mental health, psychiatry, and friends 💊 🩺

Szaszians hold on to a fantasy where an objective definition of “disorder” not only exists, but it also successfully covers recognized disorders in general medicine while conveniently excluding mental illnesses as faux-disorders. Szaszians also commit themselves to some version of the idea that medical authority only applies to genuine disorders,... See more

The so-called ‘HR-ification’ of interpersonal relations – an appropriate term, given the particularly capitalist bent of its aetiology – involves Insta-therapists encouraging the use of social scripts full of meaningless jargon, such as the much maligned template above, to ‘protect your peace’ and ‘assert your boundaries’ against those... See more

With that investigative spirit, Halsted had embarked on experiments with cocaine—then touted as a wonder drug—with a group of colleagues in 1884. Submitting themselves as test subjects, they explored the drug's pain-numbing abilities by injecting it into their peripheral nerves. In doing so, they would advance the concept of local anesthetic, a... See more

Have you heard? No one wants to hear about your mental health anymore, if they ever did. It’s passé. It’s cringe. It’s a sign of a cultural decay which you, the individual, are responsible for upholding. We can all un-diagnose ourselves and breathe a sigh of relief that the powers that be have decided it’s over.

Also, psychedelics have a fundamental discordance with allopathic research which can never be overcome. The placebo problem is unsolvable. And these medicines are customarily adjacent to non-directive therapy, and ongoing integration. We'll never be able to quantify those things in a trial format the same we we can for a blood pressure pill.... See more

Some people, especially those who are autistic, dohave a flat emotional affect, do rely on scripts and do have a clear-cut sense of justice which leads them to cut off those who transgress it. When we talk about these traits as inhuman and robotic, what are we implying about the people who display them? The impulse to be unapologetic about... See more

Philosophy of science has had a long-running debate about the status of such postulated entities. Two major positions have evolved: scientific realism and instrumentalism. Advocates of the former argue that these constructs truly exist. Instrumentalists are more modest and argue that such constructs should be treated as tools and evaluated on their... See more

Many scientific theories assume constructs that are not directly observable (muons, genetic drift) but whose existence is inferred. In mental health research, psychiatric diagnoses play such a role. We assume that constructs, such as schizophrenia or alcohol use disorder, exist but we can only observe the signs, symptoms, and course of illness that... See more

The search for root causes often means a life event that has triggered the mental disorder. When I hear people talk about root causes, it usually means they are not happy with a biological explanation and want something more psychological, more meaningful, more profound.

In clinical practice, this is tricky though - we can rarely, if ever, put our... See more