Original SDMB thread - What's next, Tri-polar?
AHunter3 Brings His Soapbox to the Park Again...
At the risk of offending several people here that I respect and care about, and at the risk of being misinterpreted as someone who is belittling the pain and suffering experienced by people diagnosed as "bipolar"/"manic-depressive" or the relief they get from the medication they take --
Witch:
quote:
The fact that mood stabilizers and anti-depressants made it possible for me to leave the house and keep a half way normal scedule for the first time in years is a pretty good indicator I'm bipolar. If the drugs didn't have any effect, that would have been a pretty good indicator I was not. Same would go for clinical depression.
Logical fallacy. I lived for years in a grad-student building with a guy who could not face the world without smoking a joint. This does not constitute proof that he suffered from a metabolic THC insufficiency. Not to pick on you, Witch, this is exactly the kind of fallacious argument put forth by the pharmaceutical folks and the mental health system as part of their justification for insisting, mantra-like, that "bipolar disorder is a mental illness. mental illnesses are caused by chemical imbalances in the brain. mental patients need to take their medications or they cannot function."
DoctorJ:
quote:
Of course it's subjective--unlike diabetes, we can't measure your Depression Level with a blood test.
Exactly. Look, people, I need you to acknowledge something. To declare that all observable states of emotional misery and suffering are medical states caused by problems in the suffering persons' brain is to make a profoundly political statement. To declare that the default assumption about anyone exhibiting prolonged emotional misery and suffering should be that they are probably suffering from some form of mental illness is only one step behind that. If these statements are not self-explanatory and compellingly true for you, please indicate that this is the case and I'll elaborate. Otherwise, please acknowledge that you get this. I, in turn, will readily acknowledge that its truth in no way invalidates the fact that many people find psychiatric medication a godsend that gave them their lives back. I would never hurl insulting names or comments at you for utilizing something that enables you to function.
Now, concerning the possibility that various miseries and melancholies and profoundly unpleasant emotional states -- even intractable ongoing debilitating emotional states -- are experienced by some people who feel that way because life has just drop-kicked them in the metaphorical teeth, or has done so on a never-ending basis for a long long time for that matter -- well, yeah, I hold that truth to be self-evident as well.
And insofar as those emotional states are therefore not maladies of a misbehaving brain but are normal natural and healthy emotional responses to shitty things happening, the long-term ideal solution here would be to fix the underlying problem (if it isn't accidental or coincidental), whatever it is that is causing life to suck for this suffering person, which isn't an Antidepressant Deficiency Disease at all. Does that translate into "Yo, look around and assess your sucky-ass life, dust your butt off and get your house in order and take responsibility for why your life sucks"?? NO, that's ANOTHER TYPE OF VICTIM-BLAMING, as it implicitly assigns causal responsibility for the suckiness of life to the suffering person, which is yet another profoundly political statement. (Like blaming the suffering person's neurons, it locates the problem inside the suffering individual, although this time holding them morally culpable in the process). In fact, one of my pet peeves is the tendency of "liberal" people to embrace the medical model of mental illness because it doesn't hold suffering people morally culpable ('cuz if its' their neurons you can't say their suffering is their own fault), oblivious to the fact that it still locates the source of the suffering within the victims themselves.
Well. I am not so enamoured of this soapbox that I cannot see that some people some of the time are indeed culpably responsible for their own miseries, and I am also not so much of an ideological monomaniac that I can't acknowledge the medical possibility that some emotional states (and cognitive states as well) that are unpleasant and dysfunctional can be caused, in their entirety, by misbehaving neurons. So I am certainly not saying that "everything that is called 'mental illness' is really the individual manifestation of Oppression by The Man" or some such reductionistically political thing.
But. Yes, a great deal of the emotional suffering that is caused by social circumstances and/or by unfortunate sequences of shitty things happening is diagnosed these days as one form of "mental illness" or another, because that has become the default assumption even for lay persons confronted with protracted emotional suffering (or cognitive incoherency). And yes in spades, the psychiatric profession is not disposed to offer a diagnosis of "miserable to the point of debilitation for reasons other than 'mental illness' ", so cases brought to psychiatric attention result in formal official diagnostic criteria being applied, along with a prescription for something that will allow the debilitated person to face the day. And yes, with huge fucking bullet points, this is a form of oppression.
(And we haven't even addressed forced treatment but you can kind of see where that would fit in, right? I knew you could...)
We need not posit premeditated conscious oppression by the Big Evil Man. Oppression of the inconvenient sufferers by those not currently forced to suffer by whatever brought them down is sufficient explanation.
Kurt Vonnegut wrote once of the canaries they used to take down into the mines. The canaries were more susceptable to lethal fumes than human miners, so when the canaries died, the miners knew to evacuate. The psychiatrization of emotional distress is akin to a bunch of miners saying "Look at those weak little canaries dying in their cage. Must be something wrong with canaries", and asserting that it could not happen to them because none of them is a canary.
Except that with mental illness, there are no yellow wings to differentiate canries from miners. Only the act of collapsing determines that one is a canary.