I had severe allergic reaction to shrimp. Ended up at the ER where I was treated with Epinephrine, Prednisone and Diphenhydramine (Benadryl administered directly to bloodstream though).
Guess what, I had serious panick attacks for another2 days. When the following day I showed up at the ER, I was told by a Doctor who originally treated me day before that I clearly have mental issues because this reaction shouldn't last so long. Psychiatrist didn't even ask questions and prescribed me anti-depressants. Obciously, anxiety diminished on its own next day. FDA.GOV confirms that all 3 medications I was given may cause anxiety (severe) and panick attacks. Including benadryl that does cause anxiety in me. This was widely studied and is believed to be caused by liver enzymes. So, all in all I had never had mentall issues before, never had issues after. But had 3 days of panick attacks and severe anxeity causeb clearly by medication. Hey, but I'm considered depressive, anxious now. It is in my medical records. Just amazing how fast they are to label you and how difficult it is to clear the record. All result of ignorance, but what can I do? Recently I went through cholestycomy procedure outside my insurance, just because I didn't want to be treated by medical stuff with suspicion.
I don't believe psychiatrists now at all. I mean this is some type of witchcraft, not science for sure.
Incidentally, I highly recommend reading the DSM (diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders) and figuring out which disorder you show the most signs of. Myself, I meet all the criteria for ADHD, and if I had been born some years later or in a different place, could easily have been diagnosed with it.
But hey, they call that a "Cytochrome P-450 defect." All because my body doesn't work the way the pharma companies would like.....
Here in the UK, the free ones on the NHS are pretty good! If you don't want treatment, noone is going to lose any money (in fact they're saving cash) so you're fine.
You were prescribed anti-depressants by a medical doctor (most likely without even the most rudimentary training in mental health), and you blame psychiatrists? How does that make any sense?
You may as well blame mechanics for the bad advice you got on fixing your car from the guy at the bicycle shop.
Psychiatrists are medical doctors. Many of them work in hospitals. Why are you assuming he was prescribed antidepressants by a medical doctor who isn't a psychiatrist?
EDIT: He even says it was a psychiatrist: "Psychiatrist didn't even ask questions and prescribed me anti-depressants."
A simpler course of action would have been to write a gentle complaint letter. In England you'd start by getting advice from Patient Advice and Liaison (PALs) who help you through the process.
My speculation regarding this phenomena is that it is an emergent (learned) response -- the collective adaptation has been to ignore outliers until proven correct.
The absolute worst case (likely rare) is that a timely alternative viewpoint is ignored - i.e. Cassandras.
On the balance, it appears the future collective wins as the validity of the outlier view (which were not that urgent) becomes apparent and the collective majority has developed the ability to adopt it and then the "tortured/rejected/misunderstood genuius" is celebrated after death.
Civilizational win, with many individual loses (some entirely undeserved).
I believe there are several degrees to which "adapting the world to oneself" could apply. You're clearly state an example where one goes too far, but at that point, is the person changed from anti-authoritarian, to THE authoritarian?
In general, I see what you are getting at, but I think you are taking parts too literally. Or, at least the way I see it, "kites rise against the wind" is the kind of mentality.
Another possible answer to your question: Who is defining progress? Did Hitler "make progress"? Not in our eyes, not it today's society, but would a German from the 30's tell you that? He certainly changed the world, I think we can hold that to fact.
I'm just going to spew another quote, cuz my brain just leaks inspirational bumper stickers... "Those crazy enough to think they can change the world, are often those who do."
More on TA: http://changingminds.org/explanations/behaviors/ta.htm
Of course, the way I see it, being anti-authoritarian is just a corollary effect of being a mature, competent, self-validated man who is following his own purpose in life. Of course such a man is going to have trouble with those who want to foist their value-systems on him through threats, psychological manipulation, or subterfuge.
Yet many seemingly self-actualized people do end up in positions of authority. Why? I'd argue that power over others is, like some drugs, highly addictive and often corrupting. Mature, self-actualized people rarely feel a void that makes holding this power desirable, since they vastly prefer to be respected than to simply be obeyed.
Yes there are some authority figures who are just and who inspire trust and motivation in others, but many others who appear this way at first and then disappoint -- I wonder how all the young Obama supporters feel now that he's expanded the drone program and continued all of Bush's most controversial and horrible policies.
(Ie you gain SAN stat from it).
Also, a working link to the PDF it was published in (article is on page 72): http://interestingtimesmagazine.net/archive/IT05.pdf
It's just a map, not reality itself. RAW himself would say as much.
A large number of mental disorders are extremely debilitating and often fatal to the patient. When successfully healed, sufferers are usually extremely grateful to their psychiatrist, feeling that they owe them their life.
You only hear in the media and online about the times when it all goes wrong, because it makes a good story. Who wants to hear blog posts about how someone was sick, and then they got well? Especially when talking about your experience with mental illness is seen as an admission of weakness or personal failure by society, which it is.
This is not to discount the fact that there is a huge amount of malpractice, abuse, and just plain poor quality thinking out there in the world of psychiatry. Most of it is connected to big pharma and their big dollars, as you might expect.
You also can't absolve the patient of all responsibility. Go to any psychiatrist, particularly here in the UK with our NHS where doctors don't sit around hoping for more ill people, and they will tell you that they are sick and tired of the parade of perfectly healthy middle class idiots shuffling before them with non-problems, or worse, dragging children with non-problems.
You can't really just turn these people away, it's unethical (illegal?) to just deny someone treatment. Unless you can invoke something like Münchausen syndrome, you have to treat these people or their charges in some way if they are in distress. Doctors are reduced to giving them some pills and complaining to each other behind closed doors about the endless stream of "worried well" affecting their ability to help those with the actual problems discussed at the start of this now overly-long comment. Actually, increasingly they send them off to a homeopathy clinic or something like that. That in my eyes is the one good use for alternative medicine, it keeps little jemima off the hard stuff when her dangerously irrational mother decides she needs to be fixed.
The DSM and it's ilk make this worse by giving the public cosmo-style checklists they can run against themselves, without all the other contextual understanding that a diagnostician has. It is then made worse again with the DSM published on the internet.
Your arguments are often emotional, anecdotal, and structured to pass a 'common sense' filter without necessarily being relevant. Who said anything about absolving patient responsibility? Who said anything about turning people away? In fact your second-to-last paragraph is almost _wholly irrelevant._
Finally, the DSM is _the gold standard._ Just like medical doctors have standardized the symptom checklist for a diagnosis, the DSM is The Rules.
Medical doctors manage to survive having their diagnostics well known. You seem to be mired in apologia about psychiatry even as you deride its primary practical tool.
Well, it's best not to think it about what the "majority of practitioners" sets to do, but with what is established as the standard theory and practice of their profession, that is, what they are conditioned to do.
As you move away from hard science like physics and math, all sorts of power plays, prejudices and societal norms come into play. You know, like homosexuality was considered a mental disease back in the day. Psychiatry not only advances the societal and power norms on those matters --it also obeys and enforces them.
A society that is messed up in many ways, will also tend to consider those that are against this mess as 'mentally ill'. It's not that different with what happened to dissidents in the USSR, just more subtle.
The problem is that isn't true. The amount of people helped is generally lower than the amount of people harmed, at least with longterm use of many of the major psychopharmaceutical drugs. The book the blog is promoting explains this quite well.
Just this morning there were a flurry of articles on a new study showing that the most commonly prescribed sleeping pills raise your all cause mortality 3x - 5x, and that's over only 2.5 years. One can only imagine what the all-cause mortality over 10+ years is.
The problem I see is that there are a lot of people who genuinely think that they are treating sick patients who will get better and have fewer problems in life if they just get in line and stop resisting authority. I see it in schools and among mental health professionals. But those people have a very narrow and misguided IMNSHO opinion of success in life.
As (early psychotherapist) Roberto Assagioli put it, clinically normal means mediocre, and to excel, you have to step outside of that. He claimed that there were criteria you could use to tell whether a disturbance was pathological or morbid, or whether it was a first step towards growth and breaking free.
This brings me to ODD. The concern is that some people who are habitually defiant get worse and can become sociopathic later. But if that's the concern, it's grotesquely overdiagnosed.
It's kind of frightening that views haven't changed in the 40+ years since the book was written. I guess the difference is that they will simply overmedicate rather than lobotomize.
Secondly, closely related to this is the famous Rosenhan experiment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenhan_experiment
The really relevant bit is this paragraph:
For example, one nurse labeled the note-taking of one pseudopatient as "writing behavior" and considered it pathological. The patients' normal biographies were recast in hospital records along the lines of what was expected of schizophrenics by the then-dominant theories of its etiology.
I also remember that one participant had their habit of standing around outside the cafeteria waiting for it to open for lunch noted down by a nurse as "neurotic behaviour around eating and food" and again framed as part of their disorder and used as a reason to keep them there.
Remember though that this was in america in the 70s, and things have changed a lot since then. Partly as a direct result of that study, which made a huge impact on the profession and caused a lot of soul searching. Someone repeated it, I think in the 90s, and they were all just put on pills rather than being committed. The crucial difference being that one can choose not to take pills.
And they were probably just given pills because that's what doctors to do make their customers happy. The "anti-authoritarian" diagnoses are also demand-driven. Parents want a mental health diagnosis to explain why their kids aren't the perfect overachievers they wanted them to be, and then they want pills to make it better. The elastic definitions of mental disorders make it possible for the customer to always be right.
Nothing brings out authoritarianism like parenthood.
And the same is obviously true of those 'under observation' - psychiatric disorders or not.
I am not sure just how many of my strange habits would be diagnosed under the DSM - but enough to worry me :-)
What blew me away was the effectiveness: it was like rebooting a system. After the treatment an entirely different person came back.
Why do you say this? From everything I've read I don't think there have been many changes at all.
The ability to delegitimize an individual's arguments by labeling his point of view a "disease" is a power accorded only to mental health professionals, and the closest historical analogs are the labels of "anti-American", "counter-revolutionary" and "heretic" (and now, maybe, "terrorist"). What these labels have in common is that they not only confer on the authorities the public's blessing to treat or re-educate the non-conformist, they also carry a freight of social stigma and fear of open association that's sufficient to scare other people away from openly sympathizing with the now-isolated individual - making it impossible to determine from that point forward whether the charges were accurate, or if the individual was targeted solely for being anti-authoritarian. In fact, making an example of one non-conformist pays dividends for the authorities running the inquisition, by cowing the rest of the population further into submission, while forcing the most vehement of the other non-conformists to expose themselves in defense of whatever is said to be "indefensible". As counter-revolutionary thought was considered contagious under Mao and Stalin, and as people were terrified to even ask where their relatives had disappeared under Pinochet, so defending a non-compliant individual becomes socially unacceptable once the labels and drugs have been applied. There's no reason to think this principle doesn't operate at the level of psychiatrist and patient, since that relationship (other than the individual's relationship to mass culture through television) is exactly where most people with the financial means to effectively contest authority are actually presented with ideas of what constitutes "healthy" conformist and consumerist behavior.
"Anti-authoritarians" are people who question and/or reject authority aggressively.
"Assholes" are people who have emotional and/or maturity issues that cause them to irritate others.
Neither of these are diseases, and you can be both, but don't confuse one with the other. I'm a fairly asocial person, but I've learned to be more diplomatic at times. On the other hand, the world is full of angry immature people who just want to "tear it all down!" without actually at heart being for or against anything. They're just a bundle of emotions looking for a place to vent.
But the underlying thesis here, that the professionals diagnosing people as mentally ill carry lot of bias with them that even themselves are unaware of? Spot on. Psychiatry has always been about introducing conformity (both in a good way and in a bad way) to society. Of course, that doesn't mean that there aren't a lot of really mentally ill people who need help, just that when you have a hammer, the world is your nail. :)
ADD: I would just be very careful about working this problem backwards, from effect to cause. That is, simply because somebody or another supports a cause you believe in doesn't necessarily mean that they aren't emotionally ill. My personal opinion is that there are a lot of emotionally-struggling people who choose politics as a socially acceptable way to vent on the world.
I am not a Mormon. But where others might have been upset, I took it as a great compliment. If you have to resort to denigrating the conclusion rather than attacking the case, that's a pretty good indication it has value!
The toughest thing to admit is the seemingly insane desires of both of these groups of people exist in everyone.
The reason why link-bait works -- even here on HN -- is simply the human propensity for an emotional response involving pitchforks and torches, either metaphorical or entirely real.
If you think back to the last time you were fired up about something, can you admit to being one of those people in the first paragraph above?
Whether you can admit it or not, you were one those "Burn it," folks. Sure, maybe you were slightly more diplomatic in your choice of words, such as saying "Stop it," or "Please stop," or even "Please consider the alternatives," or "Please be reasonable," but mincing words is just masking your opposition with pleasantries.
At one time or another, and to some degree absolutely everyone is one of the "burn it" folks. The world is full of annoying "flaws" to wear down your patience and tolerance until you oppose them in more actively.
Rather than derailing the conversation by picking an technical flame-bait example of a well contested hotspot known to evoke nerd-rage of the highest order, I'm going to play it safe, and reference the Dr. Seuss story, "Horton Heads a Who." Absolutely everyone has been one of the folks chanting "Boil That Dust Spec!"
Every programmer here can think of a "Spec" that they want to boil. ;)
Since everyone is guilty of being the opposition of something and wanting to tear down, disrupt, or change the status quo or situation in some way, you should be able to see how everyone is vying for the same prize, control. To put it more succinctly, everyone wants to be the authority in control.
In other words, many authorities are anti-authoritarians. Their refusals to cede control is their method to gain and retain control. Similarly, those who abide by existing authorities are merely employing a more deceptive method to gain and retain control. The hoop-jumpers and ladder-climbers are no different than their rebellious "anti-authoritarian" counterparts, save for the fact that the two groups are in constant competition due to the fact that the success of one is always detrimental to the goals of the other.
The most interesting exercise is to think about what things would be like if the situation was reversed; "Since you got a four year degree from a university, you obviously need to be chemically lobotomized with medications to treat your hoop-jumping disorder." Additionally, your diagnosis and prescription were written by a self-educated rebel, and ironically, being cured occurs when you refuse to take your meds.
First, I'm no psychologist or historian, so feel free to disregard everything that follows...this is just a hypothesis.
I've noticed (but I'm probably far from the first) that every seemingly "modern" human behavior can be traced back to a handful of primitive instincts or tribal behaviors (fear, greed, prejudice, etc.). So my guess would be that diagnosing someone as mentally ill because they act anti-authoritarian comes from the tribal instinct that allowed, or even required, all humans to work together without questioning their orders. It was necessary to hunting, protecting the tribe, etc. that everyone act as one. Not acting as one would cause the hunt to fail or the tribe to lose a battle, either way they would die. It's the same way that packs of animals like wolves behave. Shun the outlier because he could put all our lives at stake.
So expanding on this theory, maybe the reason we as humans act this way is because our cousin species died out because they didn't act as one. Perhaps those other semi-human species that died out were more independently-minded, but for the first few hundred thousand years that was a negative thing that led to natural selection filtering them out?
I guess I get this idea from Seth Godin's talk about "Quieting the lizard brain." Pretty interesting, if anyone is interested: http://vimeo.com/5895898
In any case, where do the orders come from? Even in your wolf pack example, the alpha wolf is occasionally challenged by others, and sometimes loses.
In my experience, it's pretty common for great leaders to have questioned authority in their youth. Leaders are self-directed, look out for their own interests, gather their own information, and trust in their own judgments. How could they not come into conflict with authority?
Perhaps I am falling into the same naturalistic fallacy here, but as far as I can tell, it's normal and good for people to test authority on a regular basis.
Yeah, I completely agree with that. I think you and I are on the same side of the argument here. Yeah, it's normal and definitely good, but I was just taking a stab at why people resist the anti-authoritarians. I'm not saying their resistance is good; quite the opposite. It just slows the advancement of society.
I guess the only data I have to back my random hypothesis is the video I linked to. But wouldn't you agree that pretty much all of our behaviors can be seen in other species? We as humans just like to pretend we're above instincts, but our instincts just hide themselves behind emotions and such.
So there is strong selection for obedience.
This is not science, it's opinion untethered from the constraints of evidence. If we want to have a long conversation about this, it would behoove us to start from science so that actual facts might be involved.
What type of evidence exactly would satisfy your requirement?
Raising an issue that needs study is just plain Good Science. But it's a starter for science, not us.
In this case, my criticism is of the person who is providing an opinion and is not reporting any information which can be independently evaluated by us here. The character of this observer therefore does matter.
I did not make those characterizations with the intent of portraying him as a crazy man who should be categorically ignored. All of those characteristics I mentioned are fine things to have in a healthy and diverse body politic. Rather, I mentioned them to point out that we are attempting to divine the truth in an opinion about a portion of society made by someone with demonstrably eccentric opinions about society.
Lastly, thank you for being sensitive about what you saw as name-calling. We could use a lot less name-calling around here.
Yet I've been told multiple times in the past five years that I'm undermining authority. By both management and peers. (Sometimes admiringly, by colleagues who think I'm the only person who isn't subject to the leader's reality distortion field.) I've asked what I can do to not be as "disruptive" and nobody can quite produce anything concrete.
I think there's something about my attitude that people can detect -- I do believe that authority needs to be earned with results. And even though when I have defended the current authority, again this is not good enough, because I'll do it in terms of "we need to be unified", "we don't know everything X knows", "X has taken on this leadership role and it costs him a lot, no one should question X's dedication", etc.
The one thing I'm not saying is that we should all bow down to X just because "he's the man". There is something about this atavistic concept of authority which demands a posture of submission, often literally. You don't look the other person in the eye any more, you allow yourself to be swept up in his obsessions, his sense of humor leaks into yours, and you treat his ideas as automatically superior. You're supposed to be happy even if he snatches a slice of cake right off your plate. I just don't have it in me.
An great example of an authoritarian stereotype controlling the debate is in our discourse about anarchy. In any mainstream forum of the USA, the mere mention of the term is an impossibility - the assumption of anarchy equating to chaos dominates the discussion. Instead, many of the concepts from anarchic literature are now shared, in a modified form, via the less besmirched term of "libertarianism." We don't equate the Tea Party movement with anarchy, yet the connection is all over Wikipedia.
Also, I have really enjoyed working for capable leaders, even if I knew they weren't terribly capable of my work (i.e. I don't care if my boss can program, so long as he or she has leadership, strategy, and understanding). At the same time, I've despised every moment that I've worked for those who I find to by sycophants, poor decision makers, or simply stupid.
I have no idea what this says about my personality. :-)
And I think that really this percent is not 99%, not even 50%, closer to the single digits really. It's just that these anti-socials impact pro-social people much more that other pro-socials.
PS: pro-social is just an opposite for anti-social. Nothing complicated.
"authority" has an opinion on religion, good manners, social interaction, biodiversity, climate change, whales hunting, and every possible topic on earth.
People can choose to fight the authority at any level they want on any topic they want.
Two people can fight authority on different topics, both of them see each other as anti-social; but both of them are anti-authority.
"Choose your weapons, your enemy has been chosen long ago, even before you realized." -- anonymous
Simply incorrect, both etymologically and logically. Authority is hierarchical; society is peer to peer. Authority is hard power; society is soft. When you're anti-authoritarian you're defying hierarchy and force. When you're anti-social you're just being a jerk to your neighbors. Not the same thing at all.
I find it an amusing corollary that later in life, no one was able to convince Einstein of the truth--or at least the usefulness--of quantum mechanics. A failing of the anti-authoritarian mindset is that if you have an opposed opinion to an authority on an issue--and that authority happens to be right--you'll never figure this out until you work it out for yourself.
Einstein never disputed the usefulness of QM. He merely disputed the idea that theories based on configuration space were fundamentally correct.
He even attempted to disprove them by showing that QM predicts the EPR paradox, which most people agree is pretty weird. He then spent the rest of his life trying to come up with theories that didn't predict nonlocal effects.
It turns out that the EPR paradox and other nonlocal effects are observed in real life (so any such theory he might have concocted would have been wrong), but the experiments were only done after Einstein died.
Ummm... Einstein's nobel prize was regarding quantum physics?
Einstein never disputed quantum mechanics. What he disputed was the (non-falsifiable, and hence not-a-scientific-theory) Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum physics. He sided with those with a different interpretation.
I suppose it's the same with many doctors who stamp "mentally ill" diagnoses on people. "If you disagree with me, then you should be treated."
Even in the United States, the automatic reply to any significant claim of criminal behavior against the US government is "bat-shit crazy conspiracy theorist".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_abuse_of_psychiatry_i...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_abuse_of_psychiatry
http://thejcl.com/pdfs/munro.pdf The Ankang: China's Special Psychiatric Hospitals
Governments, including the United States, project through their propaganda and education, a false reality in which the most important state actions are always moral and justified.
There is a type of mass pathology going on in which almost everyone ignores facts that contradict the official reality presented by authority.
I think this is unfortunately a normal aspect of group behavior because I have observed it even in a small technical group where the manager decided that Windows Communication Foundation worked differently than it actually did and everyone went along with it even though the documentation clearly stated otherwise.
The business about it being a normal group behavior is really a side issue though, and I'm not trying to make a scientific case.
The bigger issue is government suppression of dissent by the misuse of psychiatry or just by suggesting theories involving criminal activities of the government are signs of insanity.
That's up to you to decide, but currently you're required to meet expectations in your life that maybe you're just not personally suited for, not out of any disability, but because your strengths are elsewhere, or maybe you're just not interested and would rather learn or focus on something else at that time.
The problem comes in thinking something is wrong with somebody just because they don't conform to expectations or are caused angst and turmoil through their nonconformity. It doesn't matter if it's the sufferer or the society that seeks it out. It is still misguided.
Beware political positions quick to write off differing views as clinical insanity. When they start committing people, that's a sign the line has been crossed.
But that doesn't work as well anymore because there's so many of us, so much stuff to do and so much information. That's why we've been moving towards increasingly democratic societies and organizations for the past several hundred years, and the trend will only accelerate.
Questioning authority usually stopped the whole organization, and people couldn't move forward unless they found a consensus. Today it's easier to question/review/change authority without having to stop everything - it's like it's a separate module instead of a core piece, but obviously, that doesn't sit well for those whose authority is questioned, hence the struggle against anti-authoritarians...
"Have temper tantrums Be argumentative with adults Refuse to comply with adult requests or rules Annoy other people deliberately Blames others for mistakes or misbehavior Acts touchy and is easily annoyed Feel anger and resentment Be spiteful or vindictive Act aggressively toward peers Have difficulty maintaining friendships Have academic problems Feel a lack of self-esteem"
Those aren't authority problems, those are major social issues that must persist for greater than 6 months and make the home or school environment hostile. Also, he acts like all psychologists and psychiatrists do is prescribe medicine. This is silly, most psychiatrists and all psychologists would advocate combined therapy or behavioral therapy to help them with parent child interaction and problem solving skills. These authoritarian behavioral treatments include things like "Recognize and praise your child's positive behaviors, offer acceptable choices to your child, giving him or her a certain amount of control." ODD should NEVER get a drug prescription except in the case of comorbitity. Read more here: http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/oppositional-defiant-disord...
ADD and ADHD are over-diagnosed and ODD might also be, but there are people who legitimately suffer from major crushing behavioral deficits which can make properly learning difficult. Sloppy historical analogy with 'famous people would totally be ADD' is a terrible marginalization of this disorder and it's sufferers.
Also, lots of people are mentioning the Rosenhan experiment and claiming that psychology hasn't changed at all since then. This is largely inaccurate. I would direct them to this askscience thread http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/orf88/how_has_ps... about changes that have occurred including the rise of counseling and patient bill of rights.
