Naive, troubled people, who fell pray to the pseudoscientific field called psychiatry.
It's a lot more than pharmaceutical propaganda, it's psychiatric and psychological propaganda coupled with the fact that the vast majority of people can't make the difference between science and pseudoscience.
What is a "manic episode?" How do we measure it exactly and what is the scientific basis of the "border" between a medical problem and a non medical problem? What is the verifiable, scientific evidence that unambiguously proves that it is indeed a medical problem (as opposed to behavioral variety, just as people vary in size, strength, intelligence and so on?)
The very same questions can be asked for pretty much all the other concepts in the text, and pretty much anything in psychiatry.
Do any of you know how all these behaviors got to be considered "mental illnesses/disorders" and on what basis?
We can "treat" pretty much anything with drugs. We just have to label a certain thing as "bad, unacceptable, etc." and then feed people drugs util they no longer show that unwanted behavior/emotion/whatever.
And when I say "anything" I really mean it: from shyness (this can be treated pretty well with alcohol) to OPPOSITION TO RAPE! Yeah! We could even event a new mental illness, as members of the APA regularly do: "rape-phobia" - and then feed people who have rape phobia drugs until they no longer show the symptoms - that is, accept being raped, without opposition. Actually, if we think carefully we might label the concept of rape as a phobia in itself. Because, after you are treated, you'll no longer oppose uninvited sexual contacts and as such we can no longer talk about it as being rape.
Typical example of high-tech pseudoscience. Some people call this kind of stuff "high tech phrenology." I agree.
If you look carefully at the bottom of the first page, you'll see "It compared brain scans and neuropsychological test results from bipolar disorder I patients who were using medications to control their symptoms, and healthy subjects matched to the bipolar subjects for age, sex, ethnicity, handedness and other factors. "
So they "compared" the brains of people who used psychotropic medication (which obviously affects the brain) to the brains of other people who didn't. Well, that's one huge mistake.
Then, there's the typical pseudoscientific way all these "experiments" are conducted: almost all of them are based on extremely big no-no's in real science: correlation = causation (their favorite fallacy), "after this, therefore because of this", bad sampling, lack of blind tests and experimentation, biased confirmation (they're constantly looking for patters to "confirm", but only if they already "know" that the subject is [supposedly] ill)
What they're not able to do is this: to distinguish between supposedly mentally ill individuals (identified as such by psychiatrists, but who didn't take any kind of medicine that might affect the results) and control individuals, who are not mentally ill.
Medicine is just that, medicine, just as science is just science. There's no such thing as western medicine or western science. Both are universal. An individual that has cancer, has cancer no matter where he lives. It's a verifiable fact, independent of human opinion and societal values. The very same holds to true for an individual infected with HIV or malaria or you-name-it, an individual with diabetes(this is just a popular word for a few medical conditions,) an individual with a broken leg.
What differs across cultures is the acceptance of science. What's common to all cultures is the extremely diminished ability of most individuals who accept science, to distinguish real, rigorous science from pseudoscience (which often uses tools and terminology commonly used an science - a thing that leads to great confusion) Psychiatric "conditions" very greatly between cultures, because they're intrinsically related to concepts like "acceptable behavior" and "normality" - which differ greatly across cultures. Besides, there's absolutely no way to verify their existence in a scientific and purely objective manner. All these things make psychiatry pseudo-scientific. And the fact that most people can't distinguish between science and pseudoscience, makes it appear as "legitimate" to most people.
That's not say that "brain problems" don't or can't exist. There are people with brain tumors. Then there are people with birth defects that affected their brains. People with Alzheimer's disease. But all of these medical conditions are real, verifiable and NONE are treated by psychiatrists.
