[deleted] t1_ir1r160 wrote on October 4, 2022 at 6:24 PM

[deleted]

No_Bison_3116 OP t1_ir2336a wrote on October 4, 2022 at 7:38 PM

Psychiatry is a fundamentally political project masquerading as a medical specialty and as scientific. It's impossible for Psychiatry to be scientific because it can only make historically and culturally bound propositions about it's patients or subjects. History is chronotopic which is the opposite of science and philosophy etc...

"What one thinks psychiatrists are up to depends crucially on what one thinks their patients are up to; and the latter question cannot be answered without taking an essentially political stand on what constitutes a “reasonable” response to a social situation."

Ingelby, D. (1980) ‘Understanding “Mental Illness”’, in Ingelby, D. (Ed.), Critical Psychiatry: The Politics of Mental Health (pp. 23–71). New York: Pantheon Books.

"Psychiatric diagnosis can be understood as functioning as a political device, in the sense that it legitimates a particular social response to aberrant behaviour of various sorts, but protects that response from any democratic challenge.”

Moncrieff, J. (2010) ‘Psychiatric Diagnosis as a Political Device’, Social Theory & Health, 8(4): 370–382.

So what is the real purpose of psychiatry in the Capitalist system ?

The capitalist class seeks to avoid responsibility for the many problems it causes, so it frames pain and suffering as somehow natural and inevitable. Psychiatry supports capitalism by ‘diagnosing’ socially-created problems as individual cognitive or biological defects, providing pseudoscientific ‘evidence’ for blaming the victims of the system. To use Erving Goffman’s metaphor, if capitalism is a con game, then the role of psychiatry is to ‘cool the losers’ of the system so they don’t squawk, expose the con, and take their revenge.

The medications 'work' by sedating or 'cooling off' the losers of the Capitalist system.

jerfo t1_ism7zgq wrote on October 17, 2022 at 12:54 AM

I disagree with what you posit here. While some disorders are certainly caused by a diseased capialist system that fails to grant agency and achievemt to the vast majority there are several other diseases which arise independent of whichever socioeconomic framework, i.e. those which have a strong connection to genes (such as ADHD), neurological damage (such as certain frontal lobe syndromes), circuitry disfunction (such as OCD) and so on.

No_Bison_3116 OP t1_isnfuz9 wrote on October 17, 2022 at 8:17 AM

1.)Frontal lobe damage and general brain damage is caused by psychiatric medications e.g. neuroleptics.

2.)There are no tests for 'mental disorders' including no genetic tests.

3.)Brain circuitry dysfunction is the new pseudo-scientific fad of psychiatry. Has it been disproven yet like chemical imbalance theory ?No, but the onus of proof is on Psychiatry not their opposition.

ADHD and OCD are some of the most clear cut cases of disorders serving the neoliberal capitalist class :

The contemporary moment of labelling children with mental disorders is strongly related to the requirements of late capitalism for compliant, disciplined, and higher-skilled workers.

Neo-liberal governance is typified by its emphasis on citizen involvement as individuals take independent action and become enterprises (or entrepreneurs) unto themselves and in a sense police themselves by internalising and enacting prevailing truths about the identification and management of risks … Neo-liberalism depends on self-governance (or in the case of children, governance by parents and similar authorities). For instance, mothers increasingly turn to … individualising children’s (mis)behaviour as disordered through mental illness discourse, of which attention deficit disorder (ADD)/Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is the most prevalent around the globe today.

In case you don't know neoliberalism is the current mode of late Capitalism.

jerfo t1_isup2l0 wrote on October 18, 2022 at 8:53 PM

I will just answer to the first assertion since this is clearly not a constructive debate: Frontal lobe damage a d general brain damage CAN be caused by neuroleptics as well as trauma (such as concussion, diffuse axonal damage, etc), metabolic imbalances (hyperammonemia, etc.) Nutritional deficits (chronic vitamin b deficiency), and a very very long list of more causes.