Tell HN: My Brother Died Last Week. His Death Will Not Be In Vain

Perhaps we should should recognise an ill person cannot be held to the same standard expected of a well person, but can still be considered to have some degree of agency in their actions.

It's especially problematic because mental illness is a fault in your thoughts, and not in, say, your arms or legs. But you don't have thoughts in the way you have arms and legs - you actually are your thoughts.

Science has found biological symptoms for Alzheimer's and rabies. Unfortunately, these can only be firmly identified post-mortem and are thus not useful for diagnostic purposes. Just two examples if diseases with biological markers that are not useful.

> For instance, did you know that he was the first psychiatrist to claim publicly that homosexuality is not a disease? (In 'Sexual Inversion: The Multiple Roots of Homosexuality', ed. by Judd Marmor, Basic Books, 1965)

A broken clock is right twice a day. When you claim mental illness doesn't exist in toto, then of course you will be "right" about bullshit mental illnesses like homosexuality.

Excuse me, but what "formal background" is that? It's not as though psychology is a science, or that psychologists know what causes depression or how to treat it -- public evidence clearly proves they do not.

The field of psychology is such a disaster that the director of the NIMH recently ruled that the DSM (psychology's "bible") may no longer be used as the basis for scientific research proposals, for the simple reason that it has no scientific content. The director said:

Source: http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2013/transforming-dia...

Quote: "While DSM has been described as a “Bible” for the field, it is, at best, a dictionary, creating a set of labels and defining each. The strength of each of the editions of DSM has been “reliability” – each edition has ensured that clinicians use the same terms in the same ways. The weakness is its lack of validity."

"Unlike our definitions of ischemic heart disease, lymphoma, or AIDS, the DSM diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure. In the rest of medicine, this would be equivalent to creating diagnostic systems based on the nature of chest pain or the quality of fever. Indeed, symptom-based diagnosis, once common in other areas of medicine, has been largely replaced in the past half century as we have understood that symptoms alone rarely indicate the best choice of treatment. Patients with mental disorders deserve better. [emphasis added]

As to depression specifically, psychological treatments are notoriously ineffective, but alternative neuroscientific approaches like deep brain stimulation (DBS) are showing great promise. A recent flurry of treatment outcomes that apply deep brain stimulation lead to outcomes in which, by throwing a switch, a brain surgeon can literally turn depression on and off.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/02/magazine/02depression.html...

Quote: '"So we turn it on," Mayberg told me later, "and all of a sudden she says to me, 'It's very strange,' she says, 'I know you've been with me in the operating room this whole time. I know you care about me. But it's not that. I don't know what you just did. But I'm looking at you, and it's like I just feel suddenly more connected to you.' '

"Mayberg, stunned, signaled with her hand to the others, out of Deanna's view, to turn the stimulator off."

'"And they turn it off," Mayberg said, "and she goes: 'God, it's just so odd. You just went away again. I guess it wasn't really anything.'"'

I emphasize this procedure is still experimental and is not yet being offered as a clinical treatment. My point is that people need to get over their reverence for psychology -- it's not scientific, and there's no evidence that it is effective in any scientific sense.

This may come as a surprise to some, but within the mental health field, a revolution is taking place -- a revolution that intends to replace psychological treatments with neuroscientific ones.