The Old Curiosity Shop - Psychiatry

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Just in case any of us are in doubt that psychiatry continues to hold deeply prejudiced and anachronistic views (not to mention circular reasoning and oxymoronic concepts), look at the language they are still using:

"Researchers studied people with "schizotypal" personalities?-who act oddly, but aren't mentally ill?-and found they're more creative than either normal or fully schizophrenic people. To access their creativity, these people rely heavily on the right sides of their brains."
(Brad Folley and Sohee Park of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., published online last week by the journal Schizophrenia Research.)

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And what do you critisise especially here?

And why post this in "Philosophy & Debate"?

(Schizophrenia Research can be accessed only by subscription. Do you have a summary/link for that research?)

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Walter Hinteler wrote:

And what do you critisise especially here?

And why post this in "Philosophy & Debate"?

(Schizophrenia Research can be accessed only by subscription. Do you have a summary/link for that research?)

The philosophy, as I represented above, of psychiatry, is notably absent. THIS IS WHY IT IS POSTED HERE. I am not talking psychiatry shop.
Please, read what they say, slowly, before I list the mistakes of shoddy reasoning and dubious ethics.

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Re: The Old Curiosity Shop - Psychiatry

John Jones wrote:

Just in case any of us are in doubt that psychiatry continues to hold deeply prejudiced and anachronistic views (not to mention circular reasoning and oxymoronic concepts), look at the language they are still using:

"Researchers studied people with "schizotypal" personalities?-who act oddly, but aren't mentally ill?-and found they're more creative than either normal or fully schizophrenic people. To access their creativity, these people rely heavily on the right sides of their brains."
(Brad Folley and Sohee Park of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., published online last week by the journal Schizophrenia Research.)

If you want to make that point, go ahead, but you have to actually offer evidence, and not BS evidence like this.

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JJ-

I rely on the right side of my brain as well.Does that make me abnormal?

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Is that the right side as I feel it , or is it the right side as you face me? Im always confused about that.

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Maybe JJ's point is that "people who act oddly, but aren't mentally ill", are referred to as having "schitzotypal" personalities. I'd call them imaginative.

They're not "normal"... -what does that mean? I didn't think this word was still used without a specific definition.

The phrase is obviously written by people as alien to creativity as I am to the notion that I have a schitzotypal personality. I act oddly, but I'm not mentally ill. I know that creativity isn't "accessed", it is a character attribute one has or doesn't.

I don't know if these points were the ones JJ was trying to make, but they are what caught my attention at first glance.

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farmerman wrote:

Is that the right side as I feel it , or is it the right side as you face me? Im always confused about that.

Your question is anal retentive, farmerman. Razz

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Re: The Old Curiosity Shop - Psychiatry

Brandon9000 wrote:

John Jones wrote:
Just in case any of us are in doubt that psychiatry continues to hold deeply prejudiced and anachronistic views (not to mention circular reasoning and oxymoronic concepts), look at the language they are still using:

"Researchers studied people with "schizotypal" personalities?-who act oddly, but aren't mentally ill?-and found they're more creative than either normal or fully schizophrenic people. To access their creativity, these people rely heavily on the right sides of their brains."
(Brad Folley and Sohee Park of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., published online last week by the journal Schizophrenia Research.)

If you want to make that point, go ahead, but you have to actually offer evidence, and not BS evidence like this.

The work, by psychologists Brad Folley and Sohee Park of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., was published online last week by the journal Schizophrenia Research.

Psychologists believe a number of creative luminaries had schizotypal personalities, including Vincent Van Gogh, Albert Einstein, Emily Dickinson and Isaac Newton.

"The idea that schizotypes have enhanced creativity has been out there for a long time," but no one has studied how their brains work, Folley said. He and Park conducted two tests to compare the creative thinking processes of schizotypes, schizophrenics and "normal" people.
"All three groups, schizotypes, schizophrenics and normal controls, did use both hemispheres when performing creative tasks. But the brain scans of the schizotypes showed a hugely increased activation of the right hemisphere compared to the schizophrenics and the normal controls."
http://www.world-science.net/othernews/050906_weirdfrm.htm

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Re: The Old Curiosity Shop - Psychiatry
The research on schizotypal personalities betrays the deceitful intent of its researchers and the chaotic reasoning that commonly lies behind brain studies. They study 'odd' people, but to give credibility to their studies they give them the pseudo-scientific name 'schizotypal', which borrows the authoritative posing of the term 'schizophrenia'. The moral link is suspect. Another reason for using the quasi-material term 'schizotypal' is that they want to attribute oddness to something physical, which can then be given the label 'condition'. They then proceed to review odd (schizotypal) people in terms of what goes on in the odd (schizotypal) brain. They then assume that whatever they find in that brain is a schizotypal condition. They then say that the schizotypal condition causes schizotypal behaviour. This is circular reasoning.
It is also assumptive. There are no brain conditions exhibited by the brain. A 'condition' is not a phenomenon exhibited by the brain. If that were the case, any behaviour could be a condition. All they have really done is to map events in people's brains to the public's perception of personalities. To call the brain functioning associated with that mapping a 'condition' is either to honestly assert that conditions are social and not physical, or to assert that there is some strange extra-material process going on in the brain that distinguishes a condition from a non-condition.
We can see the moralistic roots of terms such as schizophrenia in this research simply by looking at the language they use. What qualifies as 'mad' (schiz-) must have the necessary condition of oddness (schiz-). Oddness is not a sufficient condition for madness, however, but that is another story.
Also to be found desperately wanting is the researchers ontology of being. The researchers imagine, or create, a false subject that accesses parts of the brain. How it does this without the brain is not told; neither are we told the supposed dwelling place of the false subject. We also have, as is usual in brain studies, the spurious practice of mixing terms derived from the paradigms of mind and matter. So, we have feelings affecting the brain, or the brain affecting feelings fed by a banquet of oxymorons (information, data, etc); or the nebulous 'I' uses the material brain to do something creative, for example. Creativity, and even behaviour is not found in a material world or in a material brain but is a term derived from the ways of humankind.
The researchers of brain studies apply common social prejudices under the veneer of science. The only science to be found is the techniques that have been developed for changing what people do or think. The prose that they supply for tacitly reinforcing social stereotypes, and the theories forwarded in support of that are superfluous, misleading and dangerous.

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Link to the abstract

Link to research-related report by Vanderbilt University

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The results of self-diagnosis are always intriguing.

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I wouldn't argue with that.

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ehBeth wrote:

The results of self-diagnosis are always intriguing.

I appeared spontaneously, so I never came with a model to diagnose myself by.

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I believe psychiatry is very much in its infancy. I myself have been admitted to psychiatric hospitals on four separate occasions (many years ago) - for 'clinical depression'.

I found the whole experience a depressingly incompetent farce. I almost felt embarrassed for the psychiatrists for their sheer ineptitude and their not having the slightest clue as to what to do about us lot in that section of the hospital.

Three of my fellow patients committed suicide during the three months that I was at one of these hospitals... and these occurred after several weeks of them having first been admitted as patients. Absolutely deplorable.

These in-patient psychiatric clinics were more in the nature of being warehouses for the emotionally and neurotically ill than anything that could reasonably be described as psychiatric treatment centres.

That was all over 30-years ago... and I believe since then very little has improved for the better. The clinics I attended survived mostly upon a regimen of bored indifference from the psychiatric staff whose most notable characteristic was their posture of mute acknowledgement for the hopelessness for their situation.

If there are any psychiatrists reading this - please sir - turn in your badge and go get yourself a real job of some use to the community.

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welcome to A2K herberts.

I agree with you concerninc psychiatrists. Not much separates "fraud" and "freud".... Sigmund Swindler.

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herberts wrote:

I believe psychiatry is very much in its infancy. I myself have been admitted to psychiatric hospitals on four separate occasions (many years ago) - for 'clinical depression'.

I found the whole experience a depressingly incompetent farce. I almost felt embarrassed for the psychiatrists for their sheer ineptitude and their not having the slightest clue as to what to do about us lot in that section of the hospital.

Three of my fellow patients committed suicide during the three months that I was at one of these hospitals... and these occurred after several weeks of them having first been admitted as patients. Absolutely deplorable.

These in-patient psychiatric clinics were more in the nature of being warehouses for the emotionally and neurotically ill than anything that could reasonably be described as psychiatric treatment centres.

That was all over 30-years ago... and I believe since then very little has improved for the better. The clinics I attended survived mostly upon a regimen of bored indifference from the psychiatric staff whose most notable characteristic was their posture of mute acknowledgement for the hopelessness for their situation.

If there are any psychiatrists reading this - please sir - turn in your badge and go get yourself a real job of some use to the community.

Of course the psychiatrists and nurses did not know what to do in the hospital. Well you tell me, how do you socialise with a chemical condition? You can't. The only thing that can be done for a chemical condition is to stand back and apply pills or apply conditioning behaviours. And another reason why they don't know what to do is that they do not know what they mean when they say that people can be 'ill' with an experience.
If you want to be part of the 'illness model' of experience then that's not up to anyone else, it's up to you.

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The vast majority in the psychiatric wards that I was in were not suffering from any kind of self-administered recreational drug-abuse psychosis or depression.

Basically all we ever did was sit and stare into the middle distance while the hospital staff would keep their fingers crossed and hope that we would soon all sign ourselves out for the sheer mindless boredom of the place... and because we could feel ourselves getting even more depressed by the day... and that's precisely what I did - despite the protests of my do-nothing psychiatrists.

My eldest brother suffered from schizophrenia. Same story - for 40-years the psychiatric profession could offer him nothing more inspirational than a miserable life of morbid depression and inertia while vegetating upon a bewildering cocktail of psychiatric drugs.

And then there was my mother... a hopeless anxiety-neurotic who the psychiatric profession didn't have a clue how to treat despite her being an outpatient for nigh on four decades. What they did accomplish with her, however, was to add to her woes by turning her into a prescription-drug addict for the greater part of her life.

Thanks guys. Psychiatrists should leave it to the psychiatric nurses - and go get themselves a real job... like driving taxis or cleaning the streets or something else that is a useful contribution to society.

Not impressed boys - not impressed at all.

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Thank you for your greetings, cyracuz. The psychiatric profession is filled with well-meaning and sincerely humanitarian individuals of exemplary character and laudable intentions - but speaking as one who has witnessed this branch of the medical profession from the perspective of a patient - I can honestly say that for all their fine and noble qualities - and their theoretical understanding of mental pathology - the vast majority of these beard-stroking medicos have not the vaguest clue as to how to effect a cure in their patients.

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herberts wrote:

The vast majority in the psychiatric wards that I was in were not suffering from any kind of self-administered recreational drug-abuse psychosis or depression.

Basically all we ever did was sit and stare into the middle distance while the hospital staff would keep their fingers crossed and hope that we would soon all sign ourselves out for the sheer mindless boredom of the place... and because we could feel ourselves getting even more depressed by the day... and that's precisely what I did - despite the protests of my do-nothing psychiatrists.

My eldest brother suffered from schizophrenia. Same story - for 40-years the psychiatric profession could offer him nothing more inspirational than a miserable life of morbid depression and inertia while vegetating upon a bewildering cocktail of psychiatric drugs.

And then there was my mother... a hopeless anxiety-neurotic who the psychiatric profession didn't have a clue how to treat despite her being an outpatient for nigh on four decades. What they did accomplish with her, however, was to add to her woes by turning her into a prescription-drug addict for the greater part of her life.

Thanks guys. Psychiatrists should leave it to the psychiatric nurses - and go get themselves a real job... like driving taxis or cleaning the streets or something else that is a useful contribution to society.

Not impressed boys - not impressed at all.

I just think that to agree with the concept of 'ill-thoughts' and to go along with terms like 'schizophrenia', dysfunctional, etc, is to play their game, and to give up the right to make complaints.

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The Old Curiosity Shop - Psychiatry

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