2005-06-22
NEURAL NETWORKS
The Neurology of metaphor was something that Kathryn Cramer took interest in researching recently, and she came up with a number of interesting abstracts |
One, on mental illness, struck my interest in particular | Mental Illness as the Unicorn, noted on PubMed questions "...that unwanted, hard-to-understand behavior constitutes true medical illness..." | The full abstract reads:
Don't misunderstand this, please | I don't fully subscribe to the "...no such thing as mental illness..." point of view [though I've got more respect for Thomas Szasz, more so than I do for the forced treatment proponents Sally Satel or E Fuller Torrey] But I do believe that psychiatry works harder at mystifying what they do not themselves understand, than they do to find out answers, so as to appear to be more learned than they actually are |
Tomorrow I'll have to ask the hospital's librarians to get the whole article for me to read | ¶ 02:26
The Neurology of metaphor was something that Kathryn Cramer took interest in researching recently, and she came up with a number of interesting abstracts |One, on mental illness, struck my interest in particular | Mental Illness as the Unicorn, noted on PubMed questions "...that unwanted, hard-to-understand behavior constitutes true medical illness..." | The full abstract reads:
Basic research, particularly into the psychological and neurological underpinnings of schizophrenia and other "mental illnesses," is flawed because of its adherence to the ideology that unwanted, hard-to-understand behavior constitutes true medical illness. It is argued here that psychiatric diagnostic terms represent moral judgments rather than medical entities. By reducing experimental subjects to a moral label, and assuming that neurological differences associated with unwanted behavior are brain diseases, researchers fail to take into account the conscious experience, organization of self and self-image, patterns of motivation, history and social contexts of their patients. The failure to consider the psychology of their subjects renders the results of these studies ambiguous and irrelevant for any uses except bolstering the biomedical model of psychiatry.I'm doubly intrigued that the abstract's author identifies him only as "Simon L" | In the supposedly protective environment of mental health facilities, great lengths are sometimes take to shield the patient/victim, including the practice of omitting full details on a person's identity | Looked at from another perspective, if the client wants full recognition of their own personhood, this kind of limitation on identity plays into the public's negative perceptions about folks experiencing profound psychic/perceptual/cognitive/spiritual discontinities so jarring as to be characterized as "mental illnesses" |
Don't misunderstand this, please | I don't fully subscribe to the "...no such thing as mental illness..." point of view [though I've got more respect for Thomas Szasz, more so than I do for the forced treatment proponents Sally Satel or E Fuller Torrey] But I do believe that psychiatry works harder at mystifying what they do not themselves understand, than they do to find out answers, so as to appear to be more learned than they actually are |
Tomorrow I'll have to ask the hospital's librarians to get the whole article for me to read | ¶ 02:26
