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Psychiatry is a Hoax :
"Except for a few objectively identifiable brain diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease, there are neither biological or chemical tests nor biopsy or necropsy findings for verifying or falsifying DSM diagnoses ." --former professor of Psychiatry at the state university of New York Thomas Szasz
"Psychiatric insiders have openly admitted the lack of science to their area of operations. Allen Frances (cited in Whitaker and Cosgrove 2015 : 61), for example, has recently stated that the mental disorders given in the DSM are “better understood as no more than currently convenient constructs or heuristics that allow [psychiatrists] to communicate with one another.” This has included the classic constructs of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder (formerly manic-depression), of which the mental health researcher Joel Paris at the Department of Psychiatry, McGill University, has admitted “[i]n reality, we do not know whether [such] conditions … are true diseases” (cited in Whitaker and Cosgrove 2015 : 61). Even National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) director and strong advocate of biomedical psychiatry, Thomas Insel (cited in Masson 2015 : xii), announced on the release of the DSM-5in 2013 that the categories of mental disorder lacked validity and NIMH would no longer be using such diagnoses for research purposes. Despite the claims to “progress” made by official historians of psychiatry such as Lieberman and Shorter, there is no evidence for the supposed “science” of psychiatry. There is no test for any mental illness, no proof of causation, no evidence of successful “treatment” that relates specifically to an individual disorder, and no accurate prediction of future cases. Thus, the claim that psychiatric constructs are real disease has not been proven. ..." --Professor Bruce M.Z. Cohen
"PRE-BIOLOGICAL AND PRE-SCIENTIFIC
Dr. Pies discussed this matter in his interview with Awais Aftab, MD, The Battle for the Soul of Psychiatry, which was published on June 23, 2020 in Psychiatric Times. Dr. Aftab asked:
“Can there be legitimate disagreement about the characterization of something as a disorder, ie, disagreement that cannot be resolved by appealing to empirical facts and springs instead from conflicting value judgments?”
To which Dr. Pies replied:
“Indeed, I think the delineation of terms like ‘disorder,’ ‘disease,’ ‘illness,’ ‘malady,’ etc. is closely tied to very general values regarding ‘desirable’ and ‘undesirable’ states of mind and body; for example, witness the positive value we accord to being able to function in social and vocational roles. And this is true not only in psychiatry, but throughout general medicine – witness the intense debate over whether obesity is or is not a ‘disease.’ (A 2008 commission of experts from The Obesity Society concluded that the term ‘disease’ is too complicated to be fully defined!)
This admission points us to the later work of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, regarding the pitfalls of ‘essential definitions’ – for example, definitions of ‘disorder’ or ‘disease’ that specify necessary and sufficient conditions for these states. Wittgenstein famously argued (in his Philosophical Investigations) that the search for such Platonic ‘essences’ is misguided; and that, at most, we can identify certain ‘family resemblances’ among entities and conditions that we would call ‘disorders’ or ‘diseases.’ That said, like Wittgenstein, I believe our ‘ordinary language’ is as good a guide as any, with respect to defining these terms. In our ordinary parlance, when someone shows evidence of prolonged or severe suffering and incapacity that is not due to an obvious wound (eg, a bullet wound), we are perfectly justified in saying that the person is ‘ill’; has some kind of ‘disorder’; or is ‘diseased.’ No labs or imaging needed! Indeed, the concept of disease (dis-ease) arose to explain just such instances of suffering and incapacity. In short, ‘disease’ is a pre-biological, pre-scientific construct. To be sure: not all instances of prolonged or severe suffering and incapacity are instantiations of ‘disease.’ For example, someone might be tied to a chair by kidnappers or terrorists, then beaten and starved, and thereby experience profound suffering and incapacity – but we would not ordinarily attribute this to ‘disease.'”
The first paragraph is fairly straightforward: terms like disorder, disease, illness, malady, etc. denote negative states, while feelings of success generally denote positive states.
But the second paragraph is a great deal more complicated. Dr. Pies contends that the fairly obvious material in the earlier paragraph points us to the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 – 1951), an Austrian-British histrionic and anti-social philosopher, regarding the pitfalls of “essential definitions”. Well, I have to say that the banal observations in the earlier paragraph do not in the slightest point me to anything of the sort.
What’s clear, I suggest, is that Dr. Pies wanted to invoke Wittgenstein’s wholly implausible notion that the theory of essences is “misguided”. So he dragged Wittgenstein into the debate by the proverbial scruff of the neck as an appearance of support for this contention. Dr. Pies needed to undercut the theory of essences because that is the crux of the issue: What is the essential definition of disorder, disease, illness, malady, etc.?
Wittgenstein proclaimed, without evidence, that seeking to understand the essence of things is a futile or misguided endeavor, and so he is an ideal “authority” for Dr. Pies’ primary purpose: to discredit the simple reality that the essential nature of disorder, disease, illness, malady, etc., is more important to their understanding than any incidental or accidental properties that they may possess.
For instance, the essential nature of water is burnt hydrogen (H2O), and knowledge of this reality underpins and supports any other incidental feature of this substance. But the fact that water is burnt hydrogen is not superficially obvious. Knowledge of the essential nature of things is usually hard-won, but is a necessary ingredient of understanding. When we don’t know the essential nature of something, we remain in the dark, and more particularly we remain prone to cumulative errors when discussing it. Indeed, it could be argued that exploring and discovering essential essences is the primary aim of science, to which all other facets of scientific exploration are subordinate. The Periodic Table is perhaps the paradigmatic example of this kind of scientific endeavor and achievement.
Back to the Pies-Aftab interview.
Note the phrase: “…at most, we can identify certain ‘family resemblances’ among entities and conditions that we would call ‘disorders’ or ‘diseases.'”
So, based on Wittgenstein’s unevidenced claims, and Dr. Pies’ personal need to discredit the concept of essence, he asserts that all we can manage to do in our attempts to define “disorder” or “disease” is to note the “family resemblances” between different diseases. Any attempt to go deeper than this is an error. All we can know are the family resemblances, and as we shall see below – to nobody’s surprise – the “family resemblances” for disorder, disease, illness, malady, etc., according to Dr. Pies, are distress (or suffering) and incapacity (or impairment). What a coincidence!
Here are some illnesses and their essential definitions, as given in Taber’s Cyclopedic Medical Dictionary (Edition 22). The reader can see that all the examples give the nature and cause of the biological abnormality, which is the standard practice in Taber’s and other similar medical reference books.
Pneumonia: “Inflammation of the lungs, usually due to infection with bacteria, viruses, or other pathogenic organisms.” (p 1833)
Diphtheria: “A rare toxin-mediated bacterial infectious disease marked by the formation of a patchy grayish-green membrane over the tonsils, uvula, soft palate, and posterior pharynx.” (p 693)
Tuberculosis: “An infectious disease caused by the tubercle bacillus, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, and characterized pathologically by inflammatory infiltration, formation of tubercles, caseation, necrosis, abscesses, fibrosis, and calcification. It most commonly affects the respiratory system, but other parts of the body…may also become infected.” (p 2389)
Diabetes: “A general term for diseases marked by excessive urination and elevated blood sugar, esp. diabetes mellitus” (p 667)
Diabetes Mellitus Type 1: “DM [Diabetes mellitus] that usually has its onset before the age of 25 years, in which the essential abnormality is related to absolute insulin deficiency. It was formerly known as juvenile diabetes.” (p 672)
Diabetes mellitus Type 1a: “The most common form of type 1 DM. It is caused by autoimmune destruction of the beta cells of the pancreas and inadequate insulin production.” (pp 672-673)
Myocardial Infarction: “The loss of living heart muscle as a result of coronary artery occlusion. MI or its related syndromes (acute coronary syndrome or unstable angina) usually occurs when an atheromatous plaque in a coronary artery ruptures, and the resulting clot obstructs the injured blood vessel. Perfusion of the muscular tissue that lies downstream from the blocked artery is lost. If blood flow is not restored within a few hours, the heart muscle dies.” (p 1234)
Similar definitions of diseases/illnesses can be found throughout the text.
So, Dr. Pies is willing to write off, as misleading and invalid, more than two centuries of dedicated research by insightful researchers and scholars into the essential natures and causes of disease. And he actually presents this spurious notion as a useful and helpful perspective.
“That said, like Wittgenstein, I believe our ‘ordinary language’ is as good a guide as any, with respect to defining these terms. In our ordinary parlance, when someone shows evidence of prolonged or severe suffering and incapacity that is not due to an obvious wound (eg, a bullet wound), we are perfectly justified in saying that the person is ‘ill’; has some kind of ‘disorder’; or is ‘diseased.'”
But he misses the reality that our “ordinary language” use of the terms “disease”, “disorders”, “illness”, and “malady” entails references to the causes and essential natures of these entities. Suppose for the moment that a person has been spitting up a good deal of bloody phlegm for the past two weeks, and presents himself to a real doctor. The doctor will probably ask him for a sputum sample, and will send it to the lab for analysis/culture. Based on the lab findings, and what the doctor can gather by peering down the patient’s throat, and asking discriminant questions, he/she will begin to formulate a diagnosis, which Taber’s, incidentally, defines as: “The use of scientific or clinical methods to establish the cause and nature of a person’s illness or injury and the functional impairment it produces.” Note that the cause and nature are the primary considerations; impairment and, incidentally, distress are always secondary. One can’t properly evaluate the level of impairment until one has first established the cause and nature of the problem.
And then Dr. Pies’ narrative plumbs the very depths of self-congratulatory arrogance and invalidity:
“No labs or imaging needed! Indeed, the concept of disease (dis-ease) arose to explain just such instances of suffering and incapacity.”
There is layer after layer of obfuscation here. Psychiatry is often criticized on the grounds that none of its non-organic “disorders” can be verified by any lab or imaging or other objective test. This is a valid criticism. But if we accept the definition of disease promoted by Dr. Pies and other like-minded psychiatrists, it becomes irrelevant. If all one needs to establish is the presence of distress and impairment, then labs and imaging clearly are not needed. But if one insists that psychiatric disorders are “real illnesses just like diabetes”, then one needs to demonstrate the characteristic pathology. That’s what the term “real illnesses” means. And labs and imagining can be very helpful in this regard. But there are no labs or imagining techniques or other objective tests that can establish the existence of any psychiatric “disorder” other than those that are clearly caused by a general medical condition.
This is psychiatry’s most profound source of embarrassment. They gambled their entire professional standing on the belief that the famous chemical imbalances would be promptly discovered – but they haven’t been discovered. In fact, in many contexts today, the quest is being quietly abandoned.
And here’s the eminent and learned Dr. Pies, who himself promoted the chemical imbalance notions to professional and lay readers in the past (here and here), stating that no evidence of chemical imbalances is needed. We just state – contrary to the belief espoused by the great majority of real doctors – that the essential feature of disorder, illness, disease, malady, etc. is distress and impairment, and voila, out of the very ashes of defeat he, and like-minded psychiatrists, have snatched the mythical philosophers’ stone, capable of turning base metals into gold, and non-illnesses into bona-fide illnesses. What an achievement!
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
“In short, ‘disease’ is a pre-biological, pre-scientific construct.”
Here again, Dr. Pies appears to be under the impression that this throwback to the pre-scientific era represents some profound and stirring insight!
To appreciate the significance of this contention, let’s consider the word “planet”, which entered the English language in the 1200’s. It came from a Greek word meaning wanderer, and was used to describe the seven celestial bodies: sun, moon, Venus, Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, and Saturn, which were mistakenly believed by the ancients to have proper motions of their own against the background of the “fixed” stars. So that’s what the English word “planet” meant from its earliest introduction until the Copernican Revolution (c 1543). Prior to Copernicus, the word planet was used in its pre-scientific sense; since Copernicus, the word is used in its scientific sense – meaning a celestial body that orbits the sun. And of course, since then, an additional two planets have also been discovered (Uranus and Neptune).
By choosing to use the words disorder, illness, disease, malady in their pre-scientific sense, Dr. Pies and a small number of like-minded psychiatrists are effectively choosing to ignore the progress made in biology and other life sciences in identifying the real nature and causes of disease. They are placing themselves in the position of astronomers who reject the Copernican Theory. The reality today, however, is that such astronomers would simply be mocked, drummed out of their societies, and stripped of their honors and credentials. They would get no telescope time at any of the great observatories, and would probably have to resort to horoscope-writing to make a living.
Psychiatry, to the best of my knowledge, is the only medical discipline (and I’m applying the term loosely) where one can boast that one is using pre-biological and pre-scientific definitions, and incur no consequences.
And this is because psychiatry is not a genuine scientific endeavor. Rather, it is a hoax, whose sole purpose is to push drugs and electric shocks regardless of the conceptual invalidity, the harm done, and the lives lost." -- Phil Hickey PHD psychologist
https://www.madinamerica.com/2021/03...eal-illnesses/
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Originally Posted by Aldaris
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