Originally Posted by
Mortimer
Mental illness certainly exists
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. Consequently, it is necessary to utilise the existing evidence to more accurately theorise the real vocation of the psy-professions in capitalist society. As the faulty knowledge claims of the DSM are summarised by Burstow ( 2015 : 78, emphasis original), “reliability cannot legitimately function as a validity claim and no studies have established validity”; therefore, “it follows that … no foundation of any sort exists for the DSM categories. This is a serious issue that calls into question the power vested in psychiatry.” It necessarily leads us to consider such institutions as moral and political enterprises rather than medical ones (Szasz 1974 : xii) because psy-professionals make historically and culturally bound judgements on the “correct” and “appropriate” behaviour of society’s members. Ths is a point summated by Ingelby ( 1980 : 55, emphasis added) when he states that what one thinks psychiatrists are up to depends crucially on what one thinks their patients are up to; and the latter question cannot be answered without taking an essentially political stand on what constitutes a “reasonable” response to a social situation . In the same manner, British psychiatrist Joanna Moncrief ( 2010 : 371) agrees that a "psychiatric diagnosis can be understood as functioning as a political device, in the sense that it legitimates a particular social response to aberrant behaviour of various sorts, but protects that response from any democratic challenge.” Even Shorter ( 1997 : viii) accepts that the profession is responsible for policing social deviance when he remarks that “[p]sychiatry is, to be sure, the ultimate rulemaker of acceptable behaviour through its ability to specify what counts as ‘crazy.’” Likewise, the concept of “health” within the mental health system is understood as whatever counts as “normal” within a specific historical epoch and cultural setting. Sayers (cited in Christian 1997 : 33–34) states of this relative concept of “health” that [t]he society and the individual’s role within it are assumed to be normal (that is to say, “healthy”: “normality” is a common synonym for “health” in psychiatry as in other areas of medicine). Indeed, the prevailing social environment is made the very criterion of normality, and the individual is judged ill insofar as he or she fails to “adjust” to it.
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
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