GENIUS FORUMS

Trevor Salyzyn wrote: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.

I think that a good philosopher tries to understand the intelligent, and when they read a statement that God........ well I don't even know what you meant, because my English does not accomodate it. But God is not a God I got that much. Then I don't want to understand them, else I am suddenly in a situation wher instead of me searching for the truth, I am suddenly inundated with a bunch of religious rules. Because these rules do not exist in the particle world, I would be wasting my time to follow you.

Pincho, you expressed no interest in learning about Buddhism, even though knowledge of the diversity of religions is pivotal to my point about psychiatry being a religion. Now you are expressing no interest in understanding how God has been used and misused. This complete lack of interest is a problem on your end, not on the part of my argument. If you don't care about religion enough to even know what a religion is, then keep out of a discussion where "religion" is one of the words in the title. You came in here guns blazing; don't try to act as though this failure on your part to understand what I said was my fault. You are ignorant of these matters, on top of being apathetic. I am not.

I am interested in stopping delusion. I want you to get back to the particle world to help you out of this religious imaginary world. That was my original reason to attack your thread, like a slap in the face for hysteria. However, I should give people choices, even if it is hard for me to let you fall down a big hole. I must let you have that choice.

But there are people on this site that have got themselves stuck in a linear world, it is very disconcerting.

The linear plane is the + spin.

Memory/abstaction is the - spin.

Result is the non-linear, or intuition. (1)

Pincho, pity for others is the last refuge of a defeated man. You are in the wrong. Get over it.

Trevor,

"experts in interpersonal relations"

Is that what psychiatry considers itself?

They want to help people and at the same time, help themselves...

This is not science, but religion.

I think it's a little of both.

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

They found your behavior odd, so they prescribed you some pills. Did it mask the problem?

Why have you been ignoring my posts?

[I'm beginning to think the creator of these bots suspects I'm onto them!]

Ignus,

They found your behavior odd, so they prescribed you some pills. Did it mask the problem?

It changed something that was defined by others to be a problem into something that others did not consider to be quite so problematic.

Why have you been ignoring my posts?

Not being fully immersed in the Infinite, I'm not skilled in the fine art of repeating myself an infinite number of times.

.

Trevor Salyzyn wrote: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.

Ok, fair enough.

The decision to treat someone's interpersonal problems with drugs is normative, not factual.

This is indeed a huge problem I've noticed with psychiatrists. They make incredibly narrow normative claims, which exclude, disrespect and deprecate other normative claims which I think are pretty reasonable: humans can become damaged by poor environment and upbringing.

Psychiatry doesn't hold anyone responsible and thinks that individuals should be medicated to conform to current exploitative and vulgar cultural values. Which is obviously rubbish.

The classification of different interpersonal problems, and which drugs fix each, is also normative.

I'm not so sure. Some people fall into incredibly stereotypical trajectories in terms of their maladaptive behavior. For a doctor to simply recognize an individuals maladaptive behavior as being strikingly similar to previously studied maladaptive individuals, is factual if you ask me. He's just calling a spade a spade.

It becomes normative when he says: "This particular individual needs to be treated so he can maintain ideal behavior"

And when it comes to drugs, I agree that it's normative to insist an individual needs drugs, but 'which' drugs actually work is factual.

An ideal is imagined and an illness is defined by not being that ideal;

Before there can be ideals, we simply need to acknowledge patterns.

For instance, if I were to believe that a triangle is less ideal than a square, don't I need to first establish the factual claim that there is a square in contrast to a triangle?

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.

Despite the foolish heedlessness with which many psychiatrist 'prescribe' their wares, these powerful mind altering drugs are not just randomly concocted, the science is not completely swept away.

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?

You summed it up pretty well there.

Trevor, let me ask you:

How have you come to account for your own condition? Do you believe that if you were raised differently that you would have been quite a bit different? Do you believe you have been damaged?

....

What did you want to discuss when you created this thread?

Specifically, how well psychiatry can be classified as a religion. I do not start threads on beliefs that I am perfectly certain of, since that would not teach me anything, although I do try to defend the belief as best as I can. There is some Devil's advocate in my treatment of this thread.

This thread is not, however, designed to give anyone a psychiatric label, or to resolve problems that there is currently no better approach than psychiatry. I only discuss my own illness as far as it is relevant to the thread.

...What the fuck did I do?

You never show restraint. I wonder: how often do you decide not to post something you wrote, because it would be inappropriate or irrelevant?

Cory,

And when it comes to drugs, I agree that it's normative to insist an individual needs drugs, but 'which' drugs actually work is factual.

No drugs fix all problems of a given illness: the problems are instead classified into positive and negative symptoms. A drug can alleviate some symptoms, and the goal is usually only to alleviate particular ones. When a drug acts, it causes side-effects that are completely foreign to the illness.

There is, therefore, a very fine line between what is normative and what is factual. The fact is not a prediction of treatment so much as a prediction of particular sorts of change. Even words like "cure" and "treatment" seem borrowed arbitrarily from medicine.

Before there can be ideals, we simply need to acknowledge patterns.

For instance, if I were to believe that a triangle is less ideal than a square, don't I need to first establish the factual claim that there is a square in contrast to a triangle?

Yes, agreed.

Despite the foolish heedlessness with which many psychiatrist 'prescribe' their wares, these powerful mind altering drugs are not just randomly concocted, the science is not completely swept away.

As far as predictions can be made about the effects of the drugs, certainly some science remains. The problem is, once you focus on the raw data of which predictions are being made, it becomes very hard to establish why these predictions have been chosen as the essential ones to focus on. There is no scientific or medical reason why schizophrenics are given treatments; the reasons are only inter-personal.

In a civilization of schizophrenics, non-schizophrenics would need treatment.

How have you come to account for your own condition?

Currently, I see my brain as being more sensitive to its own chemicals than the average brain, perhaps due to my youthful experiments with drugs. This causes it to deplete neurotransmitters rapidly during some periods, and set up stockpiles of such during other periods.

That both depletion and over-stock of neurochemicals is considered a problem is normative. However, it is perfectly factual that there exist drugs that can prevent the depressed and manic states from ever surfacing. So long as I prefer not being subject to these states, I take my pills -- but I recognize that it would be an illusion to believe these pills are curing anything. My psychiatrist may as well be a bartender.

Trevor, I think of you as the brother I never had... But you've turned out to be like the rest!

I have a brother, and he tells me things I don't like to hear.

Creating Mental Illness

^ Based on what I've read about this book, I would say that it likely comes very close to representing my current views on psychology/psychiatry.

Looking forward to reading it.

Cory Duchesne wrote:Creating Mental Illness

That looks pretty interesting. I think I'll pick it up as well.

I read the excerpt, and the thought struck me: "this could be easily explained if there were simply too many psychiatrists and psychiatric nurses for the number of people who actually need care."

It's like training 3 police officers for every 1 criminal. Or too many teachers for not enough students. A lot of bullshit gets created in the process.