The Psychoses

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Tue Feb 8 09:31:59 PST 2000


Carrol Cox wrote:


>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.

You pay an awful lot of attention to people that bore you, just like you make a big display of telling the world you're ignoring someone. As my former guru Harold Bloom once said, a great boredom is often a mask for a great anxiety.

As for the rest - *you* say these concepts are medieval and insulting. That's your opinion, which you often have a hard time distinguishing from fact. DSM-IV, like it or not, is part of contemporary medical practice, even though you seem to think it isn't.

Doug



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