Mark Bennett wrote:
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> I'm a little confused by this statement as well. If materialism, vulgar
> or otherwise, doesn't account for mental illness, what does?
There is a superstition that if a social element is involved then it isn't physical. The article Doug quotes seems to me to be itself mechanical materialist -- i.e. it has a very simple or vulgar conception of causation. What is sometimes called "situational depression" can evolve into clinical depression -- but that is because the situational depression (e.g., the death of a spouse) is, _of course_, manifested in physical changes in the brain. And if continued long enough those physical changes become an established brain pattern. That pattern can be changed (sometimes) by _either_ social events (e.g., talk therapy) _or_ by 'physical' events.
Consider migraine -- definitely a physical fact, and it is a condition which can be diagnosed with an EEG. But if someone suffers from migraine, they do not (ordinarily) have a continuous migraine. They have a migraine on one day rather than on some other day. What triggers a migraine on Thursday but not on the preceding Tuesday? Probably often social (psychological) events. But probably also some food, a change in air pressure, half a bottle of beer, who knows. Some migraine patients can be helped with bio-feedback; I guess they become able to affect their own neurochemicals. Back in '99 I developed what was eventually diagnosed as atypical migraine -- I hurt on the top of my head rather than around one eye. I take 4 4-mg tablets of Zanaflex a day and I never have headaches any more, though I occasionally have what I call a "shadow headache" -- one can feel it at the edges as it were but it doesn't develop. When I mentioned that to my neurologist a few years ago, he upped my prescription from 3 to 4 tablets a day. His reason: he suggested that one can "learn" migraine just as one "learns" to play the piano. Hence it was important to keep the headaches as completely under control as possible to avoid that learning pattern.
Carrol
P.S. The phrase "vulgar materialist" (rather than mechanical materialist or metaphysical materialist) is itself a vulgarity. Marx talked of "vulgar economy," but neither he nor Engels ever spoke of "vulgar" materialism. The implication of "vulgar economy" is that an element of bad faith is involved. Freud was a mechanical materialist, but that part at least of his thought did not, I think, involve bad faith; hence it would be wrong, I think, to call him a "vulgar" materialist. That label is a mere ad hominem, usually indicative of bad faith on whoever uses it.