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pathologising normality? BBC radio prog on new DSM

chipmunk1

Senior Member
Messages
765
This was
great! I really enjoyed this. That's the thing about psychological labels. The possibilities are endless.

and the treatment options very limited.

Even up until 1971, simply being a homosexual could result in a life sentence. Twenty states had laws stating that the mere fact you were a homosexual was reason for imprisonment. In California (of all places) and Pennsylvania, we could be put away for life in a mental hospital. In seven states castration was permitted as a way to stop homosexual 'deviants.'
At Atascadero State Hospital, doctors (I use that term loosely) were permitted under an obscure California law to commit those who practiced sodomy into the hospital. Once admitted, normal men and women were rendered mentally disabled through the torture of castration, lobotomies, forced chemical treatments and experimental treatments. The horrors experienced by hundreds are almost too hard to comprehend in America.

http://www.davidmixner.com/2010/07/...f-lobotomies-castration-and-institutions.html
 
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SOC

Senior Member
Messages
7,849
Surfing the Internet according to psychiatry:

When the psychiatrist is using the Internet it is called: Research.
When the average person is using the Internet it is called: Using the Internet.
When someone with medically unexplained illness is using the Internet it is called: Reinforcement of false illness beliefs.
They do have their own language, don't they? They use the same words as the rest of us, but somehow all the meaning is different. And the complexity of their language! It's not just that there are gender issues you must understand, as in some languages, there's actually a profession/health factor. The words/phrases actually change based on profession or health status. So you need to know who you are talking about -- their profession and health status -- in order to use the correct word/phrase.

Asking questions or questioning authority
Psychiatrists/doctors -- skepticism
Patients -- harrassment

Saying something rude about a health group
Psychiatrists/doctors -- exhibiting care and concern for their mental health
Patients -- issuing death threats

English: The psychiatrist didn't believe what the patient said and claimed the was a lazy hypochondriac who needs to get off his ass, off disability, and back to work.

Psychologese:
The psychiatrist maintained a healthy skepticism about the patient's viewpoint while exhibiting care and concern for his mental health.

English:
The patient did not accept the doctor's psychologization of his condition and told the doctor that maybe she should get his condition so that she would have a better understanding of reality of it.

Psychologese:
The patient harrassed the doctor and issued death threats.

We could probably construct a fairly lengthy translation guide.

They really should stop calling their language English, though. It's causing too much confusion. It needs it's own name and possibly a university department. All psychology and pre-med students would be required to take at least one course in Psychologese. I can't decide, however, whether patients should be required to take a course in this foreign language so that they speak 'properly' to doctors and psychologists, or be forbidden from studying the language because they might figure out what is actually being said and become less compliant. :confused: This is so complicated!
 

Invisible Woman

Senior Member
Messages
1,267

In the late 1970s early '80s one of my sister's pals was dragged off to see a psychiatrist by his parents because he was gay. He was in his mid-late teens & I don't think he'd ever even had a boyfriend. He was given drugs and subjected to aversion therapy and within a few months went from being a normal guy who just liked having a laugh with his mates to being completely introverted. Then he committed suicide. As far as I know no complaint was ever made about the treatment he had received. Sometimes we forget how very thin the veneer of civilization really is.
 

Aurator

Senior Member
Messages
625
  • Noncompliance with dietary regimen
  • Noncompliance with fluid volume management
  • Patient declines colonoscopy
The full version runs:
  • Patient declines colonoscopy

  • Patient declines to follow up w colonoscopy
  • Patient refusal to follow up with colonoscopy
  • Refusal to follow up with colonoscopy by patient

WTH is the difference between the last two? Is the patient patient in the first one and less patient in the second?

The apparent obsession with colonoscopy makes the thing read like it was written by a single disgruntled gastroenterologist - disgruntled that patients don't want to give him/her the work.

I think failure to agree to a colonoscopy is sometimes seen as evidence that a patient who has reported symptoms of IBS does not wish it to be revealed, via a colonoscopy, that there is nothing abnormal with his or her bowel and that the patient therefore has only "functional dyspepsia", i.e. false illness beliefs.

The fact that there may be something else wrong with the patient which is causing the dyspepsia but which doesn't show up in gastroscopies/colonoscopies and is not psychological is not considered, apparently.

Therefore any patient (not just a PwME) who reports IBS symptoms and who gets an all-clear result from a colonoscopy will generally be in a worse position as far as having his or her illness taken seriously is concerned.

And they wonder why people decline colonoscopies.
 

SilverbladeTE

Senior Member
Messages
3,043
Location
Somewhere near Glasgow, Scotland
the Soviet Union, after Stalin's butchery ended, decided to use psychiatry as a means to deal with it's dissenters
so if you didn't agree with the Communist Party leadership, you thus had to be mentally disturbed and needed incarcerated in an asylum and pumped full of drugs!

the West HAS become a twisted mirrored version of the Soviet Union

"those who fight with monsters must beware, unless they become monsters, too"
 

SOC

Senior Member
Messages
7,849
In the late 1970s early '80s one of my sister's pals was dragged off to see a psychiatrist by his parents because he was gay. He was in his mid-late teens & I don't think he'd ever even had a boyfriend. He was given drugs and subjected to aversion therapy and within a few months went from being a normal guy who just liked having a laugh with his mates to being completely introverted. Then he committed suicide. As far as I know no complaint was ever made about the treatment he had received. Sometimes we forget how very thin the veneer of civilization really is.
:wide-eyed::jaw-drop::eek:
:(
:mad:
 

SOC

Senior Member
Messages
7,849
  • Patient refusal to follow up with colonoscopy
  • Refusal to follow up with colonoscopy by patient
WTH is the difference between the last two? Is the patient patient in the first one and less patient in the second?
Indeed! It's surprising impatient refusal is not included. :p Then they could label the patient as hostile and noncompliant. Surely it's more fun the more negative labels you can plaster on a patient.
 

MeSci

ME/CFS since 1995; activity level 6?
Messages
8,231
Location
Cornwall, UK
the Soviet Union, after Stalin's butchery ended, decided to use psychiatry as a means to deal with it's dissenters
so if you didn't agree with the Communist Party leadership, you thus had to be mentally disturbed and needed incarcerated in an asylum and pumped full of drugs!
It happened in apartheid South Africa too.

A South African friend of mine of European origin was put in a psychiatric institution because he refused to join the army and oppress the indigenous African people. He had a terrible time there, and I think it had a long-term effect on him.
 

jimells

Senior Member
Messages
2,009
Location
northern Maine
I think that the human species has always committed atrocities.

But not on the scale that we frequently see today - the technology of well-organized large-scale mass murder carried out by remote control is only a hundred years old (long-range artillery and aerial bombardment). Whenever I am tempted to think that maybe "Western Civilization" is not quite as ugly as it appears, I recall that in the US a majority *still* believes that torture is an acceptable state policy.


if you didn't agree with the Communist Party leadership, you thus had to be mentally disturbed and needed incarcerated in an asylum and pumped full of drugs!

Well obviously only a crazy person would stand up and defy the state - any "sane" person understands that resistance is futile and silent compliance is golden.

Certainly "we" are obligated to protect them from their self-damaging beliefs using whatever tools are available.
 

taniaaust1

Senior Member
Messages
13,054
Location
Sth Australia
The psych report I was given not long again, the psych decided that me taking the disability services to court for discrimination over ME/CFS, well it was decided by the psych that this was a psychological issue and she put it down in the report as being a special interest due to my Aspergers. **sighs she didn't get that I was taking them to court for terrible things they should be taken to court for**

Even worst,, this is a psych who did the report for a court case re my issues (this all happened even after a member of PR tried to advocate for me re the ME/CFS to the psych, I'd mark this post for her if I could remember her name).
 

SOC

Senior Member
Messages
7,849
Allen Frances, in Saving Normal, thinks that far too many children diagnosed with ADHD would simply have grown out of it, and that instead they get put on drugs that can have dangerous side effects, and often are put on them for very long periods of time.
I agree that far, far too many children are put on ADD meds not because they have true focus and concentration issues, but because they are more active than some parent or teacher wants them to be. At the same time, I've known a fair number of teenagers who were miserable trying to function without the ability to focus and concentrate whose lives were vastly improved with ADD meds. I will say, though, that none of those children were hyperactive (whatever that really is). They were all straight-up ADD.

So I can't follow the "ADD meds are worthless and dangerous" school. I think they are appropriate for a limited and very specific condition. I can, however, go along with the thinking that says several types of meds -- ADD meds and antidepressants, especially -- are grossly overprescribed. Altering neurochemistry when there isn't a flaw in it seems to be a very dangerous proposition.
 
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alex3619

Senior Member
Messages
13,810
Location
Logan, Queensland, Australia
Allen Frances discussed the ADHD situation in depth. Its clear, as with many psych meds, there is a subgroup who need it. Its also clear that diagnostic inflation often causes many to get meds who don't need it. One of the things that he says is apparent, and I have not investigated this, is that many children on these meds are simply too young, a little immature. They grow out of it - but under the current situation many are on meds before that happens.

A similar picture is emerging with depression and bipolar disorder. Many need the meds, but many are put on them and have long term issues when they would have been better off unmedicated. Psychiatry has not found answers to this problem, at least so far.
 

Hip

Senior Member
Messages
17,824
A similar picture is emerging with depression and bipolar disorder. Many need the meds, but many are put on them and have long term issues when they would have been better off unmedicated.

When it comes to adults, and probably to an extent for children too, there is free choice.

A psychiatrist may diagnosis you with bipolar, explaining that many of the horrible states of mind that have always inexplicably plagued you are caused by bipolar; and then may offer some medications that will hopefully improve the situation.

At least then you understand about yourself a bit more; you understand why you have these horrible depressive mental states; and at least then you have the option to try out the meds, to see if they are suitable. But it is up to you if you want to take them.

I have heard stories of some artistic bipolar patients stopping their meds, because although the meds reduced the severe depression that occurs in bipolar, they also reduced the euphoric and highly creative bipolar "high" — which the artist used to produce all their innovative work.