K
kim500
Guest
Let me give you an analogy. Let say a child has cancer. His parents take him to priest to pray for him. Nothing wrong with that. However if they took their child to the priest, and only to the priest, and not to a doctor you would say they were negligent. You might even say they were guilty of child neglect/abuse. So how is it a health service can send an ME/CFS patient for CBT and provide them with no other medical support? And yet we don't say the health service is abusing the patient. It doesn't make sense. Unless you take the position that ME/CFS is a mental disease (with physical manifestations).
This is an excellent analogy, on many levels. Indeed, psychiatry does position itself in society as having taken over the heroic domain of clergy in caring for the soul (now, in their view, that all that religious superstition has been banished - artists and poets sidelined too - in favour of the supposedly 'scientific' approach of psychiatry). Not that clergy or psychiatry are/were heroic - or had any deep caring for our souls - but that they imagine themselves as filling this heroic role in society. Parallels are disturbing - abusive clergy, abusive psychiatrists... Psychiatry remains far closer to the magical thinking of religion than anything remotely close to science. Problem is that religion is honest about it, psychiatry is not, pretending to be objective and scientific, yet devious and dishonest in methods and practice (in fairness, not all psychiatrists have this pretentious view of their field, but the Wessley-ites most certainly do).