Mental Disorders and Religious Sentiment...

[Ichneumonwasp]

I'm not sure that I understand the point of this thread. DSM IV criteria for these "disorders" include in their very definition that the person so diagnosed suffers an impairment that interferes with life function. The whole idea is that the "disorder" in question veers from statistically "natural" function and that the person (sometimes those around them rather than the patient him or herself, especially true for manic phases of bipolar since the absence of insight is so very obvious) wants intervention.

Of course it is a social construct. The very wording of DSM IV demonstrates the social construction of these categories. What is the point?

We do have to live with all sorts of people in this world. Watching the sheer terror of a schizophrenic deluded into thinking that everyone around him or her wants to kill invites our pity and desire to help if we can. None of these medicines are cures. They are treatments intended to improve people's lives. The same is true of the treatment of epilepsy. We don't cure (aside from the rare person -- about 1 in 10 -- who no longer needs medication after surgical intervention). We treat, in an attempt to help. If the treatment is worse than the condition then we tell people to stop taking medication. We don't treat diseases. We treat people.

 

[blutoski]

I'll respond to the rest of your post later tonight in that I currently have obligations around the house with kiddos and such.

I think it's fine that you deem the answer to be empirical. After all, we heard the answer didn't we? We saw the tremble in the face or the tear as they approached the question... We see the knife scars from the last attempt, right?

By your logic then, when we ask a subject, "Do you experience the divine at least three times a day," then its an empirical question. We hear them answer. We see them on bended knee during morning prayers.

Yes. Not by my logic, though. It is the meaning of empirical. Like I said: you have been using the word incorrectly throughout the thread. I think you meant physical.

Are we going to objectify their Deity in the same fashion we objectify their "disorder?"

If so, then fine. But let's be consistent, no matter which side of the fence we're on.

That's not being consistent, though, right? The analogy is flawed. What we can measure is their religiosity, which we do in psychology routinely. There are three questionnaires that measure religiosity. We would be reifying (not 'objectifying' - that's a different thing altogether) the concept of religiosity, which most people think is pretty reasonable.

As mentioned at least once above, and you seem to ignore, we classify all sorts of personality traits, and the reification of these traits needs to satisfy validation steps before being accepted in the literature. They become disorders when the person comes into the doctor's office and says: "I want this to stop because it's wrecking my life, and I have failed to fix it myself."



To provide the psychiatric comparison, we can measure their level of depression, and the criteria appear valid (they sure look like things a depressed person would match for). It's a disorder when it's ruining the subject's life.



I think you're conflating different issues here. Your comments are all over the map. Here's my interpretation:

P1: You offer that psychology's criteria are merely describing things of current social interest, and do not represent an underlying physiology.

P2: You assert a priori that only things that have an underlying physiology can be classified as disorders.

Conclusion 1: from P1 and P2, you conclude that psychiatric criteria cannot be legitemate disorders.

P3: You offer that this is like religion: no connection to physical reality.

Conclusion 2: So, you infer that psychology is just like a religion, because they share these similar attributes.

P5: You observe that the law has powers to act upon people with certain psychiatric conditions.

Conclusion 3: So, you're concerned that from the combination of P1, C2, and P5 that there is a risk that religion could be reclassified as a type of psychiatric disorder, and that this would underwrite legal powers to be enacted against people with this new 'condition'.



I can mount a defense, but I'd like to be certain that you are laying out this argument pattern.

 

[blutoski]

As to your question about observable behaviors, I don't have a problem with accepting them. However, when we do this, we logically have to accept about anything. Such as "church attendance" as an event which justifies whatever we want to prove.

This doesn't even make sense, and you obviously don't mean it. That makes it difficult to debate you.

eg: would you agree that if you provide church attendance statistics for Montana in the 1970s, that it would justify the claim that omega-6 fatty acids contribute to reduced LDL metrics in males over the age of 50?

 

[stamenflicker]

Yes. Not by my logic, though. It is the meaning of empirical. Like I said: you have been using the word incorrectly throughout the thread. I think you meant physical.

So you are saying that asking a person if they have sucidial thoughts, writing the result on a piece of paper is empirical? Or is it not empirical?

So you are saying that asking a person if they experience the divine, writing the result on a piece of paper is empirical? Or is it not empirical?

Or do you mean physical?

That's not being consistent, though, right? The analogy is flawed. What we can measure is their religiosity, which we do in psychology routinely. There are three questionnaires that measure religiosity. We would be reifying (not 'objectifying' - that's a different thing altogether) the concept of religiosity, which most people think is pretty reasonable.

Notice the categorization here. "Depression" is given the category of "psychological feature" or "state." Why? Religiousity is given the category of abstraction. Why?

religiosity
A noun
1 religiosity, religiousism, pietism

exaggerated or affected piety and religious zeal
Category Tree:
abstraction
╚attribute
╚quality
╚morality
╚righteousness
╚piety; piousness
╚devoutness; religiousness
╚religiosity, religiousism, pietism


depression
A noun
sad feelings of gloom and inadequacy
Category Tree:
psychological feature
╚feeling
╚sadness; unhappiness
╚depression
╚dysphoria
╚oppression; oppressiveness
╚despondency; despondence; heartsickness; disconsolateness
╚helplessness
╚demoralization; demoralisation

6 depressive disorder, clinical depression, depression

a state of depression and anhedonia so severe as to require clinical intervention
Category Tree:
state
╚condition; status
╚disorder; upset
╚mental disorder; mental disturbance; disturbance; psychological disorder; folie
╚affective disorder; major affective disorder; emotional disorder; emotional disturbance
╚depressive disorder, clinical depression, depression
╚retarded depression
╚psychotic depression
╚neurotic depression
╚major depressive episode
╚exogenous depression; reactive depression
╚endogenous depression
╚dysthymia; dysthymic depression
╚anaclitic depression
╚agitated depression

7 depression

a mental state characterized by a pessimistic sense of inadequacy and a despondent lack of activity
Category Tree:
state
╚condition; status
╚psychological state; mental state
╚depression
╚dejection
╚low spirits
╚slough of despond
╚melancholy
╚funk; blue funk
╚blues; blue devils; megrims; vapors; vapours
╚melancholia

--from WordReference.com

So is a person being "born again" or experience of "nirvana"

1) a state

or

2) an abstraction?

Secondly, is it a feeling or an attribute? And when or where do we make the distinctions?

So we take something like homosexuality, once in the DSMIV and we realize we are dealing with an attribute, right?

Not so. With homosexuality we are dealing with a "phenomenon."

http://www.wordreference.com/definition/homosexuality

What about lipids? They are an "entity."

http://www.wordreference.com/definition/lipid

Not that the latter two matter, I just find it interesting as to our categorizations.

So here we are with religiosity. It is an

abstraction
A noun
1 abstraction

a general concept formed by extracting common features from specific examples

And depression. It is a

state
A noun
1 state

the way something relates to its main attributes

What's the difference? Religiousity is an abstraction, I agree. It is an abstraction because of a collection of measurements. But depressive "disorders" are also a collection of measurements. Even so, we deem them to be "states." Why?

As mentioned at least once above, and you seem to ignore, we classify all sorts of personality traits, and the reification of these traits needs to satisfy validation steps before being accepted in the literature.

And still there are others we refuse to reify. Why?

They become disorders when the person comes into the doctor's office and says: "I want this to stop because it's wrecking my life, and I have failed to fix it myself."

Or when they get committed because a doctor says it is a disorder.

I think you're conflating different issues here. Your comments are all over the map. Here's my interpretation:

P1: You offer that psychology's criteria are merely describing things of current social interest, and do not represent an underlying physiology.

P2: You assert a priori that only things that have an underlying physiology can be classified as disorders.

Conclusion 1: from P1 and P2, you conclude that psychiatric criteria cannot be legitemate disorders.

P3: You offer that this is like religion: no connection to physical reality.

Conclusion 2: So, you infer that psychology is just like a religion, because they share these similar attributes.

P5: You observe that the law has powers to act upon people with certain psychiatric conditions.

Conclusion 3: So, you're concerned that from the combination of P1, C2, and P5 that there is a risk that religion could be reclassified as a type of psychiatric disorder, and that this would underwrite legal powers to be enacted against people with this new 'condition'.

I think this is more conflated than anything I've posted. I'm not sure what to make of it.

The question is still very simple. Why does a person's self report and others observations of them not allow them to exist in a "state" of being born-again? Why when given the same criteria is one subjective experience elevated to a different degree than another?

 

[stamenflicker]

This doesn't even make sense, and you obviously don't mean it. That makes it difficult to debate you.

eg: would you agree that if you provide church attendance statistics for Montana in the 1970s, that it would justify the claim that omega-6 fatty acids contribute to reduced LDL metrics in males over the age of 50?

You know what I meant.

But in case you sincerely didn't here's a specific question:

Why does a person's church attendance not count as evidence for their experience of God?

 

[Earthborn]

Because, so long as psychology can pass itself off as science, it has greater legitimacies in courts of law, in restrictions of freedom, health care reform, in guiding politics and world decision making, etc.

Just think about economics and what influence that has on politics and world decision making. Psychology is much more scientific than that because it has far more reliable tools to measure human behaviour than economics does. In fact, psychology is actually taking over some parts of economics (or economics adopts methodologies of psychology, depending on how you look at it) because it makes it possible to experiment with behaviour. It has gone as far as economists doing animal experiments.

Any of these can at any time be used to take my freedoms or fortunes away.

I don't know about the laws where you live, but where I am this isn't legally possible unless someone is either a danger to society or a danger to him/herself. And usually the choice is made to err on the side of freedom, causing many people who arguably are a danger to themselves or society to go without treatment.

I'm only saying that the evidence that it is medical is not enough to convince me at this time

The evidence at this time is not enough to personally convince me of quantum mechanics, but fortunately its scientific status does not depend on the uninformed opinions of people who don't understand it.

Are we going to objectify their Deity in the same fashion we objectify their "disorder?"

Depends. If we define "Deity" as a set of behaviours exhibited by a person, then yes. If we define "Deity" as something that may exist somewhere outside of that person (as a supernatural being or the creator of the universe) then no.

Medicine is an unconvincing argument to me, because I'd guess that with enough research and funding, we could make a pill for just about anything, not just mood "disorders."

That's probably true and there is already a descriptive word for it: cosmetic psychopharmacology. Of course the existence of cosmetic surgery does not disprove the fact that there are physical disorders for which plastic surgery is necessary. Neither does it disprove the validity of cosmetic surgery.

I reject however that I was suffering from some kind of "real" or empirical disorder.

"Realness" is too vague a concept to be useful when discussing these things. "Disorder" is a value judgement: if doctors consider suicidal thoughts to be problem, then it is.

Are we going to create a category of inner states for say "Liberalism." Would such a category of states exist if we did?

Yes, by definition. If you create a category of inner states and call it liberalism, then that category exists, just like when you create a house that house exists.

Some conceivable future societies (where Ann Coulter is president) may even consider "Liberalism" an illness and attempt to cure it. That fact does not disprove the validity of psychiatry or any other form of medicine.

I'm saying I would be more likely to accept a "disorder" that has an actual biological component attached to it

Depression has an actual biological component to it, although it is easier to measure after death by cutting up the brain than it is during life.

However, an actual biological component by itself is never a reason to consider something a disorder, because in a biological entity everything has an actual biological component to it. Einstein didn't have a disorder because he was smarter than some. For something to be a disorder there needs to be suffering.

So then disorders are determined by popular vote?

No, by expert vote.

Furthermore how do you validate my inner states?

They can't be validated but that's not a problem. The only "inner states" that are relevant are those reported by the patient, the rest of the disorder is diagnosed by the observation of behaviour.

You are forgetting that by lying about my mood "disorders" I can have access to highly powerful drugs that make me feel really good

And that usually don't work on most people except for causing often serious side effects. They either have no effect on people except those who have been disabled by the behaviour and feelings they consider themselves to be problematic. Or they appear to work only preventatively on people who have not been.

What would a lying blind person get?

A dog?

I think its more of philosophical question regarding what "counts" as evidence and why we make those kinds of choices.

Maybe you should take up a course in Philosophy of Science instead of making up reasons why mental disorders are not "real".

He needs love and compassion--

Absolutely.

and those things alone are methods of healing

Maybe, but often not enough. There are more than enough people who are surrounded by love and compassion, even recognise that they are, and still feel very ill.

--from WordReference.com

You are using dictionary definitions where you should use medical definitions. In dictionaries, not only the official meanings are included, but also the everyday uses of a word which are irrelevant here.

Why when given the same criteria is one subjective experience elevated to a different degree than another?

It isn't.

Why does a person's church attendance not count as evidence for their experience of God?

It does count as evidence for their experience of God. It just doesn't necessarily count as evidence for the existence of God.

 

[Ichneumonwasp]

Or when they get committed because a doctor says it is a disorder.

Um, no, that is completely wrong. Commitment is a legal proceeding that depends on a judge rendering an opinion. A physician can admit someone under a 72 hour order if that person is deemed to be a danger to himself or others. If the doctor does not act and that person commits some crime, say murder, then the doctor can be held legally responsible.

This is a legal issue, not a medical one. Commitments are not based on having a "disorder". They are solely based on a judgment of whether or not person is deemed to be a potential danger.

 

[Earthborn]

The patients weren't diagnosed with schizophrenia

(snip)

A second important point about this report is that the opinions of other patients were not part of the study, were not recorded, and are essentially regarded as an urban legend that grew up around this study.

The Wikipedia article links to the original study report, and it directly contradicts you.

It was an interesting study, but I can tell that the Wikipedia entry was submitted by somebody who was copy/pasting from an anti-psychiatry screed.

No, it looks about right to me. In fact, the Wikipedia article looks more like a copy/past from the original article, and I wouldn't classify it as anti-psychiatry.

 

[blutoski]

You know what I meant.

But in case you sincerely didn't here's a specific question:

Why does a person's church attendance not count as evidence for their experience of God?

Because people go to church for many reasons! I did for many years, and I was an atheist at the time (if I didn't, I would be punished). My parents *didn't* go to church when they were younger, because they were excommunicated (they were part of a schism that disagreed with the pope's announcement on contraception). etc.

However, as I said, there *are* psychological surveys that measure religiosity. They ask different questions, like: "are you religious?" or "Do you believe in God?"

 

[blutoski]

Um, no, that is completely wrong. Commitment is a legal proceeding that depends on a judge rendering an opinion. A physician can admit someone under a 72 hour order if that person is deemed to be a danger to himself or others. If the doctor does not act and that person commits some crime, say murder, then the doctor can be held legally responsible.

This is a legal issue, not a medical one. Commitments are not based on having a "disorder". They are solely based on a judgment of whether or not person is deemed to be a potential danger.

Absolutely. My wife's role for a few months was to ride in a dedicated police unit whose job was to evaluate the psychiatric situation for perps. Mostly, there's not enough time 'on the scene' to diagnose, but the police sure are willing to put the cuffs on. Or shoot. Psychiatry has nothing to do with it: dangerous is dangerous.

I'm sure it varies from region to region, but the committment procedings are started by the police, and the psychiatrist is merely an expert witness.

Two patients with the same diagnosis could be handled very differently: the dangerous one is committed; the harmless one is sent home. It's not the diagnosis that directs legal action, but the risk assessment.

Having said that, if a person's that dangerous, technically, they would have to have a disorder to be committed. If they didn't have a disorder, they'd be held in jail or prison instead.

 

[blutoski]

So you are saying that asking a person if they have sucidial thoughts, writing the result on a piece of paper is empirical? Or is it not empirical?

Empirical.

So you are saying that asking a person if they experience the divine, writing the result on a piece of paper is empirical? Or is it not empirical?

Empirical.

Or do you mean physical?

No. I mean empirical.

Notice the categorization here. "Depression" is given the category of "psychological feature" or "state." Why? Religiousity is given the category of abstraction. Why?

You'd have to ask the authors, right? Looks like you're using a dictionary to quibble about technical stuff. I'd use the psychological literature to see how the surveys are applied.

Also: religiosity is slowly proving itself to be a personality attribute, as opposed to depression. It's rare for people to yo-yo with their religiosity indexes: they are very consistent from day to day, year to year. It's more akin to other personality traits, such as extroversion or imaginativeness.

So is a person being "born again" or experience of "nirvana"

1) a state

or

2) an abstraction?

Secondly, is it a feeling or an attribute? And when or where do we make the distinctions?

I'm not sure it's any of these things. Too granular a question. These are not psychologically meaningful terms. I'd say it's more of a manifestation of religiosity. All religions have these epiphany events, but the individuals score here or there on religiosity as individuals. I'm sure 'born again' means a different thing to every person to speaks to it.

You often have to ask a lot of questions to get an overall view. My sister would answer the question "are you religious" with a 'no'. But she's a Gaiaist, and a much bigger zealot than my parents, who are non-church-attending Catholics, and would answer 'yes' to the same question.

So we take something like homosexuality, once in the DSMIV and we realize we are dealing with an attribute, right?

Not so. With homosexuality we are dealing with a "phenomenon."

http://www.wordreference.com/definition/homosexuality

What about lipids? They are an "entity."

http://www.wordreference.com/definition/lipid

Not that the latter two matter, I just find it interesting as to our categorizations.

So here we are with religiosity. It is an

abstraction
A noun
1 abstraction

a general concept formed by extracting common features from specific examples

And depression. It is a

state
A noun
1 state

the way something relates to its main attributes

What's the difference? Religiousity is an abstraction, I agree. It is an abstraction because of a collection of measurements. But depressive "disorders" are also a collection of measurements. Even so, we deem them to be "states." Why?

Again, these are not psychological definitions, so I'm reluctant to speak for the authors of a usage-based dictionary. It reports how everybody uses the term, not necessarily how specialists use it. You'd have to ask psychiatrists how they regard individual indexes, and my impression is that they don't really distinguish. Any index could potentially lend itself to being a 'disorder' if the patient expresses suffering for no external reason, that they want to stop, but can't.




A thought, though: religiosity is a character of the individual, whereas depression is very transitional.

In comparison, euphoria is a state, often experienced by the religious. Nirvana is a bad example, because depending on who you ask, it's either a temporary state, a permanent characteristic of the individual, a real place, a mystical place, or an unachieveable internal state/characteristic/physical destination/mystical destination.

And still there are others we refuse to reify. Why?

You'd have to be specific. Some are not reified because they fail validation, for example. Kundilani Awakening would be difficult to validate, because you'd have to find independent sources with a convergent understanding of its meaning.

Or when they get committed because a doctor says it is a disorder.

Covered in another reply.

I think this is more conflated than anything I've posted. I'm not sure what to make of it.

Drat. So, why don't you throw us a bone, and outline your argument?

The question is still very simple. Why does a person's self report and others observations of them not allow them to exist in a "state" of being born-again? Why when given the same criteria is one subjective experience elevated to a different degree than another?

See, where here does it talk about being institutionalized? You keep bringing that up, but you haven't included it in your summary. Things like that.



However: to answer this specific challenge, I think part of the problem is validation regarding the expression 'born again'. If I went to China and asked a guy off a farm what 'Born Again' meant, could he explain it to me? If I asked him what depressed meant, could he explain it to me? (this experiment - mood and emotion validation - has been done, incidentally, with many cultures, some of them selected because they were isolated from other cultures, for example the Wayanas tribe in Brazil, and some tribes in New Guinea. Very good validation on moods and emotions, and perfect validation on interpreting facial expressions.)

If I asked random people in the US what 'born again' meant, would their answers be consistent enough to be convergent on a meaning? If not, then it's probably a cultural phenomenon, as opposed to moods, which appear to be an inherent part of the human experience.

This is not the same thing as reification, mind. Also: nobody says that there are underlying physical anomalies to all mood disorders. I personally suspect that some are acquired, and I think this represents the state of the profession. The scientific support comes from correlating the classifications with the


I'm also concerned that you're launching a semantic argument here, quibbling about words like 'state' or 'abstraction' and so on. I tend to withdraw from this when my opponents think their new weapon in a technical discussion is an on-line common-usage dictionary. I'm not sure you shed any light about what psychiatrists actually think or do by quoting it.

 

[blutoski]

The Wikipedia article links to the original study report, and it directly contradicts you.

I appreciate that. However, there are analyses that go into more detail about the credibility of these reports, as they are not from the experimenters, but collected afterward from staff. Here's Rosenhan's description:

During the first three hospitalizations, when accurate counts were kept, 35 of a total of 118 patients on the admissions ward voiced their suspicions, some vigorously.

Yet, when asked to produce documentation of these findings, it turns out 'accurate counts' were word of mouth. These should be treated as apocryphal.



re: the diagnosis. True, they were diagnosed as schizophrenics in remission. They were released, because the MDs felt they were perfectly normal. Of note, some of the MDs' charts indicated suspicion that the patients were fabricating the stories (Rosenhann's claim that the psychiatrists 'did not suspect' are somewhat dishonest in this regard) but that they were keeping the patients under observation because this is very weird behavior in its own right, and they were waiting for another shoe to drop. Also: there is a policy element to admission that Rosenhan did not address (ie: the legal liability of MDs going with their 'gut' feeling about malingering, and not following procedure, was a factor in admission, but not in diagnosis)

As it happens, by today's DSMIVR, the patients' presentation would be described as normal, with a history of one auditory hallucination episode, brief.

No, it looks about right to me. In fact, the Wikipedia article looks more like a copy/past from the original article, and I wouldn't classify it as anti-psychiatry.

The original experiment was hostile to psychiatry!

There are entire books written analyzing this! There were attempts to replicate the experimental results, but they were disappointing. (granted, it's possible that word of Rosenhan's results may have provoked cynicism in admissions) &c.

Don't get me wrong: this was a blockbuster experiment, but its lack of replicability makes the results suspicious, and the complaint that Rosenhan exaggerated the meaningfulness of the results in media interactions is quite valid.


Unfortunately, none of these are available online. However, they're probably easy to locate at most university libraries:

• "Reflections on Rosenhan's "On Being Sane in Insane Places" Theodore Millon (J Abnorm Psychol. 1975 Oct;84(5):456-61)
  
• "On Being Sane in Insane Places": A Comment from England" Sidney Crown. (J Abnorm Psychol. 1975 Oct;84(5):453-5)
  
• "On Being Sane in Insane Places": A Process (Attributional) Analysis and Critique" by Bernard Weiner (J Abnorm Psychol. 1975 Oct;84(5):433-41.)
  
• "On Pseudoscience in Science, Logic in Remission and Psychiatric Diagnosis" by R. L. Spitzer (J Abnorm Psychol. 1975 Oct;84(5):442-52.)
  
• On being detectably sane in insane places: base rates and psychodiagnosis. Davis DA. (J Abnorm Psychol. 1976 Aug;85(4):416-22.)
  
• More on pseudoscience in science and the case for psychiatric diagnosis. A critique of D.L. Rosenhan's "On Being Sane in Insane Places" and "The Contestual Nature of Psychiatric Diagnosis". Spitzer RL. (Arch Gen Psychiatry. 1976 Apr;33(4):459-70.)
  
• On being sane in insane places-reprise. Westermeyer J, Wintrob R. (Am J Psychiatry. 1979 Jun;136(6):755-61.)
  

(I analyzed Rosenhan's paper, support, and critiques for my abpsych course term paper, so I've waded through this material before. Unfortunately, that was in 1987, and I've long misplaced the essay, sorry)

 

[stamenflicker]

Because people go to church for many reasons! I did for many years, and I was an atheist at the time (if I didn't, I would be punished). My parents *didn't* go to church when they were younger, because they were excommunicated (they were part of a schism that disagreed with the pope's announcement on contraception). etc.

There are also many reason that people frequently fantasize about suicide. And we can go to any of these places without the word "depression."

However, as I said, there *are* psychological surveys that measure religiosity. They ask different questions, like: "are you religious?" or "Do you believe in God?"

And what if they asked, "How many times to you experience God's unconditional love in your life each week?"

A question like this is much more applicable to moods.

 

[stamenflicker]

Also: religiosity is slowly proving itself to be a personality attribute, as opposed to depression. It's rare for people to yo-yo with their religiosity indexes: they are very consistent from day to day, year to year. It's more akin to other personality traits, such as extroversion or imaginativeness.

I'd say most folks don't jump religions all that often you're right... but a personality trait? I don't know, but I'm open to think about it.

In the meantime, what I would be willing to bet does yo-yo, are people's experiences of the divine. And yeah, no matter what culture you go to, you could probably phrase the question in a way they understood-- just like "depression."

These are not psychologically meaningful terms.

What meaningful terms for religious experiences exist in psychology? Let me go ahead and answer that one-- few.

You'd have to ask psychiatrists how they regard individual indexes, and my impression is that they don't really distinguish. Any index could potentially lend itself to being a 'disorder' if the patient expresses suffering for no external reason, that they want to stop, but can't.

I lean toward agreement on this point.

A thought, though: religiosity is a character of the individual, whereas depression is very transitional.

Alright, but what about any subjective state of experiencing "God?" Those come and go like 'depression', even among the most devout of religious folk.

In comparison, euphoria is a state, often experienced by the religious. Nirvana is a bad example, because depending on who you ask, it's either a temporary state, a permanent characteristic of the individual, a real place, a mystical place, or an unachieveable internal state/characteristic/physical destination/mystical destination.

I agree we need better definitions, or perhaps to find a religious state we agree on the definition for, and talk from there.

You'd have to be specific. Some are not reified because they fail validation, for example. Kundilani Awakening would be difficult to validate, because you'd have to find independent sources with a convergent understanding of its meaning.

I understand what you are saying now, correct me if I'm off base. Because depression can be validated before the concept of depression is introduced, it lends itself to greater reliability?

However, a Kundalini Awakening would need to be validated then outside the yoga tradition...?

If this is the case, then we agree. My experience with Kundalini happened long before I had the words to articulate it, yet in my search for understanding-- which incidently included schizophrenic research-- led me to believe this was the only clear explanation.

Covered in another reply.

I agree you've answered and I've avoided to this point. But there's no sense in even talking about law, if we disagree about what constitutes an "expert" witness in its delivery.

Drat. So, why don't you throw us a bone, and outline your argument?

I laid it out simply above in a handful of points. You're issue was with point #1 remember?

I'm also concerned that you're launching a semantic argument here, quibbling about words like 'state' or 'abstraction' and so on. I tend to withdraw from this when my opponents think their new weapon in a technical discussion is an on-line common-usage dictionary. I'm not sure you shed any light about what psychiatrists actually think or do by quoting it.

Words are power. There's an old Arab proverb that says, "Always learn the language of your neighbor so you can be safe from his evils."

 

[stamenflicker]

The evidence at this time is not enough to personally convince me of quantum mechanics, but fortunately its scientific status does not depend on the uninformed opinions of people who don't understand it.

Here's the real issue Earthborn. Very few people understand the details of quantum mechanics. I've known people with 4th Grade educations that understand psychology-- and actually some of them were better at it that most liscensed psychologists. My wife will tell you that I see problems much more quickly and with greater acuity than she does.

"Disorder" is a value judgement: if doctors consider suicidal thoughts to be problem, then it is.

I agree.

Yes, by definition. If you create a category of inner states and call it liberalism, then that category exists, just like when you create a house that house exists.

I agree. But it doesn't exist the same way my house exists right?

Some conceivable future societies (where Ann Coulter is president) may even consider "Liberalism" an illness and attempt to cure it. That fact does not disprove the validity of psychiatry or any other form of medicine.

Nope you can't ever disprove the provers when they define what can be proved.

Depression has an actual biological component to it, although it is easier to measure after death by cutting up the brain than it is during life.

We've had an abbreviated seratonin talk. Look, I think depression may one day be proved to have a definite biological component. Actually, I rather hope it does. Of course, at that moment our dialogue gets even more testy with each other. I think you understand this because of this sentence--

However, an actual biological component by itself is never a reason to consider something a disorder, because in a biological entity everything has an actual biological component to it.

No, by expert vote.

I've already said how I feel about "experts."

Maybe you should take up a course in Philosophy of Science instead of making up reasons why mental disorders are not "real".

I've never said they aren't real. Only that I don't believe they are real apart from social construction. Again, a real what?

 

[stamenflicker]

Of interest...

http://www.spiritualcompetency.com/jhpseart.html


I'm afraid I am leaving for the week and will be away until Saturday afternoon. I will return to this thread then... don't forget unless you're just fed up with me. We'll find common ground, or not. Anyway it's fun.

 

[blutoski]

There are also many reason that people frequently fantasize about suicide. And we can go to any of these places without the word "depression."

Yep. Which is why the psychiatrist asks lots of questions, and the diagnostic criteria is not based on one single question. Remember: you're not the first person to ask about validation. They had to punch these through peer-review and a hundred years of practitioners' opinions.

And what if they asked, "How many times to you experience God's unconditional love in your life each week?"

A question like this is much more applicable to moods.

Only if the person's religious. I'm not religious, so I'd say 'never', no matter how happy I was.

It would, however, distinguish a religious person from a non-religious person, which is why I think it would be a good question for religiousity indices. There are usually hundreds of questions on these, because you can't make any assumptions: my sister rates very high on relgiosity, but does not believe in an anthropomorphic God capable of love. Devil worshipers are usually very religious, and of course, they would answer the above question with an emphatic 'no'.

That's why I produced an example in an earlier post of a patient who thought he was delusional, but was not, which was revealed during the normal interview process.

 

[Dancing David]

[derail] What a silly statement. An immaterialist recognizes that perceived-as-physical structures are necessary for what we consider life, up to and including HPC, human/animal mental states, etc.[/derail]


An ancillary question to the thread, extending into 'physically diagnosed' conditions, is why are placebos ever effective?

The entire medical establishment remains more related to witch-doctors than science way too often for my liking.

What have you got against witches?

I agree , but the question was asked in the heat of irrational thinking on my part, you are the only immaterialst who feel you need the physical structure on this board.(exageration)

 

[Dancing David]

David, sorry I've not had time to respond to your other thread. I realize that what I'm saying may sound offensive and I apologize. I'm not trying to belittle people in pain. As I stated, a very close member of my family is homeless and "mentally ill."

If you were to meet him, you'd for sure recognize he needs some kind of intervention, maybe even hospitalization. He was on meds for almost 10 years. They kept him from running off, but he was pretty much a slobbering zombie the whole time. I don't blame him one bit for coming off the meds.

Neither would I. I am of of the post 'recovery' type of mental health professional. Intervention is not warranted to prevent homelessness, as that is a social economic issue, all I can and will force intervention on is :direct evidence of threat to harm other/self, and groos impairment leading to inability tpo protect ones self from harm.

Sloppering zombie, sound like the psychotropics were haldol and prolixon, effective but way over powered medications, especialy for the treatment of a mood disorder, Again as I have said before outside of the need to preserve life, a legal construction, I do not believe in forcing intervention, and especialy I do not believe in forcing medication.

The question is, and has been, do I think he has a "real" condition. My answer has been consistent in that I don't think there is any way to know. Clearly his moods are not like mine. Whether or not he has a disorder, depends on who you talk to. He says no. Doctors say yes. Immediately family says, maybe, but he plays it up more than he has to.

I would have to meet him and talk to him, homelessness has a way of being the preffered mode of life for some people, they like the freedom and disregard the danger. Being undomiciled itself is not a product of MI, usualy more economics.

The question for an individual with bipolar disorder is : do they sleep, are they irritable almost all of the time, do they show any persistant elavated or depressed moods, do they show and display a frequent to consistant pattern of anger and over angry responses to situational stress.

The main quation is one for the individual: are you bothered by your level of functioning?

I say and live out what I believe, that really it doesn't matter if he has a real disorder. He needs love and compassion-- and those things alone are methods of healing, even if he never becomes as "normal" as my wife and I. I put normal in quotations because obviously I don't think such a thing is real outside of our perceived values.

I agree unless it is the town next to Bloomington IL. Normal as a human condition is usualy fairly miserable any how.

I'll look up the ADHD numbers.

As to your question about observable behaviors, I don't have a problem with accepting them. However, when we do this, we logically have to accept about anything. Such as "church attendance" as an event which justifies whatever we want to prove.

I understand the analogy, but church attendance would be an observable behavior that indicates someone being a participant in a social group, it does not indicate the motivation of the individual who attends, you have to ask them and then judge the validity of the response.

mental health is about where alchemy was when Levosier came along, part science, mostly conjecture and hopeful thinking. A good set of ethics is very helpful, I am of the 'benign neglect' school of intervention.

But observable behaviors are used in many settings to determine possible internal states of individuals as a way of gauging the verbal reports validity, like the 'observed pain scale' used in the emergency department. Sometime you have better data than others.

Hope that helps.

 

[Dancing David]

From Thomas Szasz The Myth of Mental Illness found here
http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Szasz/myth.htm

This position implies that people cannot have troubles -- expressed in what are now called "mental illnesses" -- because of differences in personal needs, opinions, social aspirations, values, and so on. All problems in living are attributed to physicochemical processes which in due time will be discovered by medical research.

Ah I remeber now, but we do have to put this comment in perspective, at the time 1960, modern psychiatry was dominated by psychogenic models and psychotherapy of the Freudian sort. people were being 'regressed' for no good reason and told they had to understand their childhoods to get well. Most succesful adults were thinking that they needed weekley therapy sessions for years and years and years.

Not the current best practise.

This position implies that people cannot have troubles

No it doesn't, that is an overgeneralization, no decent clinician would feel that human problems are generated by mental illness. Especialy the following part

because of differences in personal needs, opinions, social aspirations, values, and so on,
these are now considered to be a framework and supporting cast of characters. I am not sure that this position was supported by anyone at the time.

All problems in living are attributed to physicochemical processes which in due time will be discovered by medical research.


This was a bold assertion even for 1960, but i am sure that there were people out ther claiming that all social ills were caused by an unbalanced psyche. There are still those who do so, they are mainly newspaper journalists and pop psych and woo psych individuals.


Poblems in living are problems in living, to assume that a mental health perspective will assume that homelessness is not a social economic condition is a bold mistake, domestic violence and sexual trauma can cause people to have depression, it is not the root cause.

More later, time to go to the loony prison and force treatmen on people, to thier detriment and the oppression of society, Mwaa haaha, I love the untold power and riches it brings!