unscience at its finest -the modern "psychiatry industry

Discussion in 'Human Science' started by gamelord, Jul 3, 2018.

  1. RainbowSingularity Valued Senior Member

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    it certainly sounded that way to me when i read it.
    though i can read it another way.
    that doesnt mean it is the most commonly percieved understanding.
    and it leaves a great deal to the imagination of those who might take it to be like the old
    "pull your boot straps up and climb over the trench wall" WWI mentality
    "nothing a sound thrashing wont fix"
    or
    the mysoginistic "feeble minded woman, its all in your head"
     
    Last edited: Jul 5, 2018
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  3. Seattle Valued Senior Member

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    What gave you that impression? Gamelord, and others, were talking about how psychiatrists were just giving pills to people or were just talking about how useless psychiatrists, psychologists were and how it was just about trying to get everyone to think and act the same.

    I said that pills help some people, even people who aren't "fixed" are still potentially kept alive longer and there is attempted treatment and not just pills.

    So how do you get from that, that I'm implying someone with mental illness is just about having a defeat on their part? In the case of Gamelord I implied that is you hate everyone that you might need to look at yourself for better ways to adapt. Do you disagree with that?
     
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  5. CptBork Valued Senior Member

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    Yes it does indeed appear that US society is going over a cliff, and most other developed countries are teetering on the brink if they haven't already gone over. And it seems like companies such as Uber and Amazon aren't even trying to hide their push for a technocracy in which a small number of people profit in the extreme while the majority, even those with advanced educations, find themselves working paycheque to paycheque for temporary rented accomodations, with no social network to support their families when things go south.

    I can definitely see psychiatrists filling a void in this situation, trying to drug and coerce ordinary individuals to cope with increasing stress and marginalization, and placing labels and medical restrictions on those who refuse to fall in line. Very dystopian. However, the political example I'm referring to is even more extreme; authoritarian societies such as Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia and similar regimes today used the diagnosis of mental illness as a tool to actively suppress political dissent, and to me it seems like Trump's America isn't that far from implementing similar standards and tactics, perhaps still a few election cycles away.
     
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  7. CptBork Valued Senior Member

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    You seemed to be saying "yes you were bullied, but others have done a better job of coping and therefore something must be wrong with you." There's no "yes, but..." to be accepted here. Maybe that's not what you intended to communicate, but that is a standard line of thinking in psychiatric circles. All I need then is to find one example of a black slave who smiled all the time and never attempted suicide or rebellion, to hold up as an example for all these silly civil rights folks... That person over there is content with being shat on, so there must be something scientifically wrong in your brain if you don't want to live like them.

    I totally support people approaching psychiatrists and psychologists on a purely voluntary basis, and I support psychiatrists and psychologists who don't attempt to make more of limited, questionable data than what's already unambiguously there. Involuntary psychiatry, coercion, treating it as indisputable scientific fact, etc. constitute practices of pseudoscientific quackery and state-sanctioned violence. Also if a normally rational person attempts suicide again and again and again and again and you keep intervening, you're not actually helping them, you're just prolonging their suffering with no guarantees of relief.
     
    Last edited: Jul 5, 2018
  8. Seattle Valued Senior Member

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    It's a one-sided issue with slaves. You seem to imply it's also one-sided with every person with mental illness. True, it's not their fault. It's not someone fault who has cancer either but it's not helpful (to them or anyone else) if they just blame the medical community and society as a whole for cancer.

    It's not fair when someone gets cancer but again, that's not the point. What if someone with cancer went on a rant about everyone in the world being bad and out to get them and that they hated everyone in the world, all societies, etc.

    You would understand that they aren't thinking clearly and are emotionally impacted by the news that they have cancer but you also might point out that there are better ways for them to cope. If they don't want to cope any better then ultimately that's their choice.

    It doesn't mean that others aren't going to point out the obvious.

    It's also normal to point out that most of the rest of us are trying to deal with society as well. It's just not a rational discussion to talk about "america" wants this or "they" medical community are just trying to shut you up, etc.
     
  9. CptBork Valued Senior Member

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    It's not at all obvious that someone is mentally ill just because they're unable or refusing to cope with a situation, and it would be insanely presumptious for you to step in and judge others on that basis. If they can't remember their own name or who's in charge of their own country, then yes maybe there's a mental illness factor involved, otherwise you don't know what the hell anyone else has been through from every moment of their birth to their present, or why it affects them the way it does. So you're not actually doing anyone favours when they react in an unconventional way to someone else's/society's bullying, and in your mindless ignorance you come along and tell them it's not their fault just like having a broken arm isn't their fault either.

    Now if you were to acknowledge that a person's mental capacity can be negatively impaired by other people being utter pricks to them, maybe on that grounds and that grounds only, you'd have some cause to discuss mental health, but you have no other basis for passing such judgment, DNA or otherwise.
     
  10. RainbowSingularity Valued Senior Member

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  11. Seattle Valued Senior Member

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    This is a discussion forum, so get used to people having an opinion. No one is passing judgement on anyone or diagnosing anyone.

    It seems that all you want to hear is, "yeah, the medical community sucks, america sucks, society wants to keep us all down"...bla, bla, bla.

    If you want to display some lack of ignorance, this might be a good time to start...or not?
     
  12. Musika Last in Space Valued Senior Member

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    Actually a main component to determining to what degree a patient requires interventional treatment is to look at whether they are or could hold down a job. IOW one of the best ways to get an "I'm Sane" rubber stamp is to hold down a job ..... in one way it makes sense since the act of existing in a workplace environment brings a balance and interplay of a host of behaviours conducive to mental healtg .... although it also downplays the act of holding down a job or workplace environment as contributing to mental degradation.
     
  13. CptBork Valued Senior Member

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    That's mostly all psychiatry really is at this stage, opinion, and when enough of them share a common opinion, it becomes "science". They don't have any physical symptoms to back their qualitative diagnoses, yet they tend to act as if there's little to no guesswork based on manifested behaviours.

    Psychiatrists are doing it all the time, and you're trying to justify what they do. A person refusing to comply with normative behaviour under a stressful, isolating or threatening situation, is labeled with the stigma of a broken brain, on the grounds that there are losers in this world content with being shat on without acting out. Then they're patronizingly told how it's not really their fault, just like a broken arm, as if dismissing their complaints were doing them any favours. Stop blaming the victims.

    No, I want to hear that, unlike most other branches of medicine, psychiatry is not based on rigorous scientific methodology, and it is used by mainstream society as a tool for encouraging and enforcing "normative" behaviours within the population. Every time an existing psychiatric theory or belief gets disproven, anyone who was involuntarily or irresponsibly treated on that basis should have the right to a class action lawsuit against everyone who was responsible for enforcing the practice.

    I've been displaying a lack of ignorance this entire time, my opinions are based on verifiable facts. You on the other hand are not lacking in this area, as you support outdated stigmas and methods of treatment which have been only slightly modified from the days when they used to fry people's brains like Dr. Frankenstein.
     
  14. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    Concensus agreement actually is the only method of indentifying reality. As Anil Seth posits; "we make best guesses of what's out there and only when our guesses agree, do we call it reality"

    So your judgement seems a little harsh. Laymen, myself included, who often post their intuitive take on a variety of subjects are constantly challenged to back up their propositions with facts or mainstream concensus scientific theory.

    The problem with brain function (thoughts) is that it does not lend itself to translation as physical phenomena do, other than as narrative description by the individual sufferer.

    Even as the brain functions are similar in all sentient organisms, psychiatry (the analysis of brain functions and programming) is mostly an abstract field and extremely difficult to organize into testable equations, other than by MRI.
    https://www.understood.org/en/learn...ow/inside-the-brain-what-mris-are-teaching-us

    So we can see if something is wrong with the ability for processing information, but it does not tell us anything about the actual thoughts (best guesses) an individual experiences.
     
    Last edited: Jul 5, 2018
  15. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    Are they still depressed?
     
  16. Seattle Valued Senior Member

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    Why do you think people (voluntarily) go to a psychiatrist? You haven't suggest any helpful alternative other than to deny that there is an mental illness to treat and that everything is related to being a victim.
     
  17. CptBork Valued Senior Member

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    But when there's a lack of clear universal consensus on what the patient's reality is, should the patient not get the benefit of the doubt? If treatment is to be forced on an involuntary patient, and nothing in the patient's belief system provably contradicts reality, what rational grounds is there for overriding the patient's determination of what's in their own best interest?

    It's not at all the same thing as a layman appealing to authority in other sciences, because it's possible for them appeal to the sources behind those authorities, citing specific experiments, data, theories and their confirmation. Even if you can't personally justify to someone that \(E=mc^2\), you can point them to a good textbook on electromagnetism and Relativity or even Einstein's original paper on the subject, and they can verify that the derivation comes from established postulates which are themselves based on centuries of extensive experimentation, following sources and references to investigate anything they find suspicious.

    What's the equivalent reasoning to support a psychiatric diagnosis? Dr.'s so and so each interviewed the patient for 15 minutes, and in their opinions, the patient has no reason not to be content with their life despite decades of neglect and abuse, therefore their suicide attempt or whatever other "abnormal" reaction is proof of mental illness and consequently grounds for institutionalization.

    When doctors can look at brain scans and identify what symptoms of mental conditions the corresponding patient can be expected to have with a high degree of accuracy, then we can start taking their diagnoses seriously. If, as is currently the case, there is little to no correlation between these scans and the behaviour of patients diagnosed with mental illnesses, they can't base certainty off of a consensus opinion anymore than scientists can objectively judge whether a work of art is good or not.

    Even if psychiatry eventually achieves such a level of brain mapping and physical certainty in their diagnoses, that still doesn't determine a moral "right or wrong", but only compares how an individual's brain functions vs. the functioning of the average Joe who sits somewhere along the middle of the bell curve. Just because 95% of people might react to a certain situation or collection of experiences in a way that still allows them to hold down a job, this does not imply that the remaining 5% are obliged to react in the same way and to resort to psychotherapy, medicine and brain surgery in order to ensure this response. The only grounds for involuntary psychiatric treatment or confinement should be:

    A) If the patient poses a demonstrable threat to public safety
    B) If there's strong physical or circumstantial evidence supporting the belief that the patient would normally wish for such an intervention, and is only refusing it due to a temporary brain impairment of some sort, or a clear misperception of demonstrable reality
     
  18. CptBork Valued Senior Member

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    What else could I possibly mean when I say they were a mess before, and are still a mess today?

    This argument doesn't prove anything, because people also go to chiropractors, naturopaths, homeopaths, faith healers and witch doctors. And I already explicitly stated, in case you missed it, that I fully support psychiatrists reaching out to people on a purely voluntary basis, and that I do think it's at least potentially capable of helping patients to their own satisfaction on such a basis.

    I'm not in denial that mental illness exists or may exist, I am questioning the standards and practices by which it is assessed and diagnosed, as well as the standard factors held to blame for the alleged conditions being diagnosed (i.e. persistent bullying vs. DNA). Psychiatry is not a science in the conventional definition, they haven't measured depression (or even it's correlation to serotonin and other neurotransmitters), the way scientists have measured the electron's magnetic moment.
     
  19. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    Oh, I certainly agree with that, except that no one can force treatment on a patient unless they have shown to be a danger to themselves or society.
     
  20. Seattle Valued Senior Member

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    However, no one is arguing otherwise. No one cares whether the cause is DNA or persistent bullying either except that in one case the cure may be to remove the bullying environment.
     
  21. CptBork Valued Senior Member

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    I never said anything about a patient being "a danger to themselves". Unless the patient's beliefs can be explicitly shown to contradict demonstrable reality, a suicide attempt should not be automatically interpreted as proof of mental illness, no matter how serious or persistent the suicidal thought. A suicide attempt in itself proves that the patient is dissatisfied with their life and sees no viable alternatives for improving it to their own satisfaction, nothing more.

    If you want to codify religious law into secular law and forbid people from attempting suicide, that would be immoral in my opinion but at least it wouldn't require scientific justification. However, it's nothing but insulting to the patient and to objective science, for psychiatrists who've never been in a real lab to put on lab coats and speak as if \(E=mc^2\) proves that they have a right to lock up anyone who attempts suicide or acts out against persistent bullying.
     
  22. CptBork Valued Senior Member

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    Ok, now we're getting somewhere. If psychiatric interventions were more about altering the behaviour of the surrounding society and eliminating the bullying environment while enabling the patient to pursue their goals in life, that would be far more useful than telling the patient that their inability to function in such an environment is due to a physical defect on their own part needing correction. That's what Gamelord's been saying- diagnosing mental illness stigmatizes the patient and absolves society of its responsibility for inducing the accompanying symptoms.
     
  23. Seattle Valued Senior Member

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    Psychiatrists don't control society. Psychiatrists don't need to worry about diagnosing a patient stigmatizing him/her. Society needs to change that. The patient needs to hear the truth (whatever it is).

    Clinical depression isn't just feeling down or bad about yourself. Generalized anxiety isn't about stress. Schizophrenia is a mental illness. Autism is a range but it is a real "thing".

    Gamelord is likely to have some issues other than childhood bullying judging from everything he has posted. Take out the bullying and he would seem to have most of the same issues. Society isn't the primary problem here.
     

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