ask a Pure O sufferer

[Aractus]

I'll give you something interesting to think about. Mental disorders are debilitating and severely impact a person's life quality. And the worst thing you can say to someone who is suffering from one is that their problems are imaginary, or like you did, a sham.

If you're going to insist on debating this, please start a new thread. That sort of discussion isn't for my nerves.

You have misrepresented/misunderstood my post. A cognitive psychologist will claim that a mental illness is the result of a cognitive disorder. A behavioural psychologist will claim that a mental illness is the result of disordered behaviour. Most now think both contribute; however they haven't been able to advance the theory to the point where they're able to effectively treat people with consistent results. If I give disordered gambling as an example - it's perfectly true to say that a minimal intervention session (a targeted advice session delivered once lasting between 15 minutes to 1 hour) is just as effective as other longer treatment options and therefore they have indeed found a way to create a more efficient treatment option - certainly much more efficient than the 12-step program - but it fails to deliver better results than the 12-step program.

My argument is not that mental illness is not a valid thing - of course it is. It's just over what it is, how it's caused, how it should be treated, and finally how should it be defined in the first place. As I mentioned in my previous post, it's no secret that mental illnesses themselves are generally defined as being categorised by abnormal behaviour. Although in the DSM-5 they did attempt to re-frame it. In the interest of transparency here's the official definitions...

DSM-IV: "A mental disorder is a clinically significant behavioral or psychological syndrome or pattern that occurs in an individual and that is associated with present distress or disability or with a significantly increased risk of suffering death, pain, disability, or an important loss of freedom."

DSM-5: "A mental disorder is a syndrome characterized by clinically significant disturbance in an individual's cognition, emotion regulation, or behavior that reflects a dysfunction in the psychological, biological, or developmental processes underlying mental functioning. Mental disorders are usually associated with significant distress in social, occupational, or other important activities. An expectable or culturally approved response to a common stressor or loss, such as the death of a loved one, is not a mental disorder. Socially deviant behavior (e.g., political, religious, or sexual) and conflicts that are primarily between the individual and society are not mental disorders unless the deviance or conflict results from a dysfunction in the individual, as described above."


The WHO invoke their own definition as does the CCMD-3 (which by the way has different illnesses than the DSM as well). So the interesting fact is that a person can be diagnosed with one condition in China, and then have their same condition re-diagnosed in America as something else.

Here's a provocative quote from a PsychologyToday blog where I got those definitions from: "The very idea that you can radically change the definition of something without anything in the real world changing and with no new increases in knowledge or understanding is remarkable, remarkable until you realize that the thing being defined does not exist. It is completely easy—effortless, really—to change the definition of something that does not exist to suit your current purposes. In fact, there is hardly any better proof of the non-existence of a non-existing thing than that you can define it one way today, another way tomorrow, and a third way on Sunday."

And before you get up in arms about that, and question why Dr. Maisel doesn't feel he has to use the DSM-5 for diagnosis, he's not alone there's a number of psychologists who attack the DSM and claim that the cause-and-effect nature of disease does not apply to mental health in the same way that it does to physiological health. The psychological perspective he prescribes to (naturalistic) is probably no more-valid or less-valid than any of the others mind you, but at least there are people researching all the various current perspectives and who knows there may be some breakthrough in the future.

All I mean by "sham" is that a mental illness can be framed in a certain way. The fact that psychologists do not know the causes of mental illnesses is well established - it's not something I made up, it's not something controversial - it's well known and established. It's talked about in academic journals. A "sham" means a misalignment of priorities, a miscommunication of fact versus theory, and at least some level of deception. In 50 years from now when we have the DSM-8 which reclassifies all the mental illnesses listed in the DSM-5 and shifts them into new categories, and has a brand new definition for "mental illness" - it doesn't mean that mental illnesses didn't exist now; but it did mean that we didn't know what they were... or how to classify them properly.

These are the issues, and what I think is alarming is the fact that we have the tendency to rely on a diagnostic book that we know is inadequate. There should be greater competition, there should be more than one diagnostic book that psychologists will use - at the same time. Not just one that is limited. It'd be all very well and good to have ONE book if you know the causes of mental illnesses - but we don't, and therein lies the problem.