The Philosophy of Psychiatry
 

Why

Why not?

Damn. That was my first thought and you beat me to posting it :(

Psychiatry not psychology.

Two completely different things.

So you mean, why is there such a practice as psychiatry? Why does it exist?

Yes, I'm aware that they're two different things.

Yep.

It wasn't a rhetorical question.

Psychiatry is the sort of thing that ultimately "means well", but there is so much still unknown about the human mind that it certainly has a habit of generalizing and lumping things into neat, tidy boxes. A lot of times, that's not the case. New disorders are discovered all the time - it branches out and diagnoses are steadily made more succinct, but it's still got a long way to go, ultimately.

I'd imagine that the practice came into play as a way to try to understand why undesirables, e.g. rapists and murderers existed, and to try to find a way to treat the more severe issues. It ultimately may have spun out of control, taking differences in behavior which are predominately harmless, such as ADD, and trying to make everyone more similar - which is kind of a terrifying notion.

As I said, it has come a long way - certain medications do well with certain disorders. When drugs were developed for illnesses such as schizophrenia, many people who would less than a century ago have spent their entire lives in a psychiatric institution where lobotomies and things of the sort were considered treatment were able to leave, living more or less regular lives.

I think the whole point is probably, at this point, to attempt to allow people to exist normally in society, although individuality seems progressively to be more and more frowned upon. With so much unknown about how the human mind really works, their idea of normalcy may be so far from correct that they could be doing more harm than good.

Psychiatry = Psychology + drugs. Duh.

Again: why not?

I'm not being snarky or silly here, I want some people to step up and defend it for what it actually is.

I'm done projecting. :)

You should say exactly what you think it "actually is" then. You're obviously opposed to it? ThePhantasio's response gives some defense. I'll give some more (albeit vaguely) by saying that a good number of human brains just don't benefit the well-being of their accompanied body very well and sometimes psychiatric drugs make them work better. Are you gonna go Scientologist on us and say otherwise?

Thread brought to you by this guy:

http://www.criminon.org/about-us/ima...on-hubbard.jpg

Stop giving out lucifer_sam's personal info.

Nope, not remotely in the slightest. Just curious how other people perceive "disordered" minds.

I actually harbor much of the same sentiment as ThePhanastasio, but I've come to recognize that it's just laziness on behalf of the individual. The best psychiatrist I ever talked to equipped me with the tools to get my shit together by IGNORING ME.

Give a man a fish and he never learns how to wipe the shit off his shoes.

lolololol

Don't worry my manifesto is all open sourced.

You can't make that assumption just based on your own experiences. You seem like a smart guy; not everyone can deal with things on their own. Everyone responds differently and often times the case is a chemical imbalance in the brain that can be greatly helped by drugs, or can be greatly helped through therapy.

duh.

What point are you trying to make in this thread?

Like a lot of allopathic medicine, Psychiatry seems to be aimed at eradicating the symptom rather than examining the root cause of certain disorders. We have a multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical industry that seems to be getting rich off the fact that most would rather take a pill and manipulate their neurotransmitters than to make an effort to change their lifestyle in a positive matter, which usually does much better in addressing the root cause of whatever perceived disorder they're experiencing in the first place.

Do you think some/most/all disorders have root causes that can be treated with therapy/lifestyle changes though? I don't think your last statement can be applied broadly.

I didn't make any references to therapy.
Therapy works for some [people and circumstances] and not for others.

Yeah I changed it to lifestyle changes a second ago. How often do you think mental disorders can be cured or at least aided without the use of drugs? I think drugs are needed in alot of cases.

How many do I think can be at the very least improved without the use of drugs? Most, if not all of them, but I'm not really qualified to say.

A significant improvement though? Yes, positive lifestyle chanes can definitely help, but sometimes drugs are simply needed to help along the process. It's the way you balance drugs and lifestyle changes and/or therapy to see a maximum benefit. Just considering depression and GAD, many people just don't have the proper serotonin levels to be able to cope, so SSRIs enable them to achieve the maximum benefit.

Why do people with depression and anxiety not have proper Serotonin levels? Are the lower serotonin levels a manifestation of the respective disorder, or vice versa?

I have no idea. That's a good question though. All I know is that there's a strong correlation between the two.

Well, it's a very important question to answer. When someone is trapped in a burning building we don't have a tailor outfit him with an asbestos suit and leave him inside the structure fire, but this is simply an apt metaphor for using SSRIs or MAOIs to treat depression. Unless the depression itself is congenital, there must be a root cause for the imbalance. Address the root cause of of the imbalance and you actually productively address the disorder, not just the symptom(s) of the disorder.

If it were the case that the disorder itself caused the unbalanced serotonin levels, who's to say that the root cause is something that can be treated with lifestyle changes anyways, and not something that can be treated by some other chemical means? These are hypotheticals though. It would be best to get the answer to that question.

That's a pretty fucking big "unless" friend.

Why?

If you guys hadn't cottoned on yet,

I actually AM a victim of child abuse.

Because, now and in all of human history, there are probably vast numbers of people who suffer from congenital mental disorders. I'm not qualified to presume how many people suffer from congenital symptoms versus environmental ones. That is, I'm not a trained psychiatrist but congenital mental disorders certainly abound.

Environmental in your case, then?

You cowardly piece of shit. I hope I never see you in real life.

I'm sorry that you had to go through the experiences that you went through in your childhood and I hope that the tools that you spoke of earlier in the thread have helped you to deal with what must have been a very difficult trauma. I can't even imagine. I'm sorry, I sincerely am.

However, Engine did his best to take the bombshell that you dropped in the middle of the this thread and and make it relevant to what we were currently discussing. Could he have been more sensitive? Probably, but it doesn't give you the right in any way to call him a piece of shit. He did nothing to attack you whatsoever.

Yeah fair call Satch. I'm really sorry to hear Sam, I hope you are okay.

At the end of the day though, not everyone knows how to react to such a serious situation. I just hope you are able to move forward and not let it rule your life.

I'm sorry it happened to you, Sam.

I'm no expert on this topic, but I definetly believe that biology plays a big part in our mental health. We're differently equipped from start when it comes to handling stress, empathy and so on. I think things like empathy also need stimulation from environment, just like language skills do, so of course it's a mix of factors.

I believe when people are sick from chemical imbalance, a change in lifestyle can help most. A change in diet (quite important I think, sugar, milk, wheat and so on has shown to negatively affect mental health) and learning better ways to emotionally deal with stressful situations for example. Still, there are cases where people who feel perfectly fine on medicine believe they can stop taking them and descend back into psychosis, so I'm also open to the idea that some people just need to be medicated. Perhaps environment could be changed for them in such a way that they might not get sick had it changed sooner, but that it's too late as an adult.

Generally, I believe psychiatry helps a lot of people.

edit :

Also, when it comes to the mentally uncurable, people who don't respond to treatment and who don't function in society and at worst are likely to be harmful to others and themselves, how should society treat them?

I'm very curious about the causation of chemical imbalances as it relates to environmental and experiential stimuli and the brains ability to normalize itself, or recover on a chemical level. At what point does the brain lose it's ability to bring these imbalances back into equilibrium on its own? I'm not even sure if that's an answerable question.

Mental disorders in general do have strong genetic components and so inheritance is definetly important (imo). During my biology studies, I met a guy who was schizophrenic with tourettes syndrome. His life was controlled by tics and obsessive compulsive acts. He couldn't just turn a light off or walk up a flight of stairs. We spoke about his disease and he made it pretty clear that both his parents were sick the same way (probably their sickness brought them together) and that he was bound to end up the same way. He never mentioned any trauma during his life, although he could of course have kept it secret.

The last time I saw him, I noticed that he seemed much better and I asked him if he had changed his medication. He said that he had just become better on his own and that it was something his doctors had predicted would happen as well. Appearantly, he was worst during puberty (because of the hormonal/physical changes) and got better the further away he got from that point in his life.

I married a Yank and moved to NYC where I lived for a time and almost, and I do mean almost, everyone I met and talked to had a shrink. Is it very common in America? As a Brit, the concept that somebody else (a shrink) knows how a person should live their life better than the person living their life is, well, it seems bordering of insane.