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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)

#41

Post by astazangasta »

yellowstuff wrote: post #37
elbasti wrote: post #19

Szasz's "The Myth of Mental Illness" is one of those works which is completely and utterly misinterpreted simply because of the title. I don't have the book available at the moment, but in the introduction he says something to the effect of "I don't regret writing this book, but I regret calling it what I did, because people judge it without reading it." The gut-reaction to such a title is to think the writer is sayi…

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.

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

#42

Post by Kalium »

km3k wrote: post #24
elbasti wrote: post #19

Szasz's "The Myth of Mental Illness" is one of those works which is completely and utterly misinterpreted simply because of the title. I don't have the book available at the moment, but in the introduction he says something to the effect of "I don't regret writing this book, but I regret calling it what I did, because people judge it without reading it." The gut-reaction to such a title is to think the writer is sayi…

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…

> 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.

Yes. You are absolutely correct! It is pedantic.

It's also pedantry in pursuit of a point. By characterizing a group of symptoms as a disease, we coerce it into the mental model of a germ-caused disease. Which is to say there's one unifying and underlying cause, which can be ideally be addressed in a unified way that reflects the singular cause.

Szasz would not agree that Cystic Fibrosis is an illness. He would argue that it's thousands of illnesses with the same set of symptoms. His point would be that calling Cystic Fibrosis "an illness" is misleading and confuses people by denying the common understanding of a word.

The underlying point from Szasz being that illnesses need to be conceptualized in a meaningfully narrow way so that causes can be identified and a way to address them found. Otherwise medicine might wind up deeply invested in a quest to cure coughing and ignoring what coughing might be a symptom of.

Again, you're absolutely correct. The point at hand is incredibly pedantic. Might it also, perhaps, be a useful one as well?

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

#44

Post by drablyechoes »

yellowstuff wrote: post #37
elbasti wrote: post #19

Szasz's "The Myth of Mental Illness" is one of those works which is completely and utterly misinterpreted simply because of the title. I don't have the book available at the moment, but in the introduction he says something to the effect of "I don't regret writing this book, but I regret calling it what I did, because people judge it without reading it." The gut-reaction to such a title is to think the writer is sayi…

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…

The real difference is that a cancer diagnosis is probative (based on measurable, detectable underlying physical pathology) whereas a psychiatric diagnosis is not.

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

#45

Post by alain94040 »

elbasti wrote: post #19

Szasz's "The Myth of Mental Illness" is one of those works which is completely and utterly misinterpreted simply because of the title. I don't have the book available at the moment, but in the introduction he says something to the effect of "I don't regret writing this book, but I regret calling it what I did, because people judge it without reading it." The gut-reaction to such a title is to think the writer is sayi…

Correct, also known as the taxonomy mistake: just because you give something (here: symptoms) a name, doesn't mean you know what it is.

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

#46

Post by umvi »

dragonwriter wrote: post #28
elbasti wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But mental illness _is_ different from physical illness. That's the whole point. The dangerous thing is to presume that's not true. Or even worse: to lie about it. The phrase "chemical imbalance" comes to mind. Complete and utter fabrication of a physical cause. It may be that a physical cause is discovered for some conditions which today are considered "mental illnesses"... say, schizophrenia. Well, when that happen…

> But mental illness _is_ different from physical illness. No, it's not, it's a subset of physical illness. It's not even possible for it to be otherwise without magic.

> No, it's not, it's a subset of physical illness. It's not even possible for it to be otherwise without magic.

I think GP's point is that you can't determine a mental illness with physical characteristics/measurements. Can you diagnose schizophrenia with a blood test? X-Rays? Nope. Perhaps an MRI? Maybe, though AFAIK this still isn't really possible.

With physical illnesses it's easy. Broken bone. Cancer. Viral infection. All of these can be diagnosed without communicating to the patient at all, simply by making physical observations using chemistry and physics.

Not so with mental illness. With mental illness you basically have to just talk to the patient, take their word at face value, and then deduce based on symptom pattern matching. A determined fraudster could fake a mental illness, and it would be impossible for doctors to be able to tell AFAIK (correct me if I'm wrong), the same which cannot be said for tumors.

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

#47

Post by gmfawcett »

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?

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

#48

Post by Bjartr »

bellerose wrote: post #18

The more I read of psychiatry makes me lean towards the majority of it being pseudoscience. Finances play the most important role in suicidal ideation but nothing is ever done for the people suffering from suicide attempts besides placing them in a facility for an extended period and medicating them. Some of the drugs have even been shown to induce gambling. How in the world does someone escape a life where all the c…

> Stress is definitely the deciding factor in if a person can stay happy

You make some interesting points, but I will say that you can absolutely become, and remain, unhappy even while living a stress-free life. So while stress is absolutely an important factor, it is not "the deciding factor"

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

#49

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#50

Post by briancleland »

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

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