Thursday, January 05, 2006
Dangerous Philosophy
Psychiatry's sick compulsion: turning weaknesses into diseases - Los Angeles Times: "The association specializes in turning ordinary human frailty into disease. In the last year, ads have been appearing in psychiatric journals about possible treatments for shyness, a 'syndrome' not yet officially recognized as a disease. You can bet it will be in the next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM-IV, published by the association. As it turns out, the association has been inventing mental illnesses for the last 50 years or so... The last thing the United States needs is more self-indulgent, pseudo-insightful, overly self-conscious babble about people who can't help themselves. Better, as Voltaire would put it, to cultivate our gardens and be accountable for who and what we are. "
Irwin may have a great resume, but he does not one bit of good with this. What one can recognize when they read this is his luck. He is lucky not to have to deal with the type of depression that my grandmother did. She was depressed for years. There was no medicine or diagnosis to help her as there would be today. Had she been a part of the next generation, her life would have been markedly better. Note that I said better and not happier. Anti-depressants are not happy pills as is suggested in the uneducated press. Here is an educated man who should know better. Depression, as we know it now, is a chemical deficiency that people are born with and have no control over. This man suggests that my late grandmother was just a weak woman, but he clearly did not know her. I didn't either, but those who did insist that this woman was smart, strong, and anything but weak. Now I feel badly for his students who will come out of his counsel with a misconception that will be dangerous for their patients in the future.
Irwin may have a great resume, but he does not one bit of good with this. What one can recognize when they read this is his luck. He is lucky not to have to deal with the type of depression that my grandmother did. She was depressed for years. There was no medicine or diagnosis to help her as there would be today. Had she been a part of the next generation, her life would have been markedly better. Note that I said better and not happier. Anti-depressants are not happy pills as is suggested in the uneducated press. Here is an educated man who should know better. Depression, as we know it now, is a chemical deficiency that people are born with and have no control over. This man suggests that my late grandmother was just a weak woman, but he clearly did not know her. I didn't either, but those who did insist that this woman was smart, strong, and anything but weak. Now I feel badly for his students who will come out of his counsel with a misconception that will be dangerous for their patients in the future.
