Posted by chujoe on July 13, 2010, at 12:09:56
In reply to Progress of Psychiatry, posted by violette on July 12, 2010, at 16:19:10
This is a fascinating discussion, though pretty depressing. I'm going to watch the video later this afternoon, but even before I do, I have a couple of questions, one "global" & one "local."
1. Is the history of psychiatry different in some fundamental way from the history of other branches of medicine?
2. Does the fact that psychiatric drugs change the chemistry & perhaps the anatomy of the brain automatically lead to the conclusion that such change is "damage"?
In no way should these questions be interpreted as questioning anyone's direct experience. I happen to think that the neo-Kraepelin paradigm is deeply flawed & has helped lead to the idea that all unusual mental states are always pathological; opposing this would be the opposing vier, championed by people like Richard P. Bentall, in which people who experience distress because of their, let us say, non-standard mental states are treated, both with drugs when appropriate, as well as with other sorts of psychological therapies. Once you get rid of the disease model & begin to concentrate on what Bentall calls "complaints," i.e., those things that cause distress, you are forced to treat each patient as a person, not a page from the DSM. Of course, this still leaves many people suffering, but it offers a kind of therapeutic honesty that is very hard to come by in the modern psychiatric industry.
poster:chujoe
thread:954237
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20100709/msgs/954321.html