Merged Psychological conditions are illusory

Jonesboy is under the illusion that he's "busting" "myths" apparently of his own making.

Perhaps a more honest title would be "Look! I Can Haz Strawmen!", in which he contrives another pointless and irrelevant situation.
 
Hmmm. There was a martyr on the Skeptoid site who tried to turn every discussion into a tiradeof why psychology is not science, and anybody thought to be mentally ill was physically ill. This is rather remisiscent, and not in a good way.

PTSD is a disorder. The sufferer does not seek help because they aren't accepted, they seek help because they are suffering. Because something abnormal is happening and it is not pleasent. Telling them they just need to chill and take a trip is dangerously bad advice.
 
So, you want a return to the good old days of shooting soldiers for cowardice?
 
rjh01 said:
Is there any evidence for what is stated in the OP? Does the OP have any experience or qualifications to say what he is saying?
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they appear to be engaing in some holistic 'it is teh man what keeps us down' sort of fallacy. panic attacks are uncomfortable for those who have them, they do not resolve or heal the individual who has had teh trauma.

The OP is ignorant and want to pretend that they know something other peopel don't. No one forces people with PTSD to get treatment, you can freak out all you want, the OP is under the delusion that people only get treatment because of societal mores.

The OP is sadly mistaken.
 
not daSkeptic said:
Not to feed the obvious troll, but it was my understanding that PTSD is defined by the patient's non-improvement. In other words, if they're getting better it isn't PTSD.
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True , PTSD is defined as lasting longer the ATSD

Actually all mental illness and disoders are defined by the client's perceived decrease in functioning in areas of life skills (work, educatio and social), if a person does notw ant treatment, nor do they feel that their functioning is not impacted, then they don't seek treatment.

Jonesboy probably has a little altar to Szasz in his mind, people who are mentaly ill can chose to seek treatment or not, they are allowed to be as eccentric as they want. The suffering of people with psychosis is not imposed upon them by society, most of them don't like the hallucinations, they do not consider it a blessing.
 
Tomtomkent said:
Hmmm. There was a martyr on the Skeptoid site who tried to turn every discussion into a tiradeof why psychology is not science, and anybody thought to be mentally ill was physically ill.
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In one sense they were right, mental illness are physical disorders. They are physical disorders.
 
Dancing David said:
In one sense they were right, mental illness are physical disorders. They are physical disorders.
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Yes, but I do mean EVERY discussion, if it was relevant or not. And having popped back to check I got the jist right, they were also mentioning that psychology was a scam, to keep people down trodden who can not afford real medicine.

There is no doubt that there are physiological causes to almost every disorder, including those of the mind. The mind is a product of the brain after all. But that is not the same as disregarding psychology entirely as ineffective, or deciding that any soldier who had PTSD probably actually had Gulf War Syndrome. There remains evidence that therapy works, that it can produce possitive benefits, and there are some situations where medication or surgical cures may not be the best option for treatment. Of stress for example.
 
All animals hyperventilate.
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Not even close to true. In fact, only animals with lungs are even capable of hyperventelating--which means only a subset of vertebrates (mostly terrestrial ones, though there are a few exceptions).

If this is the level of your scholarship, I think we can safely dismiss anything you may have to say.
 
After working with abused children for the past 28 years all I can say is that the effects of trauma, years after the events, that still impact normal functioning, relationships, employment and mental health have been observed by researchers and psychiatric professionals; and the results of that research and years of observations has been described and quantified within the available standards of diagnostic criteria for the purpose of guiding mental health providers in treating those unfortunate folk whose lives are significantly impacted and disrupted. No it’s not math, chemistry or physics where theory requires the support of repeatable proofs. It’s human stuff, you know, all fuzzy and ape like where we try to help folk live better lives.
 
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Tomtomkent said:
Yes, but I do mean EVERY discussion, if it was relevant or not. And having popped back to check I got the jist right, they were also mentioning that psychology was a scam, to keep people down trodden who can not afford real medicine.

There is no doubt that there are physiological causes to almost every disorder, including those of the mind. The mind is a product of the brain after all. But that is not the same as disregarding psychology entirely as ineffective, or deciding that any soldier who had PTSD probably actually had Gulf War Syndrome. There remains evidence that therapy works, that it can produce possitive benefits, and there are some situations where medication or surgical cures may not be the best option for treatment. Of stress for example.
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I agree, they sound woo. Psychological problems, including PTSD , which are not mild in nature, respond best to medication and CBT
 
James Fox said:
After working with abused children for the past 28 years all I can say is that the effects of trauma, years after the events, that still impact normal functioning, relationships, employment and mental health have been observed by researchers and psychiatric professionals; and the results of that research and years of observations has been described and quantified within the available standards of diagnostic criteria for the purpose of guiding mental health providers in treating those unfortunate folk whose lives are significantly impacted and disrupted. No it’s not math, chemistry or physics where theory requires the support of repeatable proofs. It’s human stuff, you know, all fuzzy and ape like where we try to help folk live better lives.
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Thanks for your work. I did DV for three years, I had my fill.
 
Dancing David said:
I agree, they sound woo. Psychological problems, including PTSD , which are not mild in nature, respond best to medication and CBT
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And to my understanding it is a sliding scale. Some people may need more CBT than medication. Others might need more medication than therapy. The problem psychology is that too many people, as with the O/P here, seem to mistake "in and of the mind" as "made up and not real". Psychology may sound like Woo, and it may be argued that cognitive sciences are "soft", but they retain the same standards of evidence and process to be "science".

To say that people who have PTSD just need to "trip" to get over it is to greatly misunderstand the way the mind processes information and the two way relationship between emotion and physiological effects. If shouting "Get over it man!" worked, who on earth would have ever suffered from PTSD? PTSD is the failure to, not the process of, "dealing with" traumatic experiences.
 
Jonesboy said:
No, it shouldn't be treated. It should, like sleep, like coughing and laughing, be allowed.
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You are suggesting that coughing should not be treated?

Having a cough is allowed, but is also recognised as a symptom that could be of a could, a sore throat, or cancer. Persistent coughs should be treated. Come to think of it uncontrollable laughing and narcolepsy should be looked at too.

You realise the difference between being stressed and having a stress disorder? Like the difference between having a sleep and having a sleep disorder? Or laughing at a joke and laughing out of control in mania?
 
Debunking dyslexia

It is difficult to debunk dyslexia because the term doesn't mean anything. Medics use "dyslexia" as a disempowering term of abuse, but by dressing it up as a meaningless "condition" they can get followers. Their willing victims, the so-called "dyslexics" enjoy the pseudo-scientific intrigue that now surrounds their quite ordinary difficulty in reading.

Individuals have a range of reading skills: hardly unexpected. To make victims from these normal distribution patterns a scientist or medic will arbitrarily declare certain reading ranges as a "condition", as if it has some defining property that distinguishes it from the rest. It does not, of course. Medics privilege the binary - one range is privileged over the other as being not a condition.

The best thing to say to someone who says they are dyslexic is not the obvious "I don't believe you", which I used to say, but is "I don't know what you mean". This is because they, and no-one else, knows what they mean.
 
If I ask someone with dyslexia to read something I just wrote, letter by letter as they appear to them, and several or all are in the wrong or reverse order, I can get a pretty good idea of what they mean by "I have dyslexia."
What other well known medical conditions don't you believe in?
 
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