Baughman F (2006) There Is No Such Thing as a Psychiatric
Disorder/Disease/Chemical Imbalance. PLoS Med 3(7): e318.
http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0030318
"
All patients and research participants with psychological problems are
led to believe they have an abnormality/disease, biasing them in favor
of medical interventions, and against nonmedical interventions (e.g.,
love, will power, or talk therapy), which presume, as is the case, that
the individual is physically and medically normal and without need of a
medical/pharmaceutical intervention.
"
Th author is a professor and he's standing against the tide of
psychiatric tyranny. It is a dark trend to drug children and medicalise
childhood. It is one sanctioned by the mainstream of mental health and
psychiatry as well as political and educational establishments, but it
is immoral.
The author talks about the invalidity of the MRI scans and the science.
What he fails to note is that brain differences are not necessarily
deficits. This is the a tool of psychopathologisation: to call brain
difference a deficit.
Just as there is no normal level of serotonin in scientific terms there
is no normal brain. There are differences. Psuedoscince calls
differences deficits without the wisdom to know what it a deficit and
what is simply a difference.
Otherwise, according to this paper, taxi driving is a mental illness.
http://www.pnas.org/content/97/8/4398.full
From a discussion with an old friend who knows a lot more about
neuroscience than I do the differences in the brains of taxi drivers
after 15 years of driving a London cab might be due to more connections
being made between neurons in certain areas and less connections in
others. Why there is more in one area and less in another is an area of
interest to any scientists.
But using the methods of psychopathology a subjecti ve judgement could
be made that taxi driving is a mental illness. It clearly isn't but
there are observed brain differences.
My conversation with my friend reminded me of studies of brain volumes
in children with schizophrenia. The results are frightening even to a ly
person who is against the medicalisation of the human condition. There
are percentage differences seen in children with schizophrenia. It's a
few percent in a few years (can't remember the study but it's on the
blog somewhere).
It's the sort of evidence a psychiatrist might use to justify drug
treatment - though the drug treatment might be part of the cause of the
reduction in brain volumes.
But what if it isn't part of the supposed brain illness of
schizophrenia. What if the differences are due to the diffeerences in
the lives of children with schizophrenia. If a child is stuck in a
psychiatric ward instead of living a life which an average child would
live then their brain will end up developing differently. If the child
is excluded and isolated instead of enjoying the social contact which
many children enjoy then their brain will develop differently. If a
child is stuck at home instead of going to school then their brain will
develop differently. If a child has a more mentally inward facing
experience of reality and consciousness then their brain may develop
differently.
This doesn't mean the child is diseased. The disease is the society
which doesn't value these valuable and essential human types. The child
may be more thoughtful or soulful. The child may have more capability to
achieve wisdom. The child may not fit into the constructs of a diseased
society, but there is nothing wrong with the child no matter how much
brain evidence is used to call their type - the schizophrenic type - a
disease.
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