When you put it like this, something that springs to mind is the way that a group establishing authority in this way uses fear mongering about the most extreme possible outcomes to garner some of the support they can't get because of the evidence they don't have. So, people learned to (think they) need psychiatry and it's tools to deal with extreme symptoms - words like psychopathy and psychosis, which in reality for most people are a distant concept, but which I think represent what scares people about this in that way that "the other" always scares people. I do wonder how those things are weaponised to open the door to let the idea in, so that no one ever notices Sagan's Razor.
It's not terribly unlike weight loss science, in that way.
Jess this is brilliant. Absolutely amazing. You've summarized psychiatry's flawed fundamentals accurately, elegantly and dispassionately. There used to be an "anti-psychiatry" movement. The film "One flew over the cuckoo's nest" grew out of it. But that was in the 1980's. In the meantime, psychiatry has got stronger because, I think, of Big Pharma. And because the sum total of human knowledge about how people function (or not) still has a long way to go. But there have been huge gains. Advances in the technology enable us to see inside the living brain, the Romanian orphans and advances in neuroscience have generated a different view. It's time to stop using the term "mental health." It's time for a paradigm-shift: rather than "What's wrong with you?" it's now "What happened to you?" (Ironically enough, from child psychiatrist, Dr Bruce Perry).
When you put it like this, something that springs to mind is the way that a group establishing authority in this way uses fear mongering about the most extreme possible outcomes to garner some of the support they can't get because of the evidence they don't have. So, people learned to (think they) need psychiatry and it's tools to deal with extreme symptoms - words like psychopathy and psychosis, which in reality for most people are a distant concept, but which I think represent what scares people about this in that way that "the other" always scares people. I do wonder how those things are weaponised to open the door to let the idea in, so that no one ever notices Sagan's Razor.
It's not terribly unlike weight loss science, in that way.
Jess this is brilliant. Absolutely amazing. You've summarized psychiatry's flawed fundamentals accurately, elegantly and dispassionately. There used to be an "anti-psychiatry" movement. The film "One flew over the cuckoo's nest" grew out of it. But that was in the 1980's. In the meantime, psychiatry has got stronger because, I think, of Big Pharma. And because the sum total of human knowledge about how people function (or not) still has a long way to go. But there have been huge gains. Advances in the technology enable us to see inside the living brain, the Romanian orphans and advances in neuroscience have generated a different view. It's time to stop using the term "mental health." It's time for a paradigm-shift: rather than "What's wrong with you?" it's now "What happened to you?" (Ironically enough, from child psychiatrist, Dr Bruce Perry).