Psycho-Babble Medication | about biological treatments | Framed
This thread | Show all | Post follow-up | Start new thread | List of forums | Search | FAQ

Re: His resignation letter » antiserial

Posted by Quintal on April 18, 2008, at 14:22:46

In reply to His resignation letter, posted by antiserial on April 18, 2008, at 0:08:39

>While professing itself the "champion of their clients" the APA is supporting non-clients, the parents, in their wishes to be in control, via legally enforced dependency, of their mad/bad offspring: NAMI with tacit APA approval, has set out a pro-neuroleptic drug and easy commitment-institutionalization agenda that violates the civil rights of their offspring. For the most part we stand by and allow this fascistic agenda to move forward. Their psychiatric god, Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, is allowed to diagnose and recommend treatment to those in the NAMI organization with whom he disagrees. Clearly, a violation of medical ethics. Does APA protest? Of course not, because he is speaking what APA agrees with, but can't explicitly espouse. He is allowed to be a foil; after all - he is no longer a member of APA. (Slick work APA!) The shortsightedness of this marriage of convenience between APA, NAMI, and the drug companies (who gleefully support both groups because of their shared pro-drug stance) is an abomination. I want no part of a psychiatry of oppression and social control.

This part caught my attention. As someone who was recently in a position to receive enforced treatment, it's heartening to know there are psychiatrists who oppose their profession being used as a tool for social control. It reminds me somewhat of R.D. Laing's theory of Schizophrenia as a weapon which is used to attack, invalidate and control 'black sheep' and other social misfits. "Madness Explained: Psychosis and Human Nature" explores this vein more deeply. It was actually given to me by a member of my mental health team.
__________________________________________________


By Etienne ROLLAND-PIEGUE (Tokyo, Japan) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)

The philosopher Karl Jaspers, who was trained as a psychiatrist, made a distinction between `understanding' and `explaining' madness. He argued that in the case of psychoses, the most severe form of mental illness, no attempt should be made at understanding what appears as incoherent speech or meaningless behavior by investigating a patient's background and making sense of what he has to say. Rather, psychologists should try to explain psychotic behavior by dividing patients into discrete categories and establishing causal links that should ultimately point towards brain malfunctions or genetic defects.

Richard Bentall shows us that attempts to explain and to understand mental symptoms are inextricably linked. Rather than postulating an unambiguous dividing line between the mentally sane and the insane, he proposes that irrational beliefs and abnormal behaviors manifested by psychotic patients can be seen as the far end of a continuum on which people are distributed. The differences between those who are diagnosed as suffering from a psychiatric disorder and those who are not amount to relatively little, and these differences appear to be understandable when viewed in the context of what we know about normal human psychology.

The classification of psychiatric disorders into neuroses (such as benign forms of depression or phobias) and psychoses (such as manic depression and schizophrenia) dates back to Emil Kraepelin and a number of Karl Jaspers' contemporaries. Although the concepts originally formulated by German psychiatrists at the turn of the twentieth century underwent a series of transformations, the idea that psychiatric disorders fall into a finite number of categories remain the organizing principle for psychiatric practice and research, as evidenced by the successive editions of the DSM diagnostic manual. For Bentall, these classifications have little more scientific value than astrological predictions based on zodiac signs. According to his rather extreme contention, we should abandon psychiatric diagnoses altogether and instead try to explain and understand the actual experiences and behaviors of psychotic people.

Bentall then moves on to show how psychological research can cast light on phenomena such as hallucinatory voices, depressed mood, delusional beliefs, manic episodes and incoherent speech. For each of these `complaints', he provides simple models or psychological mechanisms framed in ways that can be tested experimentally. Once the various psychotic complaints have been explained in this way, Bentall claims that the ghostly conundrum of madness evaporates: the complaints (particular classes of behaviors and experiences that have been singled out because they sometimes cause distress) are all there is. Madness is explained.

Or is it? Some readers may argue that experimental clinical psychology only scratches the surface and does not allow us to delve into the depths of the human psyche, as psychoanalysis has accustomed us to do. To this, Bentall would object, first, that he uses some of the insights of psychoanalysis as working hypotheses in his models and, second, that theories that cannot be tested experimentally are not worth considering. Karl Popper, not Sigmund Freud or Carl Jung, is his intellectual hero.
__________________________________________________

Q


Share
Tweet  

Thread

 

Post a new follow-up

Your message only Include above post


Notify the administrators

They will then review this post with the posting guidelines in mind.

To contact them about something other than this post, please use this form instead.

 

Start a new thread

 
Google
dr-bob.org www
Search options and examples
[amazon] for
in

This thread | Show all | Post follow-up | Start new thread | FAQ
Psycho-Babble Medication | Framed

poster:Quintal thread:823865
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20080412/msgs/824053.html