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A psychiatrist who didn’t believe in mental illness (2013)

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Re: A psychiatrist who didn’t believe in mental illness (2013)

#61

Post by gmfawcett »

briancleland wrote: post #50
gmfawcett wrote: post #47

I wish I could remember the title and author, but this reminds me of an (unrelated) book on pain management, where the author's thesis is that most musculoskeletal pain is psychosomatic: you can essentially will yourself out of chronic pain once you accept this statement as fact. Does anyone recall the book I'm talking about?

John Sarno perhaps? I found his method very effective. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JVDj2rEOas

Yes, thank you, I think that's the one!

I had no idea there was a documentary film about him. Thanks very much for sharing that.

Re: A psychiatrist who didn’t believe in mental illness (2013)

#62

Post by honkycat »

dang wrote: post #8
_zskd wrote: post #6

Of course the #hustle obsessed hacker news crowd would love this title. "Mental illness is fake! Mentally different people are just whiny and inferior, not a legitimate illness. Depressed people need to just stop it." What a load of crap. This article does a poor job of laying out Szasz's actual beliefs. Szasz sounds like a right-wing wonk and little else. He has since been proven completely wrong in the 50 years sin…

Can you please stop posting rants to HN? They're not what this site is for, and you've done it a lot, unfortunately. Your non-rant comments are fine. HN is for intellectual curiosity—see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html .

That is a fair criticism.

I have a lot going on in my life right now, and some of that stress is leaking out into my social media. I've deleted my twitter recently for similar reasons. If I could scramble my HN username and delete the account, I would do that until I'm in a better place.

I will try to do better in the future.

Re: A psychiatrist who didn’t believe in mental illness (2013)

#63

Post by Digit-Al »

elbasti wrote: post #26
km3k wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't read the book, but from your summary it sounds like the argument is that for illnesses that we don't yet understand well enough to cure or even have a potential cure, we should use a different word. That sounds pedantic. There's many non-mental diseases that we don't yet understand fully enough to know how to cure completely. There are many diseases where there are varied causes of the disease, where we are…

> but I don't like confusing people by trying to deny the common understanding of a word. I think that's actually the crux of the argument. The phrase "mental illness" IS the perversion of a common understanding of a word. When people hear "illness" they think "thing that is broken". Is a runny nose an illness? No, the flu is an illness. I don't think it's about whether we fully understand the cause or not; I think i…

If I'm understanding your argument correctly then you are basically saying that what we currently call mental illnesses are in fact symptoms and we have yet to determine what they are symptoms of.

Would that be a correct interpretation of your thoughts?

Re: A psychiatrist who didn’t believe in mental illness (2013)

#64

Post by amanaplanacanal »

astazangasta wrote: post #41
yellowstuff wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The book "The Emperor of all Maladies" doesn't put it in those exact terms, but makes it clear that essentially the same is true of cancer. Cancer is a symptom of many kinds of health problems, not a single disease that responds to a single treatment. If we understood bleeding as poorly as we understood cancer, then everything from R&D for better bandages to public campaigns to reduce gun violence would be lumped tog…

There is a difference, that cancer has a biological cause (a genetic lesion). "Mental illness", e.g. schizophrenia, has no such origin in a bodily abnormality.

What? How do you know that? That doesn't seem like something you can say is known.

Re: A psychiatrist who didn’t believe in mental illness (2013)

#65

Post by GuB-42 »

new12345 wrote: post #55
GuB-42 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cancer is a class of well identified diseases. Like a bacterial infection. There are many types of cancer just like there are many types of bacterial infection. But they are both well identified. We can see the cancer cells and bacteria, and when they are gone, the patient is cured. Mental illnesses are more like the "flu-like syndrome". The causes can range from leukemia to heroin withdrawal to a wide variety of vir…

Cancer is no where close to "well identified disease". Bacterial infection is one as we understand what causes it and that's why we have been successfully able to bring down the number of bacterial infection cases by educating folks on how and what to avoid. Its not the case for cancer(or we intentionally ignoring the cause here) whose numbers are rapidly increasing every year.

We have a pretty good idea of what causes cancer, and unfortunately, time and random chance are the biggest factors. You can lower the odds by following some recommendations but unless something else kills you first (probably your heart), you will get it eventually.

Also, once it's there, we know it's there, and we know exactly how to cure it: destroy all the cancer cells. The hard part is doing it without killing you in the process, and making sure that not a single cell is left in the end.

Re: A psychiatrist who didn’t believe in mental illness (2013)

#66

Post by astazangasta »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #64
astazangasta wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a difference, that cancer has a biological cause (a genetic lesion). "Mental illness", e.g. schizophrenia, has no such origin in a bodily abnormality.

What? How do you know that? That doesn't seem like something you can say is known.

How about, "after decades of searching using all of the best available tools, none has been found".

Re: A psychiatrist who didn’t believe in mental illness (2013)

#68

Post by amanaplanacanal »

astazangasta wrote: post #66
amanaplanacanal wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? How do you know that? That doesn't seem like something you can say is known.

How about, "after decades of searching using all of the best available tools, none has been found".

We know that some mental illnesses have a genetic component. How would that happen if there were not something physical?

Just because we don't know now, doesn't mean we will never know. That's how science works.

Re: A psychiatrist who didn’t believe in mental illness (2013)

#69

Post by gmfawcett »

wiry-bulb wrote: post #52
gmfawcett wrote: post #47

I wish I could remember the title and author, but this reminds me of an (unrelated) book on pain management, where the author's thesis is that most musculoskeletal pain is psychosomatic: you can essentially will yourself out of chronic pain once you accept this statement as fact. Does anyone recall the book I'm talking about?

http://www.neuroplastix.com/styled-4/aboutus.html Maybe Dr. Moskowtizs. His technique is the subject of chapter 1 in Norman Doidge’s “The Brain’s Way of Healing”

Thank you for this.

Re: A psychiatrist who didn’t believe in mental illness (2013)

#70

Post by AchieveLife »

elbasti wrote: post #59
AchieveLife wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No. The we think "I've been diagnosed with a disease. (Sorry I'm being an a-hole|I won't go to your party|didn't get out of bed, I suffer from bipolar and there's no cure". Straw man argument and incredibly insensitive. The proposed causation between diagnosis and excuse making behavior is ridiculous. People will make excuses regardless of their knowledge of a diagnosis. It's about what they _want_ to do and their…

Agree it sounded (and probably is) insensitive. I think a different comment expressed this more clearly, by saying "that there's a certain fatalism that one experiences once they've been "diagnosed" with mental illness."

Right.

I argue that the right education about mental health applied to the mass population would greatly mitigate the occurrences of many if not all of the arguments here.

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