Mental Disorders and Religious Sentiment...

[Dancing David]

I'm not saying "they" don't exist at all. Certainly as a category of subjective experiences "they" are a real something. But a real what?

More specifically, I am saying that "depression" as a set of subjective descriptors are of no more or less importance than the set of subjective descriptors which comprise a kundalini awakening, divine bliss, or whatever else a person chose to build a category around.

So it is just based upon your own a priori conjecture, whatever.

I will be sure to tell that to the next person who overdoses because they are depressed:

"Don't be depressed the Prophet Stamenflicker says you can't be depressed, it is only subjective.'

Are you saying pain is subjective, it is measured subjectively, would you take novacaine before having a tooth drilled? It is only subjective.

 

[Avita]

Stamenflicker, there are several issues here. Are the descriptions in the DSM accurate reflections of inner states that people experience (i.e., can we differentiate using these criteria)? And if they are, can they be detected in physiological ways? You say that you don't believe in either, yet this whole conversation started because you claimed here that:

I also believe that how we "feel" affects our health. Now I can't "sunshine sing" my way into a new arm, but certainly I can better fight off a cold by staying upbeat, positive, and active. That God does or does not play a role in that upbeat feeling, is hardly my concern.

And then I pointed out that "positive thinking" plays a more complicated role in human immunology than commonly supposed, and that your assertion was much of an overstatement.

Could you please explain how mood could affect us physiologically, yet mood disorders wouldn't? We don't test for depression by monitoring the immune system, just because too many things also affect the immune system, and because we have much easier ways to find out. And that's the list of criteria offered by the DSM. Yes, they can always be argued over and refined, but the truth is, they're useful.

Perhaps you have heard that women are more afflicted with depression. Latest research shows that men suffer from it more commonly than supposed. It's just that men tend to "cover up" the sadness more, especially with anger. But if you get that person into therapy, and start figuring out what's behind the anger, you'll find the same feelings of sadness, helplessness, hopelessness... The DSM doesn't need to change the criteria for depression to say "In men, excessive feelings of anger are common, etc." That's because it's not part of the underlying disorder, but merely one expression of it (and the DSM does make such a note in the section on "Specific Culture, Age, and Gender Features"), which not all men exhibit, and which women can also exhibit.

As for your objection that one can have people with, say, the same level of serotonin in their brains, one of whom is depressed and one of whom is not - well, of course. That's because neurotransmitters play multiple roles in the organism, and are affected by multiple factors. So one person may be more able to compensate for the lack than the other, same as how people with identical levels of sugar in their blood may have their health in different states (say, one already has nerve damage, and the other one doesn't), because diabetes does not affect the same organs at the same speed in all people, but we know which structures tend to break down first in diabetes, and can use that knowledge in diagnosing. Mental disorders have been shown to affect everything from brain structure to blood flow, just as physical diseases do, like my hypothyroidism example and Blutoski's much more extensive list. If medical disorders are often just as vague as psychological disorders in their symptoms, then how can you insist that one describes something real, and the other doesn't?

At one point you say:

And while high blood pressure is a measurable symptom, fatigue is not.

Stamenflicker, I have had the misfortune of suffering from several diseases, both physical and mental. Curiously enough, for most of my physical illnesses, the first and most noticeable symptom was fatigue. Of course, each time, I would at first dismiss it as due to stress, overwork, what have you, until such a point as I could not ignore it anymore. The doctor would then have to run a large battery of tests, because fatigue can indeed be a symptom of many, many diseases, including mental ones, and no disease at all. I was fortunate enough to have my problems identified relatively quickly, instead of being dismissed as a neurotic, but many people are not as fortunate, and suffer for years before being diagnosed properly by medical doctors. Does that make their experience any less real? By contrast, anxiety which is strong enough to make my whole body shake at the mere thought of doing the feared thing - that's rather noticeable and unmistakable.

I could go on, but the point is this - the measure of a disease, whether physical or mental, is often simply how much it disrupts the person's life. Some people don't wear glasses despite strong near-sightedness, simply because they can get along well enough without. Some people neglect their blood pressure or high blood sugar, despite all the tests showing them to be extremely high, simply because they can't feel the effects. Some people don't take their psych meds for the same reason. None of this means that they don't have a serious problem, one which will, in all probability, come back to bite them.

I can also point at my head when it hurts, but so what? I am not pointing at the actual pain I'm experiencing. I can similarly point to my chest when it tightens during a panic attack.

As for the example of Little Susie and her grandma - you're again ignoring the fact that there's a matter of degree involved. Little Susie is playing - she imagines hearing the voices, but she doesn't "actually" hear them, nor are they disrupting her life, or insisting that something terrible will happen if she does not give her dolls tea right now. If that happened, she'd have childhood schizophrenia, as one of my cousins does.

Finally, Katana and Blutoski also make the very good point that mental disorders respond to medication, while religious feelings don't. Of course, there are a few threads on this forum about the new mushroom that will induce such experiences for you (curiously enough, not in all people who try it, and not in the same way), but we yet know of nothing that would take them away (and we do know of other substances that induce mental disorders. Alcohol, for instance.) I'm restating what they said, because it bears repeating.

 

[Dancing David]

I'm saying just what a comedian I heard once said...

When little Susie hears her dolls inviting her to a tea party, we think its cute.
When Grandma starts hearing these invitations, its a tragedy.

It's all about what we choose to categorize, what we deem to be of value, that sets the stages for what we call a "mental disorder." Again, there are some exceptions, but not so many as the APA wants to believe.

What a pile of barf , made up from your own head.
3.5 million people with schizophrenia in the USA, are you going to tell me dementia isn't real?

That is humor, except for the fact that little Suzy is imaging that the dolls are talking, a person who has schizophrenia hears actual auditory events generated in thier cortex due to a mental illness. I suppose you would think it funny if it happened to you.

You are a coward Stamenflicker, you joke about other people's suffering because you lack compassion, I suggest you come with me to the ED and talk to the people who think about killing someone bacause the voices tell them to, I know a family who had thier father murdered because they made the mistake of discharging thier very psychotic family member while they were delusional. Your joke won't bring back the dead will it?

Like I said you are a coward, mental illness is real and you are some sort of Ludite that wants to make mental illness a character defect. You are as bad a Christain Scientists and Joe's Wittnesses who let tghier family members die because they won't get medical treatment.

Prove yourself to not be a coward, read Surviving Scizophenia by E. Fuller Torrey, go to the NAMI web site or DBSA and read the stories. What a dung heap you are.

 

[stamenflicker]

So it is just based upon your own a priori conjecture, whatever.

No, it's based on the reality that we classify what we want to classify. There's really nothing a priori about it.

I will be sure to tell that to the next person who overdoses because they are depressed:

"Don't be depressed the Prophet Stamenflicker says you can't be depressed, it is only subjective.'

You're clearly not getting the whole picture of what I've posted.

Are you saying pain is subjective, it is measured subjectively, would you take novacaine before having a tooth drilled? It is only subjective.

I would take whatever was available and do when I have dental procedures done. But then again, my teeth are real. My nerves are real. And there would be real signals sent to my brain via my empirical nervous system. None of that changes the fact that pain is relatively subjective and its threshholds sporadic and undefined.

 

[Avita]

I want to add, since this thread grew while I was composing my post -

I'm saying that a person with a fist full of those attributes has a fist full of those attributes. I think that's all we can really say about it.

That's flat out wrong. You see a person about to jump off a bridge. You manage to talk him out of it, and spend some time exploring what he is feeling that is making him want to jump off the bridge. You do the same for a large number of other people who have chosen a variety of ways to kill themselves. You find out that in 90% of the cases, they are experiencing three or more of nine possible symptoms (actually, for the suicidal sample, you are likely to find more than three, but let's ignore that for the sake of the argument). Do you conclude that these are unrelated attributes just because not all suicidal people experience all of them, or do you conclude that they're symptoms of some underlying disorder that is expressed to different degrees in different people? Furthermore, you find out that such people tend to respond well to certain kinds of psychological interventions and medications, and poorly to others. What does that tell you?

(edited for clearer wording)

 

[Dancing David]

I've long felt that many disorders are probably the same disorder, manifesting in an individual way within a particular individual.

This is not meant to be a sweeping statement. And I can't tell you specifically which ones I mean. But ADD and OCD are strongly related, I would think (this is not my area of expertise in the slightest, except as a patient ). What if they weren't just related, but were the same "problem," whatever we call that problem, which manifests differently, depending on the person.

People are different, she said simplistically, so why wouldn't manifestations of a brain disorder naturally differ among them?

I also think folks just get tired of the "31 Flavors" air of mental diagnosis, whether they should or shouldn't. I'm talking, for instance, about that recent article this summer about a "new kind" of anger disorder, a road-rage sort of thing. Can't recall the specifics just now...

I was, oddly enough, taking a basic sociology class at that time, and we discussed it: is this really a "new" disorder, or just a new label for something we already recognize? Did we really need this new label, if so?

How many perfectly "normal" but socially unacceptable behaviors are we medicalizing, maybe when they don't deserve to be such? Are we feeding a health-care/drug manufacturer's monster, or are we helping people?

How many "disorders" are simply products, results, of living in a hostile society? I don't always like to be around people much, but then, people often treat me like crap. Knowing I have to go around people sometimes makes me very anxious. Disorder or learned response? If learned response, can you really give someone a pill that will help?

You are right behaviors respond best to talk therapy, but mental illness is a biopsychosocial disorder, it has components of biology, psycholoy and social skills. It effects all three and can be changed in all three.

The road rage thing is crap. it won't make it into the DSM.

[/quote]
There are differences in each individual, but the braod categories are a guide to treatment, a person with OCD will generaly respond to an antidepressant while a person with ADD will respond to a stimulant.

As far as what behaviors are medicalizing, being a victim of domestic violence, they are often forced into treatment buy the perpetrator and medicated when they should be protected.

Now if you want to discuss the spectrum thing,
there is a four sided pyramid, one point is depression, one point is anxiety, one point is psychosis and the fourth is mania, using a three demesional plot within the pyramid you can describe fairly well what a mental disorder looks like at a given time.

I always felt that OCD was closer to psychosis than ADD, because obsession is often seen in people with schizophrenia.

 

[stamenflicker]

Stamenflicker, there are several issues here. Are the descriptions in the DSM accurate reflections of inner states that people experience (i.e., can we differentiate using these criteria)?

If you're asking me, then I have no idea. Because they are subjective states we must rely on the person doing the describing.

And if they are, can they be detected in physiological ways?

I'm saying the ones that can are more likely to win my support in the science department than the ones that can't.

And then I pointed out that "positive thinking" plays a more complicated role in human immunology than commonly supposed, and that your assertion was much of an overstatement.

Exactly. And I'm stating that "negative thinking" plays a more complicated role than the DSMIV supposes. In fact, I'm saying that the whole subjective state or set of states are not as neatly quantifiable as people want to believe they are.

Could you please explain how mood could affect us physiologically, yet mood disorders wouldn't?

There is no difference between mood and mood disorder. They are both just moods. That we treat the bad ones as an objective entity while simultaneously treating the good ones as "pie in the sky" crazy talk is not logical.

Mental disorders have been shown to affect everything from brain structure to blood flow, just as physical diseases do, like my hypothyroidism example and Blutoski's much more extensive list. If medical disorders are often just as vague as psychological disorders in their symptoms, then how can you insist that one describes something real, and the other doesn't?

I believe that moods can affect many of these things, not only defined "mood disorders."

Stamenflicker, I have had the misfortune of suffering from several diseases, both physical and mental.

I am sincerely sorry. As for the items in the rest of this paragraph, I think we pretty much agree. It is only a very subtle difference we share.

As for the example of Little Susie and her grandma - you're again ignoring the fact that there's a matter of degree involved.

It is a matter of degree that we deem of value. In other words, we decide the degree subjectively. That's fine. I'm just saying its not science.

Finally, Katana and Blutoski also make the very good point that mental disorders respond to medication, while religious feelings don't.

I've responded by saying all moods respond to medication. Even the happy ones, or yes, the religious ones. With the exception of manic controlling drugs, we just don't spend much time and money altering the good moods.

 

[Dancing David]

I've stated before in other posts that schizophrenia might be one of only a handful of exceptions. The reason I might be willing to make one there? Is there is empirical evidence which can be pointed to with the human biology.

Look at some other dissociative disorders-- fugue states, multiple personality, whatever. Rarely if ever is there any tangible evidence of a true empirical disorder.

Depression does effect levels of various receptors and related byproducts.

And there is a tangible experience, the events that are percieved by the individual, a perception of hopelessness is an actual perception, which is a physical event in the brain, validity is another issue that should be considered in assesment.

Or are you an immaterialist who believes thoughts and feelings occur outside the body?

Now when it comes to DID, the famous disassociative identity disoredr, I don'tr believe it. I have seen epople in the state, I would say they are having a 'panic attack'.

Fugue states are more likely explained by the confusion and memory impairment of psychosis, depression and mania.

 

[Dancing David]

No, it's based on the reality that we classify what we want to classify. There's really nothing a priori about it.



You're clearly not getting the whole picture of what I've posted.



I would take whatever was available and do when I have dental procedures done. But then again, my teeth are real. My nerves are real. And there would be real signals sent to my brain via my empirical nervous system. None of that changes the fact that pain is relatively subjective and its threshholds sporadic and undefined.

Oh so your subjective pain matters more than someone else's schizophrenia. You are still ------. mental illness is real, people who have schizophrenia hear voices that they experience as real real, people with amputated limbs feel real real 'phantom' pain.

Brain events are brain events , right?

But I know you think that brains are subjective and don't exist, therefore an event that occurs in a brain that you can't measure doesn't exist.

Go to the hospitals and heal the sick Stamenflicker. Tell them there illness isn't real because it is subjective.

What is the difference between their mental illness and the pain of tooth extraction, we can both agree that the word 'pain' describes the sensation of nerve stimulation through damage, why not say that schizophrenia is similar?

The word describes a subjective experience that hopefully can be treated.

 

[stamenflicker]

What a pile of barf , made up from your own head.
3.5 million people with schizophrenia in the USA, are you going to tell me dementia isn't real?

Are we talking about schizophrenia or dementia? I've made my comments regarding schizophrenia above.

You are a coward Stamenflicker,

Is that a subjective state? If so, what medication should I be taking?

you joke about other people's suffering because you lack compassion,

Where have I made a joke? When I'm joking I tend to put in a (see above)

I suggest you come with me to the ED and talk to the people who think about killing someone bacause the voices tell them to, I know a family who had thier father murdered because they made the mistake of discharging thier very psychotic family member while they were delusional. Your joke won't bring back the dead will it?

Why do you assume I haven't spoken with people just like this?

Like I said you are a coward, mental illness is real and you are some sort of Ludite that wants to make mental illness a character defect. You are as bad a Christain Scientists and Joe's Wittnesses who let tghier family members die because they won't get medical treatment.

Man I really messed when I married that psychologist wife of mine. The cult will never take me back now!

Prove yourself to not be a coward, read Surviving Scizophenia by E. Fuller Torrey, go to the NAMI web site or DBSA and read the stories. What a dung heap you are.

I'll read yours after you've read mine-- Insanity: Its Scope and Consequences, Thomas Szasz.

In the meantime, can you stop insulting the skeptic on the skeptic forum?

 

[stamenflicker]

Oh so your subjective pain matters more than someone else's schizophrenia. You are still stupid. mental illness is real, people who have schizophrenia hear voices that they think are real, people with amputated limbs feel real phantom pai.

But I know you think that brains are sucjective and don't exist, therefore an event that occurs in a brain that you can't measure doesn't exist.

Go to the hospitals and heal the sick Stamenflicker. Tell them there illness isn't real because it is subjective.

What is the difference between their mental illness and the pain of tooth extraction, we can both agree that the word 'pain' describes the sensation of nerve stimulation through damage, why not say that schizophrenia is similar?

The word describes a subjective experience that hopefully can be treated.

Are you drunk?

 

[Dancing David]

If you're asking me, then I have no idea. Because they are subjective states we must rely on the person doing the describing.

Oh I see you assume that mental health workers are dumber than you and don't consider that, the technical phrase is validity. Duh, even a dummie like me thought of that one Stamen, us mental health people do learn how to judge when people are lying to them.

 

[stamenflicker]

Depression does effect levels of various receptors and related byproducts.

No it doesn't. Moods affect it. By your logic, the absence of depression affect the chemical states in the brain. Should we assume that a person experiencing a kundalini awakening also is affecting them? Where is the baseline standard of measurement?

Or are you an immaterialist who believes thoughts and feelings occur outside the body?

How am I supposed to know?

Now when it comes to DID, the famous disassociative identity disoredr, I don'tr believe it. I have seen epople in the state, I would say they are having a 'panic attack'.

Fugue states are more likely explained by the confusion and memory impairment of psychosis, depression and mania.

And yet both of these "disorders" had specific spikes in the timeline, i.e. the culture in which they manifested. During the Japanese stockmarket crash, we didn't fugue states did we? Why?

 

[blutoski]

And while I recognize that we have to create somewhat arbitary lines of demarcation, it sounds more like you are agreeing with me than disagreeing. It still does not alter the fact that with medicines targeting specific empricial diseases we have things we can actually measure.

This is the disjoint, then. Psychiatrists measure things all the time. For example, the severity of depression is related to the number of items on that list you provided. When we eliminate items from the list, the person is objectively less depressed. Within each item, the patient can be asked to scale the severity of each metric. We ask patients to keep a journal so they can chart progress. eg: 3 suicidal thoughts/day at outset, down to 1 suicidal thought/month after x months of therapy.

In terms of anxiety disorders, such as OCD, you'd want to measure the number of panic attacks per week.

In terms of antisocial personality disorder, there's usually a criminal record to track progress, or in the case of those who are institutionalized, there are inventory checklists that are standardized within most institutions to use as references.

Insight is a major factor in personality disorders, and there are marked progressions for degrees of insight. These are comparable from person to person, and from session to session with the same person.

And yet if we deemed fish particles in the atmosphere to be of any scientific value, we'd have vectors for determining them as well. That "depression" is considered scientific as opposed to say the affect of Beatles tunes in local elevators, is one of preference and practicality-- not scientific truth.

Nobody's claiming scientific 'truth' or scientific 'value'. Science does not have truths or values. I'm concerned that you're spinning your wheels with a strawman.

We're talking about Psychiatry, which is a specialty of medicine. There is no 'truth' that death or discomfort is bad, either, or that people with high blood pressure should be 'corrected', but people with brown eyes should not. It's a metaphysical discussion.

Yet, I don't hear you complaining that we should be agnostic to the claim that brown eyes should be 'fixed'. The underlying metaphysical reason we don't is for the same reason that we don't fix 'salesmanship', but we do fix 'depression': it's causing the patient discomfort, which we have unscientifically[/u] decided is an issue.

I guess what confuses me is why you're singling out one aspect of medicine, when all others suffer from your same primary critique. In medicine, whether some condition is a medical condition or not is not a scientific question: it is a value question.

I'm saying that a person with a fist full of those attributes has a fist full of those attributes. I think that's all we can really say about it.

Then you're being wilfully blind, I think. I think we can all tell that a depressed person is not the same as a happy person. I think that from the human gift of empathy, we should be able to understand that it's not a good place to be.

These metrics in the DSMIVR are not especially different than metrics used in psychology, except they're the subset that are of interest to healers.

There is, for example, a religoiosity index. It's not part of the DSMIVR because it's not related to discomfort the same way other personality factors are.

And yet you are telling me that a person feelings of lonliness are of more scientific value than their feelings of oneness with nature. I'm just saying that I don't believe it, or have any method of determining which subjective state is worthy of statistical pursuit for the purpose of creating an false "condition" which attempts to pass itself off as an empirical reality.

Nope. Never said that.

As for which subjective state is more/less worthy... that's up to the patient. Psychiatric patients are almost entirely self-selected. They're the ones who say: "I want this to stop, but I don't know how to make it."

And things like pot work on almost all of us. That medication may or may not work on certain subjective states really does tell us anything about why we treat one set as scientific and the other as non-scientific.

Again: what's this 'scientific' crap?

The question is: does it address the underlying complaint. Pot does not reduce the symptoms of depression, so if the patient says, "give me something to prevent me from committing suicide," and I said, "gosh, we have no diagnostic criteria, so let's give you random meds," that would be unethical.

The DSMIVR is a continuation of the moral obligation to provide the best assistance to those in need.

The scientific method can support this medical goal by connecting the cluster of observable traits with the most promising treatment. This is done through an accumulation of outcome stats, and also through investigation of physiology to learn about underlying causes. Psychiatry has a special challenge, because the physiology of the brain is in a very early stage of understanding, and its mechanics are obviously more complex than any other organ.

You are right they don't. But they may have some set of subject states they have in common with the experience of "born again;" states which when compiled an examined create a statistical "condition" to be named.

It's only a condition if the patients beat down the door. Right now, I'd say epiphany is a phenomenon that is fairly well explored and documented, and positively correlated to fantasy-prone personality and religiosity. These are all legitemate fields of study, but are not medicine, and are not in the DSMIVR for the same reason that having freckles is not a 'condition': nobody's asking for relief.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not arguing that religious sentiment belongs in the DSMIV. I'm arguing that the DSMIV is treated as science by imposters, and accepted as science by the gullible. And worse still, used by lawyers to condone any number of activities-- be they religious or otherwise.

I'm dubious about that last statement. Be mindful that mental diagnosis almost always works against the defendant. Consider the example of a patient my wife had last month...

Defendant: "You see, your honour, I can't help but be a menace to society - I have antisocial personality disorder, and I'm not cured."
Judge: "Then probation is denied."
Defendant: "D'oh!"

Personally, I feel safer with dangerous people out of circulation.



I think there's a lot of urban legends circulating that give the impression that people 'get off' because they have mental conditions. Usually, it just makes their sentence longer, means they have fewer privileges, and reduces their prospects for early release.

 

[blutoski]

I'll read yours after you've read mine-- Insanity: Its Scope and Consequences, Thomas Szasz.

Be mindful that Szasz is an ass. He's up to here (hand at eye level) in Scientology, and has more or less stopped producing cogent arguments.

He had some good points about institutionalization mabye forty years ago, but they've been addressed and then some, and at this point Szasz is living in the shadow of his previous achievements. It's like he's stopped reading the literature, and his arguments look very ignorant today.

Sort of like Pauling, I respect his earlier work, but since the '80s he's just been an embarassment to everybody these days, and it's more just sad, really.

 

[Avita]

Cross-cultural differences in psychology, psychological self-expression, and psychological classifications, are endlessly interesting. But you seem to be claiming that because people in different cultures have a prevalence of one or another disorder, then that somehow proves that the disorder is not "real." It's real, though in a sense, "created" by the surrounding environment. First, people tend to have different vocabularies for expressing what they feel. (You are probably aware, for instance, that most people who have a panic attack for the first time think that they are having a heart attack - that's the closest fit they can find in their experience, as our society talks about heart attacks a lot). There's no difference between that and symptoms of physical diseases - you always evaluate them in terms of what you know. Second, the environment itself can create conditions for developing certain mental diseases, which continue existing long after the initial environment has changed (e.g., people obsessed about money long after the Great Depression has passed; immigrants from the former Soviet Union who continue to be paranoid). Third, certain behaviors are encouraged and discouraged by each society, and that will affect the presentation of the mental disorder (I already gave the example of depression manifesting as anger in men).

If you're asking me, then I have no idea. Because they are subjective states we must rely on the person doing the describing.

Of course, any mental professional who is any good will take that into account. I think that relatively few slavishly follow the DSM without engaging in at least some level of thinking.

I'm saying the ones that can are more likely to win my support in the science department than the ones that can't.

I get that, but people have been trying to present evidence that mental states and physiology are tightly intertwined to you for a while now. They've also explained to you why certain diseases, both mental and physical, are not as clear-cut, and not as clearly diagnosable, as we would like. It's hard to tell, but at times your position seems to be that unless there's one single test to determine if a disease exists, it's not a disease - unless it's a "physical" disease, in which case never mind. If that's not your position, please make that clearer.

Exactly. And I'm stating that "negative thinking" plays a more complicated role than the DSMIV supposes. In fact, I'm saying that the whole subjective state or set of states are not as neatly quantifiable as people want to believe they are.

Nobody is arguing the "not as neatly quantifiable" part. What others and myself are arguing is that you're setting an impossible standard for mental illness. Also, the DSM says nothing about "negative thinking" - I'm not even sure you'd find the words in there. The DSM is also not about single moods, which are transient. The DSM attempts to describe certain conglomerations of experience that tend to be relatively long-lasting and interfere with people's lives. It attempts to figure out which experiences tend to go with which other experiences, and how we can make a person stop having those aversive experiences.

There is no difference between mood and mood disorder. They are both just moods. That we treat the bad ones as an objective entity while simultaneously treating the good ones as "pie in the sky" crazy talk is not logical.

No, we have some criteria - not entirely clear-cut, but there's that fallacy again - to distinguish moods from mood disorders. Also, mania is a "good" mood, yet listed in the DSM and treated. The same is true of certain kinds of religious feelings expressed by, for instance, people with schizophrenia. The DSM, contrary to popular opinion, is not out to demonize certain kinds of experience. Take any of the disorder criteria, and somewhere in there, you'll see a statement to the effect that whichever criteria the person fits, there must also be significant disruption to the person's life before it can be counted as a disorder.

I believe that moods can affect many of these things, not only defined "mood disorders."

Research shows that while moods are capable of briefly doing things like raising blood pressure, mood disorders cause more lasting changes, such as changes in brain structures.

It is a matter of degree that we deem of value. In other words, we decide the degree subjectively. That's fine. I'm just saying its not science.

My science textbooks disagree with you. Yes, there must be many more precautions taken when the phenomenon is not objectively quantifiable, but if we limited ourselves to just those phenomena, we strongly limit what we can learn about the world. Science, after all, is about testing and refinining hypotheses, not about handing down pronouncements from on high and stopping there.

I've responded by saying all moods respond to medication. Even the happy ones, or yes, the religious ones. With the exception of manic controlling drugs, we just don't spend much time and money altering the good moods.

All moods respond to something. The trick, when you have a person sitting in front of you whose moods have overwhelmed him or her, and are ruining that person's life, is to know what to apply to that person's particular state that will work better than placebo. Hence, classification, and hence, acceptance of a level of subjectivity.

 

[blutoski]

And yet both of these "disorders" had specific spikes in the timeline, i.e. the culture in which they manifested. During the Japanese stockmarket crash, we didn't fugue states did we? Why?

Who knows? One interpretation for this is just small sample sizes (there are very few cases of fugue in any year, so a 1000% increase may be from 5 to 50). Another is the magnitude of the problem. It's estimated that the US crash wiped out 40 million US households, and ushered in a global economic failure, whereas the Tokyo crash may have wiped out a few thousand, and was isolated within Japan.

If the major cause of fugue is serious personal shock, this alone would explain a 1,000x+ difference in incidence between the two events.

Another reason is that we have increased ability to test for fugue and differentiate it with psychoses or drug-induced memory blackouts (wasn't the '30s a period of high alcohol abuse?)

 

[blutoski]

Oh I see you assume that mental health workers are dumber than you and don't consider that, the technical phrase is validity. Duh, even a dummie like me thought of that one Stamen, us mental health people do learn how to judge when people are lying to them.

One of the things about psychiatrists is that the get good at the 'reality pill'. Patients lie about having a psychiatric illness because they believe they will have an excuse for some incident, usually criminal. Or they want to take a break from something. The term is 'malingering'. Psych 101 is to look for certain tells.

But this is not significantly different than other parts of medicine. I worked in Emerg on weekends for about two years straight at an inner-city hospital (St. Paul's, for those in Vancouver who would recognize it) and the #1 fake complaint was "I have a stomach ache." This does not invalidate the entire field of internal medicine, most of whose illnesses harbinger with this primary complaint. The second most common complaint was "I have a headache", followed by chest pains, blindness, and so on.

These guys are all looking for a free meal and a soft mattress, and have chosen conditions that require a few hours of 'observation' in the overnight wing of emerg. So, we give 'em an egg-salad sandwich, four hours of sleep, and they're on their way.

Such is medicine.

 

[Kopji]

I hesitate to add to this, having lots of crazy people in my family certainly does not make me an expert.

If I were to identify something I thought was a common thread with insanity, it is in how choices are made: How do we choose this from that?

We label it insanity when our choices harm us, but otherwise we call it by all kinds of benevolent sounding things. This does not deny that there is an identifiable quality (the it)within us that could under the right circumstances, drive harmful choices.

The various conspiracy threads are a topic of continued interest to me because they support this idea of a flaw in our ability to choose rightly between things. While not religious, it seems similar.

I am sympathetic to stamenflicker's honesty in the opening post. Much religious sentiment and insanity seem the same to me. I cannot tell one from another - except for the kind of choices we make. I can understand why that looks subjective or cultural.

If your religiosity does not help direct or navigate you toward bad choices, it is hard to label it an illness. On the other hand, for some people the very same religiosity is a way to destruction. Perhaps this is an indication that there are real differences between us, and no religion (or atheism for that matter) can say it is best for all.

 

[blutoski]

I hesitate to add to this, having lots of crazy people in my family certainly does not make me an expert.

If I were to identify something I thought was a common thread with insanity, it is in how choices are made: How do we choose this from that?

We label it insanity when our choices harm us, but otherwise we call it by all kinds of benevolent sounding things. This does not deny that there is an identifiable quality (the it)within us that could under the right circumstances, drive harmful choices.

The various conspiracy threads are a topic of continued interest to me because they support this idea of a flaw in our ability to choose rightly between things. While not religious, it seems similar.

I am sympathetic to stamenflicker's honesty in the opening post. Much religious sentiment and insanity seem the same to me. I cannot tell one from another - except for the kind of choices we make. I can understand why that looks subjective or cultural.

If your religiosity does not help direct or navigate you toward bad choices, it is hard to label it an illness. On the other hand, for some people the very same religiosity is a way to destruction. Perhaps this is an indication that there are real differences between us, and no religion (or atheism for that matter) can say it is best for all.

We have to be mindful that insanity is a legal term, and not a medical one. The closest medical category that looks like what people colloquially call insane is psychotic. This is very different than having odd ideas, and religion in no ways resembles psychoses.

eg: (taken from a transcript from last week)

Interviewer:

"Why did you hit those people?"

Psychotic Patient:

"The ultra ways is not in the CIA zoners. Unless who isn't the key. Aquaman! Winter! Unless unless unless unless unless unless unless unless unless unless unless unless unless unless unless unless unless. But only if we celery celebrate celebration. Fortune smiles smiling similar smiles. Not buttons but butt****. All almonds are arrgh! We're all going into caves!"

So, when people casually say, "Well, I think the psychiatrists are just calling ordinary behavior a pathology because they feel threatened by unfamiliar views." I think they're just plain ignorant.

If you took this guy to some Amazon tribe and dopped him there, they'd look at each other and say: "This guy's nucking futz," just like we would. Some things are culture-agnostic, and psycho is one of them.