For those who are having trouble understanding the distinction drawn in the quoted paragraph, it’s analogous to:
Is skin rash a valid or useful diagnosis or is it the manifestation of an underlying disorder? Skin rash as a phenomenon is very real, but is it caused by a specific underlying physical disfunction, or a symptom that can be caused by a variety of physical dysfunctions that manifest themselves as skin rashes?
(or any other symptom or symptom cluster you care to name - asthma, migraine, high blood pressure, cataract)
He’s suggesting that hoarding is a mental illness symptom rather than a syndrome.
Edit: I see Nava did this translation first and better. Sorry for the redundancy.
So, ALL definitions are “matters of opinion.” There is no truth, only varieties of bias. Humpty Dumpty defines any word to mean anything he wants.
That kind of world has no meaning.. The rest of us live in a world where words have meanings.
(By the way, I did check several dictionaries to look up the word “chair.” Not a single one of them mentioned the rocking-chair. Is a rocking-chair a chair?)
Okay: now, take a deep breath and let us reason together. Our world has sets of things – such as chairs – and the boundaries of the sets are not rigidly defined. The topology is cloudy, or, as often is said, “Fuzzy.” A good old-fashioned dining room chair is very near the center of the set. A box with a cushion on top is near the edge. A person on all fours is closer yet.
The same is true for mental illness. There are examples very near the center of the definition. The nice lady who put a .357 to her head on Easter Morning and blew away 1/4 or her skull was such a person. Bobby Fisher, the chess genius, was pretty well near the center.
Hentor the Barbarian mentioned an 18-point scale for a particular kind of mental illness, and pointed out that the definition of such illness is any six of the 18 points. One may ask, with full validity, why six? Why not eight? There is room for disagreement regarding the boundaries of the set.
But simply to declare, “There’s no such thing” is to put one’s fingers in one’s ears. It may give the illusion of comfort: you won’t hear the gunshot when the nice lady kills herself. But the brains are still on the wall.
We do live in a world of opinion and illusion where nothing matters all that much.
The lady who shot herself was not mentally ill, she probably felt she had no way out when there were hundreds of ways out. Bobby Fisher was not mentally ill either. He won the world championship of chess. He proposed major changes to the tournament which is now in place. He was impatient with people who could not think as he did. He made a good living teaching chess.
You are not in this world to accumulate wealth or reach goals. You are here to learn, by observing and understanding. When you can see beyond this world then your are home.
I think others have alluded to this, but I’d like to offer the following analogy. Psychiatry now is much like taxonomy was during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Plants and animals were grouped based on superficial characteristics on the supposition that these were indicative of a deeper and more meaningful connection. By and large, this proved to be a valid and productive working hypothesis. However in some notable instances, it was spectacularly incorrect.
It would take the advent of molecular biology and a deeper understanding of the biochemical makeup of what was being studied before it could be realized that there were certain misalignments that needed to be corrected.
I’m not implying any hostility or other affect, just requesting that you read all the way and indicating that, as you did not seem to have understood any part of the post you were quoting, coffee or other stimulants might be a possible solution.
Thanks. Another alternative, when someone suggests you haven’t been clear, is to simply make your point clearer without snark.
The thing about hoarding is that originally it was seen as a symptom of OCD. However, the very types of research strategies I mentioned above were suggesting that it wasn’t acting that way. I’m having trouble linking to it on my phone, but there is a nice summary of the process that you can review called “Hoarding disorder: A new diagnosis for DSM V?” You can Google it and check it out yourself to get some better understanding of how this works.
Everything is props for us to stage our personal plays around. We choose the parts we will play and can play many parts in one lifetime. People who wish to commit suicide are not mentally ill, mental illness is a misnomer because we don’t know or understand what mental is: brain, consciousness, mind, awareness, soul or spirit.
Nothing can be answered definitely. Only guess or theories or opinions. That is because science is yet unable to expand their search into the unseen realmes such as consciousness, mind, awareness, soul or spirit.
Remember when someone shows you an orange, the eating kind, nothing in your brain or body see orange. Instead they detect only photons and electromagnetic waves as in brain waves. Who actually detects the orange. why you do. your consciousness whatever that is.
Fortunately, not everyone is mired in woo. Woo does not provide for testable predictions. At root, science is simply the effort to make and improve upon the accuracy of predictions, in my opinion. At some point, sufficiently accurate and reliable predictions become explanatory.
Saying that we can’t know anything does not advance understanding in any way whatsoever.
Yes it does. Theories, guesses, and opinions can be tested, and rejected if they are wrong, or confirmed (provisionally) if they are supported by evidence.
If you want to deny all of psychology and cognitive science, or even the idea of science, I’m not sure what you think you are contributing to the thread.
When done so in a manner that a) records the predictions following from those theories, guesses and opinions, 2) determining whether those predictions are accurate or not in a structured fashion, and 3) revising the predictions as dictated by step 2, it sure does.
Psychiatry is dishonest. Also in the news, sky is blue, news at 10.
There is no reality behind the “chemical imbalance” explanation that you have all heard touted as proven scientific fact. Depression is not caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain that psychiatric pharmaceuticals fix. Neither is bipolar disorder. Neither is schizophrenia. Neither is attention deficit disorder.
Psychiatric medications do help some people cope with some highly unpleasant emotional and cognitive conditions.
We do not have a significantly better understanding of what those conditions actually entail than we had 125 years ago, though, unless you want to credit a decently large stack of discredited hypotheses and attempted approaches though. Which is actually true progress in research (albeit not the kind that tends to get media attention). But the field of psychiatry (and/or the field of psychiatric pharmacology) should not really get credit for that progress when they continue to lie about it and pretend that their disproven theories are actually scientific facts, should they?
The ailments that lead people to seek psychiatric intervention for themselves are major sources of ongoing misery. Selling symptom relief that works for some is not a bad thing, but marketing it as perfectly crafted “magic bullets” or the psychiatric equivalent of insulin or synthroid, as if shrink-drugs were things that restored suffering brains to the condition of normal healthy brains by replacing missing hormones, etc, is downright criminal and should be stopped as an ethical violation.
I do not deny science is beneficial, but only when dealing with truth. If you make a guess or theory and then set out to prove same, you have shut the door on thousands of other reasonable solutions. You have limited the field of thought on the subject. Just as Bobby Fisher said no draws should be counted, no guesses or theories should be counted either. I don’t think you understand how limited science has become. It will take a great thinker to break through the limitations. The major limitation is all things are material or matter. As long as that stands consciousness will be beyond the grasp of all science.