wrobert at uci.edu wrote:
>
> My comment is in reference to diagnosable mental illness, rather than 'bad
> ideas.' The comment about the NASCAR debate was meant to indicate that by
> inference. To be honest, I was referencing a comment from a friend about
> studies he read, but I'm pretty sure that he is referencing APA standards
> around mental illness, but I could ask if you're interested.
APA standards are subject to sharp challenge even among psychiatrists and psychologists. There is a small handful of mental illnesses which seem reasonably defined and described, but even in respect to such there is enough confusion at the margins to undercut very precise estimates of distribution within this or that social or occupational category. And while the woods are full of conpsiracists who see all psychiatry as a plot by the pharmaceutical industry, _some_ designations certainly do represent a drug looking for an illness. At one time serious bipolar cases were often diagnosed as schizophrenia, and there is no reason to suppose that many current diagnoses will be similarly rejected in the future.
Where would one draw the line between Anxiety disorder and bad ideas or fucked-up conditions of life.
In any case, I was primarily cocnerned with the silliness of the flip judgment on "grad students" you quoted. Grad students do no constitute a coherent category, the different fields of grad studies vary more from each other than do grad students from undergrads or high-school grads.
Carrol