Mind Fixers: Psychiatry's Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness
Mostly, this is going to be letting the article speak for itself. For the most part, this poster is intending for the reader, if any and/or audience generally, if any, to search out their own deductions.
One commentary that cannot be avoided: when actual science, and the alleged professionals of the proposed disciplinary and academic set remain silent - it is nothing short of intending to utilize dark free speech to mount misinformation, disinformation, deceit, deception and the gross negligence of intentional harm upon the demonstrably ignorant populace.
Minus the typical expletives, profanities and obscenities that this poster prefers to use, there are quite simply no suitable adjectival terms, devices, phrasings or comportment that can remotely convey the disgust and repulsion that such an abrogation of responsibility confers.
In 1886, clark bell, the editor of the journal of the Medico-Legal Society of New York, relayed to a physician named Pliny Earle a query bound to be of interest to his journal’s readers: Exactly what mental illnesses can be said to exist? In his 50-year career as a psychiatrist, Earle had developed curricula to teach medical students about mental disorders, co-founded the first professional organization of psychiatrists, and opened one of the first private psychiatric practices in the country.
But, as Earle knew, psychiatrists could not peer into a microscope to see the biological source of their patients’ suffering, which arose, they assumed, from the brain. They were stuck in the premodern past, dependent on “the apparent mental condition [his emphasis], as judged from the outward manifestations,” to devise diagnoses and treatments.
The protracted attempt to usher psychiatry into medicine’s modern era is the subject of Anne Harrington’s Mind Fixers: Psychiatry’s Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness. As her subtitle indicates, this is not a story of steady progress. Rather, it’s a tale of promising roads that turned out to be dead ends, of treatments that seemed miraculous in their day but barbaric in retrospect, of public-health policies that were born in hope but destined for disaster.
Harrington is right to sigh over what has too often proved to be a yelling match between equally deaf opponents—members of an ambitious profession convinced that psychiatry is making strides toward understanding mental illness, and critics who believe it is at best a misguided attempt to help suffering people and at worst a pseudoscience enabling social control at the expense of human dignity. Indeed, since the sides first squared off, more than half a century ago, they seem to have learned little from each other.
Modern medicine pivots on the promise that portraying human suffering as biological disease will lead to insight and cures. Inescapably, this enterprise has a sociopolitical dimension. To say which of our travails can (and should) come under medicine’s purview is, implicitly if not explicitly, to present a vision of human agency, of the nature of the good life, of who deserves precious social resources like money and compassion. Such questions, of course, aren’t always pressing; the observation that a broken leg is a problem only in a society that requires mobility seems trivial.
But by virtue of its focus on our mental lives, and especially on our subjective experience of the world and ourselves, psychiatry, far more directly than other medical specialties, implicates our conception of who we are and how our lives should be lived. It raises, in short, moral questions. If you convince people that their moods are merely electrochemical noise, you are also telling them what it means to be human, even if you only intend to ease their pain.
A moment of commentary here: More than a portion of the rage this poster feels at the OP "situation" is most obviously not knowable by the reader and/or audience generally.
However it works out operationally, this poster was? is? an adopted simian. The adoptors didn't like, resemble, mirror or share commonality with the adopted, and the reverse being just as equally correct and accurate. But ethics are ethics, correct is correct and one's framework must inform them of what actions are appropriate regarding human suffering and their part in it or their part in minimizing it to their capacities.
The adoptive mother is currently institutionalized in the psychiatric wing of a nursing facility for advancing progressive Lewy Body dementia; the short of it being, her frontal lobes are functionally desiccating inside her skull, neuron by neuron. She was an educator for nearly 40 years, and the bitter irony of that should not be lost on any of the readership here. There is mercy in the ailment being of the frontal lobes, it prevents her from knowing that she is losing every identifying cognitive and affective mapping that made her who she ever was. I digress.
At the risk of being polemical, let me suggest that Harrington’s word disingenuous fails to describe the cynicism of Robert Spitzer, the editor of the DSM-3, who acknowledged to me that he was responding to the fact that “psychiatry was regarded as bogus,” and who told me that the book was a success because it “looks very scientific. If you open it up, it looks like they must know something.” Nor does ironic accurately describe the actions of an industry that touts its products’ power to cure biochemical imbalances that it no longer believes are the culprit. Plain bad faith is what’s on display, sometimes of outrageous proportion. And like all bad faith, it serves more than one master: not only the wish to help people, but also the wish to preserve and increase power and profits.
Robert Spitzer, exemplar of how academia can willingly shelter a charlatan, also purveyor of "homosexual therapy" To your own cognition and reading, to your own ends be it, but for this poster, it is long beyond past time to end this "faith based" propaganda campaign, and further overdue for the scientific community to excavate a spine from wherever lost pit it was first discarded. But as my closest friend, teacher and compatriot Schvagg reminds me, "monkey is gonna monkey, what can you do?"
B&B orig: 3/22/19
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