GENIUS FORUMS

I just picked up some random psychiatry text from the local U. Reading through the introduction, I came across a little gem of a self-description. Apparently, psychiatrists view themselves as "experts in interpersonal relations".

My jaw dropped. Is that what psychiatry considers itself? Since psychiatrists can prescribe powerful drugs to completely alter someone's behaviour and thought processes, this leads me to two very quick analogies:

1) drinking beer to improve your interpersonal relationship skills
2) a priest, an expert in interpersonal relations, giving you high-powered drugs

This is not science, but religion. My assumption that I was hospitalized not for saying false things, but for annoying the hell out of people, has been verified.

Trevor Salyzyn wrote:I just picked up some random psychiatry text from the local U. Reading through the introduction, I came across a little gem of a self-description. Apparently, psychiatrists view themselves as "experts in interpersonal relations".

My jaw dropped. Is that what psychiatry considers itself? Since psychiatrists can prescribe powerful drugs to completely alter someone's behaviour and thought processes, this leads me to two very quick analogies:

1) drinking beer to improve your interpersonal relationship skills
2) a priest, an expert in interpersonal relations, giving you high-powered drugs

This is not science, but religion. My assumption that I was hospitalized not for saying false things, but for annoying the hell out of people, has been verified.

You threw a dart, and instead of getting a Bullseye you hit a polar bear in the ass. You are so off target.

Are you still sore that I called your quantum mechanical theories bullshit? That I had the presumption to know that you were stupid from the first sentence?

Please keep your idiotic comments out of my thread, even if you can't hold your tongue elsewhere.

....atleast Tom Cruise is right about ONE thing....

Trevor Salyzyn wrote:Are you still sore that I called your quantum mechanical theories bullshit? That I had the presumption to know that you were stupid from the first sentence?

and where did this take place?

Trevor,

This is not science, but religion. My assumption that I was hospitalized not for saying false things, but for annoying the hell out of people, has been verified.

It's definitely not philosophy ...?

.............................................................................................................................................................

Q. Would it bother you if a fat, old, ugly teacher came to class and begun to teach by demoving all her clothing? ...What if it was a sexy Salma Hayek look-a-like? What's the diference? Is it appropriate one way or another?

(I'm going to begin taking my meds on Monday. Does the depressive side-effect have anything to do with realization...?)

Trevor Salyzyn wrote:I just picked up some random psychiatry text from the local U. Reading through the introduction, I came across a little gem of a self-description. Apparently, psychiatrists view themselves as "experts in interpersonal relations".

My jaw dropped. Is that what psychiatry considers itself? Since psychiatrists can prescribe powerful drugs to completely alter someone's behaviour and thought processes, this leads me to two very quick analogies:

1) drinking beer to improve your interpersonal relationship skills
2) a priest, an expert in interpersonal relations, giving you high-powered drugs

This is not science, but religion. My assumption that I was hospitalized not for saying false things, but for annoying the hell out of people, has been verified.

Well for one thing, you presume that psychiatrists are grouped into a single mind. An introduction on a piece of paper that describes this entire single mind. And that this piece of paper is the Bible.

My assumption that I was hospitalized not for saying false things, but for annoying the hell out of people, has been verified.

Trevor, those can be the same. False things do annoy people, but so does the truth, the distinction is of importance...

Pincho, can you please stop making presumptions about what I'm presuming? It's kinda annoying. How about you skip the bullshit and you respect that I'm not actually as dense as a doorknob. You don't need to re-iterate things that I'd have to be a moron not to have thought of. If I am making mistakes somewhere, they are not going to be in the first place anyone looks.

Psychiatry is a complex institution: if I wasn't already aware of that first-hand, after having already spent years diagnosed and mis-diagnosed, drugged and threatened with drugs, and without having the direct experience of the institution, you might have a case for believing that I don't understand enough of the complexities to make judgements on the institution as a whole. But me being a philosopher and patient of many doctors, I can pull a hell of a lot of information out of a standard textbook of clinical psychiatry that is accurate, but not revealed directly to inexperienced readers.

Trevor Salyzyn wrote:Pincho, can you please stop making presumptions about what I'm presuming? It's kinda annoying. How about you skip the bullshit and you respect that I'm not actually as dense as a doorknob. You don't need to re-iterate things that I'd have to be a moron not to have thought of. If I am making mistakes somewhere, they are not going to be in the first place anyone looks.

Psychiatry is a complex institution: if I wasn't already aware of that first-hand, after having already spent years diagnosed and mis-diagnosed, drugged and threatened with drugs, and without having the direct experience of the institution, you might have a case for believing that I don't understand enough of the complexities to make judgements on the institution as a whole. But me being a philosopher and patient of many doctors, I can pull a hell of a lot of information out of a standard textbook of clinical psychiatry that is accurate, but not revealed directly to inexperienced readers.

But at the same time you can be dillusional. Which is another reason to spend a lot of time with psychiatrists. And is another side-effect of drugs.

pinocchio,

But at the same time you can be dillusional. Which is another reason to spend a lot of time with psychiatrists. And is another side-effect of drugs.

Your idiocy is almost unbearable.

Ignis Fatuus wrote:pinocchio,

But at the same time you can be dillusional. Which is another reason to spend a lot of time with psychiatrists. And is another side-effect of drugs.

Your idiocy is almost unbearable.

My facts are almost unbearable you mean?

Because you cannot call my facts idiocy.. and my quote is a fact without doubt.

Trevor Salyzyn wrote: This is not science, but religion. My assumption that I was hospitalized not for saying false things, but for annoying the hell out of people, has been verified.

Maybe the doctors who deal with patients are merely representatives of people who can rightly be regarded as scientists.

I'm interested in how they create drugs - surely it's somewhat scientific. Is it always just an arbitrary process of producing random concoctions? Perhaps there some fairly noble scientific people who have a respectable grasp of and interest in how the brain generally works, and strive to create medicine that operates on the brain in predictable manner - and perhaps this is a part of what psychiatry is about.

Pincho Paxton,

Me: Your idiocy is almost unbearable.


You: My facts are almost unbearable you mean?

Because you cannot call my facts idiocy.. and my quote is a fact without doubt.

I went to bed and couldn't sleep. I reckon part of the problem is caused by "my idiocy", so I need to get this off my chest:

I'm really sorry I wrote that. (ok?)

Ignis Fatuus wrote:Pincho Paxton,

Me: Your idiocy is almost unbearable.


You: My facts are almost unbearable you mean?

Because you cannot call my facts idiocy.. and my quote is a fact without doubt.

I went to bed and couldn't sleep. I reckon part of the problem is caused by "my idiocy", so I need to get this off my chest:

I'm really sorry I wrote that. (ok?)

I accept your apology.
I am tired too, I am an insomniac. I sometimes make posts that I did not want to make. I am sorry about my initial post, and any other posts that seem harsh.

Pincho,

But at the same time you can be dillusional. Which is another reason to spend a lot of time with psychiatrists. And is another side-effect of drugs.

This is all ad hominem. It is not an argument against my argument, but against me. It also completely misinterprets delusions, psychiatry, and drugs. It is ignorant to the point where I can't even take offense any more, because it's not like you know anything about what you are talking about.

Anyway it is not hard even for a mentally ill person (fuck, I can't believe I had to say that) to compare a given system of thought to all the religions he knows and to all the sciences he knows. Psychiatry has more in common with religions than sciences.

Cory,

Maybe the doctors who deal with patients are merely representatives of people who can rightly be regarded as scientists.

I'm interested in how they create drugs - surely it's somewhat scientific. Is it always just an arbitrary process of producing random concoctions? Perhaps there some fairly noble scientific people who have a respectable grasp of and interest in how the brain generally works, and strive to create medicine that operates on the brain in predictable manner - and perhaps this is a part of what psychiatry is about.

No part of psychiatry is scientific, although psychiatry uses -- and abuses -- discoveries of neuroscience and biology.

The decision to treat someone's interpersonal problems with drugs is normative, not factual. The classification of different interpersonal problems, and which drugs fix each, is also normative. An ideal is imagined and an illness is defined by not being that ideal; most of these illnesses, however, can only be "treated" by giving the person a powerful, mind-altering drug every day for the rest of his life. Any science is completely swept away under the weight of something that I can't simply call ethical. There's way too many answers supplied to misleading questions, and way too many people buy into it, and there's way too much influence -- for psychiatry to be considered merely an ethical system. It's an ethical system that abuses a possible understanding of the world to force people to strive for a false ideal... sound familiar?

I just think that you use such a broad term for religion that it starts to invade my own beliefs, and that is distasteful for me. In fact I find it an insult, and feel that you insulted my beliefs in your first post. And that CAUSED me to try to correct this notion that you have with a reply that would stop you from using the word Religion so broadly.

To me, the word religion is..

"any specific system of belief and worship of a God or Godess, often involving a code of ethics and a philosophy."

And I don't want it to contaminate my personal beliefs, and I don't want it forced on psychiatry either.

Pincho,

"any specific system of belief and worship of a God or Godess, often involving a code of ethics and a philosophy."

1) Is Buddhism a religion by this definition?
2) How is psychiatry not a religion by this definition?

Trevor Salyzyn wrote:Pincho,

"any specific system of belief and worship of a God or Godess, often involving a code of ethics and a philosophy."

1) Is Buddhism a religion by this definition?
2) How is psychiatry not a religion by this definition?

1) I don't even know what Buddhism is. It is not a subject I would want to explore, as my notion of it is that Buddhists worship a Buddah or something.

2) Where is there a God in psychiatry?

Pincho,

1) I don't even know what Buddhism is. It is not a subject I would want to explore, as my notion of it is that Buddhists worship a Buddah or something.

So, you have admitted here that your definition of religion may not include all religions. Are you unwilling to explore this topic further because it might make you have to second-guess your opinion of psychiatry?

If psychiatry was your religion, I can see why this would be a useful evasion.

2) Where is there a God in psychiatry?

Several places. One is with the psychiatrist, who is often treated with the fear, love, and respect of any deity -- other possible places include the medication (as though the ritual of taking medication staves off moral corruption), the companies that create the medication, or even the whole institution itself.

Trevor Salyzyn wrote:Pincho,

1) I don't even know what Buddhism is. It is not a subject I would want to explore, as my notion of it is that Buddhists worship a Buddah or something.

So, you have admitted here that your definition of religion may not include all religions. Are you unwilling to explore this topic further because it might make you have to second-guess your opinion of psychiatry?

If psychiatry was your religion, I can see why this would be a useful evasion.

2) Where is there a God in psychiatry?

Several places. One is with the psychiatrist, who is often treated with the fear, love, and respect of any deity -- other possible places include the medication (as though the ritual of taking medication staves off moral corruption), the companies that create the medication, or even the whole institution itself.

So you want to use a broad term for religion, and a very broad term for God. Go ahead, but I will not change my English to suit yours. So I will never understand you.

Trevor Salyzyn wrote:Apparently, psychiatrists view themselves as "experts in interpersonal relations".

My jaw dropped. Is that what psychiatry considers itself?

That does seem like a very bad description. In my view, what goes on within (internal to) a particular person is the realm of psychology. What goes on between people is the realm of sociology.

But no one goes to visit a sociologist. Sociologists can't prescribe drugs.

Pincho Paxton wrote: Go ahead, but I will not change my English to suit yours. So I will never understand you.

!!!

Pincho,

So you want to use a broad term for religion, and a very broad term for God.

Yes, I want to use a broad term for religion. I want religions to include Buddhism.

As to God, my "very broad term" is the way that people treat the object. If I am going to use God in a demeaning manner, as the thing that redneck fundamentalists believe in, then my use is perfectly acceptable. It's a very particular form of idol-worship. Psychiatrists are worshipped as omnipotent idols.

In which case, I want to use actually a very narrow term for God; if I wanted to use a broad term, I'd use the pantheist definition of God, where God is simply "Everything". In this case, however, I clearly don't mean what an educated person means when he uses the word God, but what a religious nut means.

Go ahead, but I will not change my English to suit yours. So I will never understand you.

So, you are actively trying not to understand me? No wonder you are so deluded! Good philosophers tend to work the other way around, where they actively try to understand others. Maybe you should go to a different forum, because this statement makes you sound like you are bad at thinking.

Dave,

That does seem like a very bad description. In my view, what goes on within (internal to) a particular person is the realm of psychology. What goes on between people is the realm of sociology.

But no one goes to visit a sociologist. Sociologists can't prescribe drugs.

Well, I did say my jaw dropped. But calling psychiatrists "sociologists" (or even "bartenders who wasted more than a decade in school") is actually more accurate as to what goes on when you deal with a psychiatrist. Psychiatry is such a mess, and it's not hard to find the culprits.

The textbook authors recommend an "eclectic" approach to dealing with patients, where a doctor picks and chooses from many different theories in his attempt to find what works. They dispassionately record things like "the patient is now angry; showing resistance to goals of treatment" (as a patient, I sure as fuck was angry, but the treatment never seemed to have any real goals... changing me from one thing into another is not a particularly clear goal... it's an ethical statement, nothing more. )... but dispassionately shrugging off what I'm saying because I'm "showing resistance" does not mean that my resistance is somehow unjustified!

Anyway, this eclectic approach, especially given the incommensurability of many of the theories, simply makes the psychiatrist a hypocrite who always changes his mind. And some of the theories with currency are, despite any therapeutic use in pretending they are valid, completely fucking false. There's therapeutic value to Dungeons and Dragons, but that does not justify treating someone as though he's a "level 4 cleric" simply because his character is that. It doesn't even make sense.

One of the big theories, the first presented in the book, involves assumptions about the ego that no philosopher (at least not at GF) would ever let slide.