[MD] Sickness and Death

[Christoffer Ivarsson]

> [Chris]
> And now I'm reading about the development of psychiatric care in Europe
> and Sweden. To put it bluntly, it's really fucked up stuff. And I'm
> not referring to the treatment of the patients as such, but rather
> the foundation that psychiatric is based on. I mean, they are trying
> to cure the mind by looking at the body. Mind-Matter, Mind-Matter,
> for thousands of years they have kept at it, and not gotten one step 
> closer.
> When will they understand?
> I keep having to go out for air when I read about it. Also I suspect the
> professor in charge of this particular class will find my paper on it
> somewhat. bitter. So be it.
>
> Sickness and Death of the mind. Pff. I need a cigarette.
>
> [Krimel]
> I don't know much about the situation in Europe but I do know that in the 
> US
> treating mental illness as a disease has proven far more effective than
> anything else ever attempted in this area. The advent of psychiatric
> medications in the middle of the 20th century began to reduce the 
> population
> of mental patients in mental institutions dramatically. The newer
> generations of these medications target problems much more effectively and
> hospitalizations have continued to decline. For other forms of mental
> problems, particularly epilepsy and other seizure disorder the surgeries
> performed are radical and terrifying but they also save lives.
>
> Certainly there have been many unfortunate problems and solutions that 
> were
> worse than the problems they sought to solve. But there is every reason to
> regard mental illness as rooted in physical causes in a great many cases 
> and
> it is simply not true that progress in the treatment of these diseases has
> not been made. In fact the opposite is true.

Far be I from denying the benefits of medical science. That is not what this 
is about though. I'm just pointing out that for example:

DSM-IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) now consist 
of some 950 pages, and virtually every part of human behaviour can be 
diagnosed as some sort of mental disorder.

What is these diagnoses based on? Nothing. Air. At least that is the case 
with some 90% of them, and this has been the way psychiatry has worked 
since- forever. A diagnosis is made from observing a behaviour in a human, 
then comes the conclusion that this must be due to some dysfunction in the 
body (or the mind if we go over to psychology).

And then everything is a illness all of a sudden. Not reflecting over the 
fact that "illness" is a human invention and exists nowhere else but in 
human thinking, materialistic psychiatry goes on to see everything as 
functions (even thought they cannot prove it, it must be so!) and the list 
of what is a mental disorder grows ever longer.

With a MOQ view we would identify it as diagnoses based on social level 
Values.  And the major problem is that psychiatry is working on the very 
mind/matter split that everybody takes for granted - and not surprisingly 
things get a little dysfunctional in psychiatry itself (what ARE they 
actually handling?)

Regards

Chris