Re: terms (Psychiatrists, State,Liberty and Schizophrenia)

Errol Back-Cunningham (ebc@ix.netcom.com(Errol)
3 Oct 1996 03:08:35 GMT

In <3252D713.30F5@centuryinter.net> Al Porterfield
<porterfield@centuryinter.net> writes:
>
>Errol Back-Cunningham wrote:
>>
>> Just for those of you who were not aware - there is a perfectly
>> valid school of thought that maintains that the entire DSM
>> 'Diagnostic and Statistical Model) which
>> is based on it's Sacred Cow - 'schizophrenia' and all associated
>> terms - is completely bogus. It is a mechanism of control that
>> allows the medical/psychiatric profession to make money, control
>> elements of the public - often to the extent of infringing
>> civil liberties.
>>
>> [etc., etc., etc. Much deleted]
>>
>> Errol(Got my degree in psychology in 1982)
>>
>
>Oh PUHLEEZE! As Seymore Kety said years ago, if schizophrenia is a
myth,
>then it's a myth with a genetic component.

And what made him right?

>Your "perfectly valid school of thought" is, in fact, warmed over
Thomas
>Szasz.

No argument there.

His ideas about mental disorder generally, and schizophrenia in
>particular, didn't withstand serious scrutiny even when they were in
>vogue: And THAT was about a quarter century ago.

Serious scrutiny by whom? The guardians of the terminology?
The control freaks who decide who should be incarcerated?
The high priests of the institutions? Is there a sort of IQ gap
in which one side says we have more points than you - therefore we
are correct?

>And you even trot out the tired old Rosenhan study: The "normals" who
>gained admission to a mental hospital by LYING and saying that they
had
>symptoms that they didn't, in fact, have. And this remarkable piece of
>"science" proved... what? THAT YOU CAN CONFUSE A DIAGNOSTICIAN IF YOU
>LIE TO HIM/HER! Wow! What a revelation.

Nice to know they're human. But having confused them - can they
admit to making mistakes?

>One can only argue that the diagnosis of schizophrenia is nothing more
>than a sociopolitical label designed to disempower those who buck the
>status quo by ignoring an enormous body of good research accumulated
>over the past several decades that indicates otherwise. Is the
diagnosis
>without its problems? Not by a longshot. But the outdated ideas you
>floated in your post aren't worth the bits they're written in.

So we can fully expect the ideas now touted in the DSM to be
revered and honoured by the psychiatric practitioners in two hundred
years time?

Errol