself in direct opposition to the norm, psychiatry being The Norm, and seeing this tyranny of normality, to subject it to scrutiny and analysis of its madness. You have no problem nipping in the bud or advocating the lesser evil of something that you only fear will happen. But acting out of fear is more irrational and dangerous than those you fear.
I feel very bad! It's awful! In my country, Orthodox priests also are asent to Germany to become to study psychology. I have not heard anything about psychiatry. But even the need to study psychology shows the failure of the Church to handle the spiritual needs and problems of their parishioners and in general to give useful advice to anyone in need.
Religion should not look necessarily like that. E.g. Buddhism doesn't.
Of course, I expected reactions from some people, but not such as that! Despicable.
Here's what I just read from this person, which I reproduce (copy-paste) below, before it is deleted or edited:
[i]"Holy shit you need some help there, bro. Most mental disorders in the DSM are fake? Psychiatrists are behind every massive human rights abuse? And that fucking picture - do you even know that they put you out for ECT (not ETC)? Are antipsychotics truly equivalent to lobotomies in your mind?
Shut down this fucking thread, please. I mean goddamn.
edit: I mean I'm laughing, but holy shit"[/i]
(Re: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/750911)
Fifth year medical student. Neurology and psychology are an active interest of mine in my studies.
Plenty of psychiatrists, psychologists and psychotherapists draw from Buddhism or are Buddhists. Buddhist psychiatrist Mark Epstein springs to mind.
Lmao, why on earth would I delete that? Go ahead and post it on a billboard with my real-life name.
Of course there are. All kinds of proffessions contain Buddhists in their ranks. But I don't think that a Buddhist psychiatrist will be of the kind I mentioned, although this is not impossible. We are talking about "numbers", not individual cases. And I talked mainly about massive human abuse. And of course, for godssake, I didn't say that all or even most psychiatrists, of any religion or no religion, are of the kind I mentioned. I believe they are the minority. But enough big to produce human damage. And, I emphasize, more than any other medical --or, in fact, any other-- profession,[s][s][/s][/s] in general.
But, anyway, I brought up Buddhism in the context of religion, not psychiatry.
Thanks for the clarification.
A psychiatrist would have no problem prescribing a medication based on the presented racing thoughts and false beliefs and would never understand the problem as mental content driven.
Your question is rhetorical and rather slanted, but here is a real alternative approach, not antagonistic to drugs where they can be helpful, that does not seek to impose a particular understanding of reality. Open dialogue is an established approach to mental health that has good results dealing with difficult cases.
[quote=Jaakko Seikkula]Well, the main idea is to listen carefully to each participant in the conversation, accepting their comments without exceptions or conditions. Within this unconditional respect for their voices, people start to listen to themselves. They learn more about their own story. This is why, in the dialogical approach, we do not look to find some right story, or some right commentary on the story of the person in crisis. Really, what is most important is the response in the here-and-now while speaking about the important issues of ones life. The most difficult and most important experiences most often do not have any words, such that it would be possible to have an explicit narrative about it. They emerge in being moved, e.g. in an emotional reaction, by the things being told. This is the most important moment for a dialogical practitioner.
{snip}
In my mind, a much more effective way is to think about psychotic behaviour as an embodied psychological response to extreme stress. Psychotic experiences are one form of defence that the embodied mind uses to protect itself against a total disaster. They are not pathological, nor signs of an illness, but necessary survival strategies that everyone of us may need in an extreme situation. The extreme situation may be something that is occurring in the present, or it may be drawing on earlier experiences in a persons life. In hallucinations, the person is most probably speaking about real incidents that have happened, but which they do not yet have any other words, other than psychotic ones, to express it with. [/quote]
https://www.madintheuk.com/2022/10/interview-with-jaakko-seikkula-creator-of-the-open-dialogue-approach/
For a better general overview of the method: https://imhcn.org/bibliography/recent-innovations-and-good-practices/open-dialogue/
From the above:
Since a person can show symptoms based entirely on mental content there is the district possibility their condition has no biological dysfunction whatsoever. And treating a nonbiological condition as a biological condition could complicate the interpretation of study results. It could be an entirely different treatment method would be better still.
An example would be mass conspiracy theories such as Dominion voting machines being rigged. You wouldn't claim this population has anything universal in their biology causing that belief.
It's very unfortunate that the professions treating these conditions lack a working knowledge of the mechanics of information.
As for 'Information Mechanics' as a psychosis research subject at universities, they won't study it because it won't be funded by the pharmaceutical companies.
These types of computer simulations can help anyone visualize the progression of psychosis..
Information Mechanics:
Where information = brain state =
[ the physical brain, ( mental content ) ],
this being an irreducible unit where the parenthesis show a relation of dependence on the physical brain...completely resolves the question of monism or dualism in philosophy?
Yes it does. Mental content cannot exist absent the physical brain and any definition of information being an abstract concept cannot physically exist and must be corrected to include the physical brain. This being the state of things, the professions of psychology, psychiatry, and certainly philosophy should be judged incompetent as the question is in their domain and they have failed to answer it.
The medication protocol of today is no better.
This is PECISELY why the rest of the 40 percent of the US population carries a loaded gun.
I think psychiatry has a bad rep because (true premises according to my belief):
1. Pscyiatrists have no clue where psychiatric illnesses get generated an how. Truly.
2. Symptomology has demarked quite a few conditions, but they have huge overlaps.
3. They can't use symptomology to treat patients effectively.
4. The only drugs that do anything positive to a psychiatric patient are antipsychotics.
These include schizophrenia, schizotypal everything, manic depression, OCD.
5. Some biochemical functionalities of these drugs are known, some are not.
ON the other hand:
- psychiatry, like all branches of medicine, is an empirical science. Not theoretical like QA or Chemistry.
- the expectations compared to the results have poor performance ratio.
- there is no direction for developement; only a hope that some drugs that are discovered in the future
will perfom better than the present ones. This is an expectation by the profession.
- the expectation of the populus is wholly different from that of the profession, and it expects nothing
less of miracle. Much like with the physical medicine.
- both the lay population and the patient population has larger proportions who have no faith in
the profession's viability, and most psychiatric patients live in state of denial of their own conditions.
- there is stigma attached to the madness.
- the stigma is warranted, as psychiatric patients are very hard to get along with.
- but psychiatric patients suffer as well as they present a set of symptoms.
This is a difficult situation, and without much further development, it remains very much a difficult
situation.
The bedrock belief in psychiatry that psychosis cases have their origin in failed biology seems destined to fail if you know the fundamentals. All psychosis cases involve information and mental content can be the entire cause and origin.
The fact that no medical test can identify a physical cause points in the direction of mental content as the cause.
There is also a problem of how professionals and the general population understand information. They have a dumbed down view of it like the information icon...you know the circle with the lower case ' i ' in it.
Psychiatry in part follows pharmacological companies and there's a lot of pr, manipulation and sales/marketing involved in treatment. And these are not empirical sciences.
Quoting god must be atheistSome are. But pretty much anyone can be a psychiatry patient.
In psychosis, numerology, secret code and things like double messaging from media, advertising or news stories are held as mental content and have completely different parameters from what you find in physical systems. Content can appear and vanish at a whim for example. Unexpected content can cause surprise or panic. If the reaction is to process harder and faster the problems can accumulate faster than corrections can be made.
So this mental content running out of control is the cause of psychosis and not a problem of the underlying biology. No wonder these patients don't get along with their doctors. The doctors are clueless and the patients don't understand what is happening to them but have a sense that the problem is not in their biology.
Information internalization is used in education purposely because personalized information is easier to learn, because some of the content is already in place.
From my perspective, and I suppose a dialectical one, psychiatry represents a host of things that to formulate arguments against it situates you within irrational, individualistic, nihilistic, antiestablishment, antifascist, transcendent, ironic, subjective, skeptical, contrarian, critical, analytical, anarchist, primitivist etc. If any of these are aligned with your own interests psychiatry is a good dummy to beat up on.
What they should be looking into are anomolies involving mental content and basic theory of information specific to human brain function.
I'm much more critical of this profession at the university and research levels as these are the ones responsible for the basic science and education of the practicing psychiatrists.
The Dan Markingson suicide case at the University of Minnesota is a prime example of how badly psychiatric research has failed. It's become a landmark case in medical research ethics if you are not familiar with the case. Most all of his symptoms were common mental content driven such as pattern recognition, code, perceived contact with unknown entities and so on. All well documented.
Do you see why the competence of psychiatry should be questioned?
I see people in general as feeling oppressed and not knowing why, but to me it seems the world's central banks have a lot to do with it and they always become weaponized to fight wars along with covert programs to bring in war resources. The result is it's hard to capture the value of your own efforts because of this smoke and mirrors economy. So that's a short version of geopolitics as it exists and the people running things haven't been great at solving the problems.
Psychiatry itself has been weaponized to serve the interests of these same governments.
History is chock full of examples, whether fact or fiction, about people using other people's thoughts and beliefs against them. If there are experts, who know what makes people tick better than the people themselves, and those experts have ill will, well...
I wasn't thinking about reforming psychiatry. I was thinking about the individual who has real challenges but does not want the psychiatric/pharmacological approach. Often, in my experience of others, they shift between rejectinga and accepting the pp approach. Rather than replacing it.Quoting introbertOK, I hear that. And that's also different from what I focused on. And I agree. At least at this level of distraction. I see a lot of collective madness.
The psychiatric profession would suggest a biological failure.
My alternative view is that the brain holds information in networks and under normal conditions most of the information is true or non problematic and we function normally. However, it's possible to have rapid outbreaks of false information on this network that can't self correct in real time. For a person experiencing this rapid onset, there would be a sense that his biology is acting normally but at extreme activity levels (in an attempt to self correct) but information seems to be scrambled and erratic, unpredictable compared to normal. And when he arrives for professional psychiatric treatment he will be told his biology is failing and requires medication.
To get a mental image of this, imagine a virus on a computer network. Agent Based Models are a way to computer model this and simple models can show progression of a virus moving from node to node on networks with some nodes affected and other nodes unaffected. In biological brains the biology can be functioning normally but the corrupted networks of mental content are the cause of the abnormal condition.
If this is the case then forced medication would be taken as a breach of trust by the patient and could exacerbated his condition.
Do you think your informational computerised view is much different? Are we machines? Are we infected by viruses? The very idea seems like a virus that has infected us.
The analogy is to psychosis symptoms such as conspiracy theories. The specific reason I think this should be considered is an understanding that mental content is something emergent from physical brains but not the same thing.
This is likely not the only cause but should be considered especially in the young, healthy and sudden onset group. Drug use/abuse could make this more likely or unusual events or just bad luck.
The physical stuff has been looked at and looked at so no, not a physical virus or it could be detected. Often these patients volunteer descriptions of specific mental content that concerns them.
While I appreciate this very noble theorizing or speculating, this is highly intractable to even be called a theory. Do we know how information get scrambled in one's mind? I mean, we have distortion of information based on the five senses -- senses are fallible. We can be deceived. At the same time, we sometimes think erroneously because we tend to jump to conclusions with not enough information. But all these have external causes.
Quoting Mark Nyquist
No, I disagree with this analogy. Virus are tractable, they are predictable, otherwise we stand no chance in stopping them. I don't care if this is an organism or a computer virus.
I don't follow why you mention external causes.
Yes. I think the analogy works up to a point, and bearing in 'mind' that talk of computer virus is itself an analogy from biology. But up to more or less the same point, a much earlier model of possession by evil spirits will also work. A false theory is created by a malicious agent, as is a computer virus, and is designed to infect, and take possession of the hardware and use it to spread itself.
And that moral story survives as the notion of white hat and black hat hackers/magicians.
Such an understanding seems to point to a policy of isolating infected persons, and brainwashing them by way of removing the infection. That is a dangerous understanding.
I would like us to put ourselves into the pictures and analogies we make. Is it perhaps a certain paranoia in us that we need to arm ourselves in advance with a theory by which to understand the mystery of the other? Is our theory of mental illness itself a virus that we are spreading, that is infecting the world.
Even on the internet it is proving very difficult to sort the memes of God, from those of the devil - truth and sanity from lies and folly.
https://www.amazon.com/Lost-Connections-Uncovering-Depression-Unexpected/dp/163286830X
gives a nice overview.
And generally, good models of how our brains work, and can fail, could make us more resistant to some of these psychological illnesses.
Stress by external events are a big part of it but some could also be how brains take in, process, store and manipulate information.