[lbo-talk] Collective idiocy....

Wojtek S wsoko52 at gmail.com
Mon Dec 17 08:00:17 PST 2012


Shag: "Not sure about Asperger's. From what I've read, there doesn't seem to be any there, there. Another diagnose created by the pharmaceutical industry in order to treat it with pills."

[WS:] I don't think AS is treated with pills. Cognitive behavioral therapy seems to be the main form of treatment.

As to the point raised by Lenin's Tomb - mental illness does not occur in social vacuum, so one needs to consider both the mental disorder and how that disorder functions in a particular social context. Clearly, the destructive narratives are provided by the cultural context, yet most people do not act on them. They treat them as symbolic forms. But it takes a person with a mental disorder to cross the line from symbolic to real. So the availability of the destructive narratives is insufficient to explain why acts described by these narratives are committed. You need psychiatry to do this. However, cultural narratives can explain forms that psychotic behavior takes. In modern culture it is blowing things up or becoming a stock broker. In other cultures it was going on crusades or becoming religious prophets.

While we are at this, I don't really understand why so many lefties are so dismissive of affective and mental disorders. Reminds me of the role of useful idiots the left played in the dismantling of the mental health care in the 1960s. There is considerable scientific evidence linking these conditions to neuroanatomical factors, even though exact causes have not yet been discovered. The fact that there is misdiagnosis and abuse of treatment does not mean that all modern psychiatry and pharmacology is bullshit. I know a number of people who benefit from psychiatric diagnosis and treatment, and denying that is equivalent of kicking them from mental asylums to the streets, in which the left was nilly-willy instrumental. Most people cannot afford a fifty grand a year private residential facility - their only options of dealing with mental disorders are pills, jail, or in some cases suicide. Or ranting on the internet ;)

-- Wojtek

"An anarchist is a neoliberal without money."



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