Gadfly, having been misdiagnosed once myself, I understand your feelings. There are some real creeps out there and some of them are psychiatrists. That makes them like other doctors. Diagnosis is not that simple in non-mental health fields either.
If it weren’t for the correct diagnosis by the right psychiatrist, I would be dead.
People like TVAA make it harder for people like me to understand their own illnesses. It is not because he holds an opinion different from mine. It is because he intentionally tries to confuse the issue with pretense.
Is my disorder fake too TVAA? I just wanted to know before I go and whine about it, you know, maybe I should just “Get over it”.
I’ve got fibro myalgia, does the big confusing word make it any more valid?
I’m just making up the excruciating pain? Right? The insomnia? The depression, fatigue, and anxiety?
So you mean when I forget my anti-fatigue pill and pass out on the floor, that’s just in my head? Wow, that’s good to know, I’ll keep it in mind next time I’m up all night feeling horrible pains in my legs and back.
There’s no pretense. There are lots of people who are too blinded by unfortunate past experience to actually understand what I’m saying. There are also people who have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about but are convinced they do. (Nursing school my foot…)
I’m here for support if you need it. I have ADHD and a mood disorder of some sort. I also have high levels of anxiety. I read those threads, and they offended me, but then I thought who cares what they think? Let them live in ignorance. Remember, you don’t need anyone else to worry about. I had an anxiety attack twice (two days in a row, the first time was worse). It’s just an aweful feeling to have. It annoys me also when people say just think of happy thoughts and stuff like that. It isn’t that simple. I’m here for support if you need it.
I have no particular reason to think you don’t have excruciating pain, insomnia, depression, fatigue, or anxiety.
I also have no way to determine whether the diagnosis you’ve been given has any relationship to any physical problems you have.
It’s like Lyme Disease – it’s often a diagnosis of exclusion, since there aren’t any really good tests for the infectious agent and the symptoms are common to so many different conditions. Does a person actually have LD or not? It’s hard to say – but at least there’s an empirical and known physiological definition of the disease.
For the mental disorders, there aren’t any. There’s no way for us to tell if the DSM accurately describes depression, because it defines it – there is no empirical definition that the DSM merely tries to detect accurately.
I don’t dispute that people have problems, and I don’t dispute the possibility (sometimes probability) that those problems are the result of an underlying physiological cause. But we don’t know what those causes are, or how to combat them.
There are depressed people. There is depression. But is there Depression, like there’s Cancer or Diabetes or Epilepsy? Can’t say.
Actually, epilepsy can be remarkably difficult to diagnose. There are also such things as pseudoseizures, which present almost indistinguishably from genuine seizures but appear to be psychogenic/psychosomatic in origin. It can be hard to detect seizures on EEGs – surprisingly so. That doesn’t mean that there’s no such thing as epilepsy. There are lots of things that can cause seizures, though – and sometimes the seizures themselves are difficult to isolate.
Perhaps that part of your anatomy has indeed taken the Hippocratic Oath. I couldn’t say.
The most important aspect of the Oath is to avoid doing harm. Allowing patients to make decisions out of ignorance and with grotesquely-oversimplified data harms the patient.
Although I know perfectly well you don’t believe this (and you’re entitled to your opinion): I’m making it harder for you to understand your disorder because I’m trying to figure out what it actually is, and reality is a whole lot more complicated than the pap explanations most people have been told.
Based on his/her posts/threads, he/she doesn’t know Jack about a whole LOT of stuff Guin, so I wouldn’t put a lot of stock in what someone like he/she says.
I’m perfectly willing to be corrected if you can show that I’m wrong – and I do make mistakes, especially when I’m discussing topics I’m not so familiar with.
But I’ve noticed that most of the people who have so repeatedly claimed that I have no idea what I’m talking about at all never even get around to pointing out where I’ve actually made the mistake.
And so ignorance continues… either they’re wrong, and they’re not allowing themselves to be shown otherwise, or I’m wrong and I’m not being shown otherwise. Either way, it’s not a good thing.
Why, why, why, Hentor… Just leave it alone! Okay, are you saying that schizophrenia’s prevalence rates in Africa differ, such that it is not found there, or that it’s presentation is typically acute in a way that differs from the rest of the world? More importantly, can you provide a cite for this one, or is this another among the clearly incorrect and erroneous throw-away comments you repeatedly make that have no basis in reality?
This would be the second such comment in this very thread, a pit thread prompted by your tendency to do this very thing. You seem to compulsively spew nonsense. I am alluding to this:
What in hell do you mean? What, if not the DSM criteria, do people use to diagnose ODD? Please provide a cite for this assertion too!
By the way, this one was priceless:
The one showing the greatest lack of comprehension in that thread was you! As I said there, it was actually embarrassing. Too bad you didn’t choose to “(self) correct” more often.
To everyone else: You know, when I first started having these conversations with The Vorlon Ambassador’s Aide a couple of years ago, my impression was that he was a student early in his career at Penn State (not that I knew this to be true). I thought he was simply showing signs of “zealotry of the newly converted,” as many of us do when studying psychology. (I don’t know about psychiatry because their specialization comes so much later in their training.) However, it has been too long since then, so I can’t say that I believe that to be his problem now. It seems that he basically has a very little knowledge about current practice and a lot of remembered history of psychology of varying accuracy. Perhaps “zealotry of the implacably self-possessed former student?”
I don’t discourage anyone from looking critically at psychology or psychiatry (in some ways you might say I make my bread and butter by doing just that). But please for the love of all that is decent and ignorance-fighting, when you make an assertion as to whether something is or isn’t done a particular way, or if you are engaged in discussion with someone who does, please provide or ask for some support of any kind! This should be done whether it’s schizophrenia in Africa, the method or practice for diagnosing ODD, that psychiatrists weren’t MD’s, that hypersomnia and increased appetite are not consistent with a “typical” depression diagnosis, or the host of other cites that TVAA still owes to so many other people.
Too much self-stimulation will make you go citeless.
BTW, just for fun sometime, ask TVAA about the morality of telling children there is a Santa Claus!
So, aside from the contention that no one else has any valid information about mental illness, do you have any valid information to convey about mental illness?
Interesting that someone who wants all of life reduced to the “scientific method” would make this complaint. It is difficult, though, to decipher TVAA’s agenda here - is it that he’s been unfairly diagnosed as a schizophrenic and wishes to move to Africa? Is he angry at his autistic refrigerator?
Or is it, perhaps, that your tunnel vision of life is finally showing its limits? Dude, mental issues are by nature self-reflective. You’re angry that the brain can’t be dissected, analyzed against a standard, and reinserted? That’s the nature of the beast. It’s exactly why your beloved empiricism & materialism…well…they ain’t the whole story.
People. As far as I can tell, TVAA’s crux is thus: Diagnosing and treating mental illnesses is a sketchy and questionable process, because most haven’t been traced to provable physiological problems. It’s an interesting point, and after clarification, I really don’t see why panties are bunched.
LOL, after reading your post I can SEE that you DO have a mental disorder. Whether or not it is self-inflicted is the question!
Give it up! There are mental illnesses out there but I don’t think that everyone that claims to have one has one. Let me see… I have been diagnosed with Bi-Polar, Depression, Anxiety, ADD, ADHD. Eat me ass shrinks. I have none of it; my only problem is that I listened to you in the first fucking place!
Is this the giant pity party thread where everyone feels sorry for themselves? WAHHHH!!!
I can see why people with disorders would get upset at statements made by TVAA and other posters about that these disorders were a bunch of balogna. Since I have a disorder, and it does annoy me when people try to say it’s all made up. Well, since I have it, and have experienced both depression, and abnormally high levels of anxiety, I know this stuff isn’t fake. I’m just saying that people should try to be more understanding, that’s all.
My panties are bunched because they are far too big for me, and I am used to boxers. Gadfly, although I believe that “sketchy and questionable” are overstatements, and that we can diagnose a disorder (by using validated and reliable referent behaviors to define a disorder) and apply proven treatments (by referring to empirically tested interventions that typically show improvements for people with those sets of behaviors) without knowing any physiological cause, I think that is generally a fine premise to debate.
You mischaracterize TVAA when you suggest that that is his debate. It is the appearance of his debate, but he has some other agenda. Part of the problem comes from the myriad throwaway inaccuracies and overstatements presented as fact yet frustratingly without evidence to support them that one has to wade through. “Clinical psychology is not a science,” “10 clinicians would give 10 different diagnoses,” and so on. TVAA tends to take acknowledged but limited problems and state them as accepted practice within the field, so that “A troubling problem is that a small number of psychologists have in sex with a client, despite ethical prohibitions and punishments” becomes “Psychologists abuse people by having sex with clients” (not that he has said this specifically). TVAA also tends to make statements that apply to one aspect of a field, discipline, disorder, what-have-you and state them such that they apply without regard to all. So he may say something like “Antipsychotic medication causes extrapyramidal symptoms,” when this is very much true for some antipsychotic medications and not true for others.
** Acute schizophreniform diseases account for a much larger proportion of schizophrenia diagnoses in the developing world – particular Africa – than elsewhere. I distinctly remember reading an examination of mental health issues in the developing world that discussed the differences in outcome in Africa. Until I find it again, you’ll have to settle for http://books.nap.edu/books/0309071925/html/220.html
** Again, you are a complete and utter fool. How many times do I need to explain this?
The DSM criteria themselves are full of vague and highly subjective statements. For example, the DSM-IV major criteria are roughly as follows:
** Now, what defines what “often” is? Once a day? Once a week? Once a month? How much more frequently do these behaviors need to be observed than is typical? What is typical? The rest of the criteria note, among other things, that “the disturbance in behavior causes clinically significant impairment in social, academic, or occupational functioning”. What is “clinically significant”? If teachers or parents manage to work around these behaviors, does that mean they’re not ODD? (They’re not impairing functioning then, are they?)
These criteria rely heavily on cultural effects and subjective interpretation, which is obviously the case as the DSM doesn’t offer any operationalizations of the concepts it includes in the disorders’ criteria. Like a recipe that doesn’t offer any measurements but suggests “reasonable” amounts of one ingredient and “appropriate” amounts of another, the criteria as written cannot be used to evaluate anything.
Yet diagnoses are made. Ergo, the criteria doctors use to decide whether a child has ODD or not are not contained within the DSM. (Without knowing the levels at which a clinician would consider something to be “often”, “clinically significant”, and so on, there’s no way to actually use the DSM.)
** Hey, you’re the one who suggested that the control group in that experiment was being studied. You also ignored that the researchers failed to demonstrate the DSM model with the mathematical standards of validity, and you completely misunderstood their discussion of the possible causes of error.
It was embarassing. For everyone reading your posts.
** Already dealt with these.
** The medical field had so little respect for early psychiatrists that they refused to print psychiatric articles in the journals, which forced the psychs. to start their own. The bitter struggles of psychiatrists to prove that they were as much a valid practice as other types of medicine are well known (among people with any knowledge of medical history). But you caught me there. I should have said that most of them were not practicing physicians (and even that’s not true of all the founders).
** It’s not “typical”, and it used to be considered a diagnostic difference until it was realized that there’s no difference between exogenous and endogenous depression as far as treatment is concerned. The criteria were broadened to include an “increase or decrease in sleep, appetite, weight, activity, etc.” Gee, that’s specific.