"Mark M." <markm@voicenet.com> writes:
While the psychiatric profession has invented many bogus diseases, that does not mean that the profession has no credibility. Remember that psychology is little more than philosophy. Abnormal behavior patterns don't necessarily mean that a child has a disorder or disease. However, if the child experiences physical symptoms, then a chemical imbalance in the brain is not that farfetched.
There are, of course, real mental illnesses with underlying pathology, like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and clinical depression. I'm not sure the existence of genuine mental illness makes the psychiatric profession credible, however, when they are all too willing to climb in bed with the latest political fad. Recall those "experts" during World War I who explained with prefect seriousness to the American public that the reason the Germans' heads fit so well into those pointy helmets was that their brains were missing the part that distinguished right from wrong. Adolescent Psychiatric Imprisonment and Insurance Fraud are a multi-million dollar well-organized business in the United States, and talk shows are filled with women who split into 1,000 different personalities, some of them alien visitors, after being traumatized by some sexual oddity.
First of all, a child is considered to have "school phobia" when the child refuses to go to school and also has severe anxiety attacks, vomiting, and nausea.
Goodness gracious, you make these people sound almost reasonable. I remember last year one local TV station did a piece on "school phobia", and the wonderful drugs that could be used to treat it. The kid profiled simply didn't like school, and refused to attend it, and the list of symptoms given to help parents recognize the disorder were entirely attendance related. Of course, with enough Mellaril in your system, you can probably put up with just about anything.
Attention Deficit Disorder is hardly nonsense; it's a disorder found to be partly hereditary and strongly linked with clinical depression.
ADD people are simply the upper 5-10% of the population with regard to behavioral traits which make learning more difficult. Of course such things can be hereditary and of course people who can't live up to expectations placed upon them sometimes get clinically depressed. The thing to remember here is that we are looking at things which show continuous normal variation in any population, like height and hatsize, and the people who are being labeled and treated here are hardly some huge number of standard deviations away from the norm.
There are real illnesses, and there are fake ones. Just because the psychiatic profession does attribute certain behavior to some non-existent illness doesn't mean there is any reason to not believe in any psychological maladies.
Which of course is not the issue here. No one has stated that legitimate mental illness does not exist, merely that the profession has a tendency to use creative imagination where a market or political pressure exists.
It's surprising to me that people consider the Unabomber "insane" but yet do not believe that many very real mental illnesses and disorders exist.
Insanity is a legal term which by its very construction, is an almost impossible set of criteria to meet. It has nothing to do with any scientific definition of mental illness. You can be completely bonkers and carrying on meaningful conversations with wall ornaments, and the government will be more than happy to fry you in the electric chair. -- Mike Duvos $ PGP 2.6 Public Key available $ mpd@netcom.com $ via Finger. $