Oh yeah: which “absolutely last response” is this, now? I’ve lost count.
You lost count at “1.”
Jerk.
Interesting coincidences:
Two or three years ago our much loved Mr. Svinlesha had a rather familiar post in this thread:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=48815&perpage=50&pagenumber=1
Here are a couple of excerpts from that thread:
You’ve become more modest now, Mr. S.
And he also quoted from this study:
Gee, that sounds so familiar.
DocCathode, who went to Penn State, also had a jones about cultural bias in diagnosis. I think it may have been in the same thread.
And there are others – some old, some new.
Were all of these folks separated at birth? Some have quite similar writing quirks. Two or three draw material from old textbooks from about the same period. At least a couple of them could probably benefit from the very medication they scorn.
That’s my non-professional opinion, of course.
Guinastasia, didn’t you read the ODD thread? According to TVAA, suggesting that psychotherapy was a matter of choice was
:rolleyes:
This is not the first time Hentor has said he’ll stop responding to my posts. So which absolutely, positively last time is this?
Wetbrain.
Auliya, that statement was in response to the claim that since change in therapy was voluntary, there wasn’t any reason to worry about its being imposed on people.
Way to misrepresent, yo! Ignorant twerp, why don’t you leave this boards and come back when you’ve gained some actual knowledge and about thirty IQ points, eh?
Oh, and one last thing:
Don’t think we haven’t noticed that you’ve stopped presenting actual objections to my points. When you go up against actual reasoned positions instead of hysterical blather, you lose. You’re merely trying to distract us with personal attacks and selectively misrepresentative quoting.
In regards to Guin’s posts:
I think part of the problem I perceive here is an attributional one. People like yourself say they have a disorder, and use this to explain their behaviors and emotions. For example: you seem to be implying that you have certain problems because you have Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.
But that’s technically backwards thinking. You have the diagnosis of OCD because you have certain kinds of problems. The diagnosis is defined in terms of those problems – an underlying disorder is assumed to be their cause, but that’s only an assumption at this point.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with the seriousness or validity of your problems. Nor does it have anything to do with assigning praise or blame to you. It’s all about people defining their problems in terms of objective and external factors without evidence.
Zoe:
Well… I guess wisdom comes with age, Ms. Z.
I’m not really sure (again) what your point is in the last post, unless it is that one cannot work in psychiatry and study to be a psychotherapist at the same time. Are you accusing me of lying?
I did work in psychiatry for several years after my arrival in Sweden, first at the largest mental hospital here (Lillhagen). After a few years I quit Lillhagen (a quite terrible place, by the way) to help start up the long-term living facility at Gyllenkroken. (On the left hand side of the page you can find a button entitled Gruppboende Fräntorp. That’s the facility I worked at. We provided living space and around-the-clock services for six chronic schizophrenics.) I worked there for about 2 years, while at the same time continuing my training as a psychotherapist. In fact, I had only recently quit that job when I wrote the post you quote from.
First off, I don’t “scorn” medication, although I am relatively skeptical of it. I certainly didn’t scorn medication at Fräntorp, where most of the occupants ate massive doses of antidepressants, anxiety dampers, and anti-psychotic medications. They needed them to survive, in most cases.
But I am also skeptical of the tendency I often see of reducing schizophrenia to a purely biological disorder. I have yet to encounter a schizophrenic that came from a healthy family. Most of them were subjected to severe abuse as children, often sexual abuse.
Finally, I also don’t know what to make of this last comment because, if anything, TVAA has been roundly criticized for failing to back up his arguments with cites. But apparently now I’m being criticized for backing up a two-year-old post with a cite. (By the way, the book in question [Melanie Klien and Critical Social Theory, by C. Fred Alford] was published by Yale University Press in 1989.) I was unaware that that work, or anything written by George Deveroux, had been cited by the other participants in the current discussion.
Do you have a link?
Mr. S: This is why none of his arguments are valid. They often start out with some ridiculous unprovable assumption like this.
I mean, if one can truly speak with a voice of authority about “people like (Guinastasia),” one would have to have intricate firsthand knowledge of Guin. and many people “like” her (presumably those who say they have a mental disorder and use it to explain their behaviors and emotions); would have to be able to provide numerous cites; or would have to be one omniscient motherfucker.
Since he’s not provided cites, and since I sincerely doubt he’s the facilitator for the weekly meeting of the “people like Guinastasia society;” I’m going with “motherfucker” as an explanation.
It’s the audacity to make a generalization based upon no knowledge, then to ask people to believe that he knows what he’s talking about. THEN to base arguments on extrapolations from that generalization.
TVAA, are these the ethical concerns that led you to quitting the psych field? The field’s lack of tolerance for your unfounded generalizations?
A “ridiculous unprovable assumption”?!
How often have you heard someone say that a person does such and such a thing because they have condition X? It’s called an attribution, greck, and that particular one is so common that I have a difficult time imagining that anyone living outside a cave could have managed not to hear it.
Sweet, merciful Buddha on a bicycle, you’re dumb!
No, **you’re ** dumb and you smell funny.:mad:
Gonna suggest people “just use common sense” next?
You’re saying that anyone who experiences people with mental illnesses differently than you must be dumb? Or are they just not paying attention? Cause your interpretation of thihgs must be correct, right?
If it’s just your opinion, state it that way and save us all the trouble of thinking you’re as pompous as you seem to be.
I’ve heard people say those things, that doesn’t make them right. It certainly doesn’t justify making a statement as though it were fact; and it definitely doesn’t make it possible to generalize beyond any one given person.
so yeah, ridicuous, unprovable. Unless you have proof.
Hey Guinastasia,
Do people like you say you have a disorder then use it to explain your behaviors and emotions?
Any way of proving that? I figured you being the person most like you, you could at least tell us what you are like. I figure that also makes you the best authority on people like you.
Unless TVAA is the foremost authority on you and people like you as he/she seems to think.
I guess that really wouldn’t provide us with proof, but it would give us a qualified opinion.
Guinistasia, I believe that TVAA is sincere in what he says here – from what I’ve read, he has taken a “detached” and “intellectual” approach to this subject (and possibly with a pinch of Devil’s Advocacy thrown in (apologies to him if that is a slight), whereas, you have (understandably) a direct, intimately personal and emotional, involvement with the subject. It is easy in these circumstances for TVAA to seem unsympathetic, critical, or, dismissive. I’ve not seem him to be any of those things.
Mr. Svinlesha, old textbooks are not reliable sources of current thinking in psychiatry. As a psychotherapist, you should be aware of that.
Cheap shots about age are not characteristic of good psychotherapists either. It’s a good thing that I am content enough with my age to mention it often.
As for whether or not you are a liar, this is TVAA’s pitting. Are you suggesting that I should address my opinion of your integrity here?
I had always enjoyed your posts previously. I will miss that trust.
Do I use my OCD to explain my behavior and emotions?
The obvious answer is-it depends.
Do I use it to explain every little thing, and use it as an excuse? Absolutely not!
What I DO use it to explain:
-Why I do not drink
-For certain things RELATED to OCD (fears, for example, or periods of anxiety).
In all honesty, I can’t say I would be THAT much different if I didn’t have it. It’s a great stretch for TVAA to say I use to define my personality, if that’s what he’s implying.
There are things I can directly link to it: panic attacks, anxiety, feelings of being anxious, shy, low self-esteem, depression.
HOWEVER, that’s only when there is no other apparent cause. Say my parents are killed in a car accident. Would I be depressed? Yes. Would that have anything to do with OCD? No.
But could it trigger a reaction? Yes. It does tend to peak in times of great stress. That’s just normal-people with physiological conditions often suffer more during stressful times. Do people with heart problems have to avoid stress? Yes.
Perhaps I’m wandering a bit. All I can say is, I don’t know HOW much of my personality to assign to my condition and how much to assign to, well, just being me. Because, I suppose, I cannot separate parts of me. It’s not responsible for EVERYTHING about me. It’s not responsible for my intense interest in Russian history. It’s not responsible for my love of Star Wars, or my lusting after Goran Visnjic. It’s not responsible for the fact that I prefer my steak medium rare.
shrugs
Well, of course people do - but that’s because the statement is essentially meaningless! All the statement is saying is - ‘does (some aspect of your mental life) alter how you behave?’.
Or, even more trivially, TVAA may mean it as ‘does the fact that you suffer from depression mean that you act depressed’?
Tautology!
However, ISTM (and I have not read the original thread) that the crux of TVAA’s argument is that the organic basis of mental disorders is not well understood. This is, AFAIK, an accurate statement.
People who claim to have ADHD/OCD/Whatever are retards that want to get high off their medcine.
Not really.
Well are you suggesting that your posts are hysterical blather? Maybe your comprehension levels need seeing to TVAA, you really seem not to have understood the post in question at all but put your own biased spin on it. You have not responded to one thing I have asked except to be abusive and provide one solitary cite from a googled article.
As far as personal attacks go as distractors - you win first prize
Go take a look at the GD thread, auliya dear.
Zoe: old textbooks are excellent resources for examining the quality of psychiatric thought. By examining the claims previously made about mental disorders and their therapies and comparing them to what we now know (as opposed to suspect or believe), we can get a rough idea of the quality of today’s claims and beliefs.
It ain’t pretty, folks.