The Psychoses

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Tue Feb 8 08:47:00 PST 2000


kelley wrote:


> You are demonizing Ken here in the most deplorable way possible
> because you aren't carefully reading what he says. Nor are you bothering
> to go out and read a little bit in order to understand it more.

If someone wrote a post based on belief in phlogiston we would all ridicule her. But the concept of phlogiston at least does not , every day someplace, do actual harm, sometimes physical harm, to people the way in which the throwing around of such equally exploded medical conceps as psychosis and neurosis does.

Ken and his defenders have not shown the remotest acquaintance with contemporary medical practices and neuroscience, nor any recognition of how harmful their medieval notions are to people. They are beginning to bore me. It is simply impossible to have a rational conversation with people who throw those two terms around as though they named actual illnesses.

I did learn something about leukemia. But Doug's still being utterly callous in his pathetic attempts to shore up a damaging medical practice.

You and I still share a lot, Kelley, but, I repeat, one cannot hold an intellectual conversation with someone who uses psychosis and neurosis as medical terms and believes that he/she is saying something true or even harmlessly trivial.

Carrol



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