Diagnosing in the Dark: Assault on Psychiatric pretense

TheyKnowMyIP

Came across a couple of interesting articles today:
link1 link2

Trying to defuse the problems with this field by calling people who questions Biological Psychiatry as a Scientologist is simply absurd. Psychiatry needs to reinvent it's perception, perhaps even merge with Neurology. The current abuse simply can't continue.

Do you believe this article to be sensationalist rubbish, or does it raise some valid points?

5uspect

Scientologist? Absurd? What?

cavedave

There are valid questions about Psychiatry. If you ask how it acted in the recent past in Ireland in locking up many people whose sole problem was not conforming to a very authoritarian society. Or if you look with how it is used in Russia now to lock up political dissidents.

These questions are looked at by Psychiatrists Szasz' "The myth of mental illness" for example. Psychiatry is not a science it does not claim to make falsifiable predictions in the sense that there is no blood test for mental illness and almost by definition their cannot be.

Scientology may not be an entirely honest broker here. Even looking its wikipedia page (which will have been scrubbed heavily to make scientology look good) you can see that it looks like Scientology is so anti psychiatry because L Ron Hubbard was diagnosed with mental illness.

Whenever we disagree with someone they are nuts, crazy or mental. This is evidence that we use mental illness as a way we can ignore peoples opinions. Does this mean that schizophrenia does not exist? I dont think so, But I do think it means we should be really careful to avoid the trap of just calling anyone we disagree with crazy and locking them up.

The struggle for definition is veritably the struggle for life itself. In the typical Western two men fight desperately for the possession of a gun that has been thrown to the ground: whoever reaches the weapon first shoots and lives; his adversary is shot and dies. In ordinary life, the struggle is not for guns but for words; whoever first defines the situation is the victor; his adversary, the victim. For example, in the family, husband and wife, mother and child do not get along; who defines whom as troublesome or mentally sick?...[the one] who first seizes the word imposes reality on the other; [the one] who defines thus dominates and lives; and [the one] who is defined is subjugated and may be killed.

Szasz