The town planning analogy hit closer to home than the psychiatry stuff for me. Anyone who's tried to reason with a municipal board knows that technocrats love pretending complex human messes are just math equations waiting to be solved!
Once upon a time, therapists talked their patients through the concept of a double bind, another way of describing a wicked problem. That approach seems to have vanished.
Is there a diagnostic category for prolonged psychic pain as the result of feeling abandoned or betrayed? Pills are hardly a remedy for that. Most of what life throws at us can only be dealt with by facing our reality, preferably with someone who will walk with us through the pain. A true therapeutic contract cannot be a one up one down relationship, which is as you point out, is how psychiatry works today.
Joanna Moncrieff in her book "The bitterest pills" thoroughly critiques the edifice you describe.
Moncrieff's scholarship is exceptional and impossible to ignore. Psychiatrists must surely know that treating symptoms without seeking to address causes is unethical. Surely carrying that knowledge inflicts moral injury. Moncrieff's position once seen cannot be unseen. Is this one of the reasons that psychiatrists develop depression?
With respect, mainstream psychiatry does indeed manage to ignore Moncreiff's work, mainly by not seeing it, as in "there's none so blind as will not see."
Do psychiatrists develop depression more than the rest? I asked a colleague who for years saw Drs on behalf of medical board. Strictly speaking, psychiatrists should take as many drugs as the rest of the population, but they don't. She said it's because they get all their families on drugs instead. Nifty.
Rittel and Webber's ten features of a wicked problem seem to me to be horrifically flawed.
There is however a generic term which at least in theory appears to relate to things like values and emotions. It is called emotional intelligence, designated EQ, as compared to intellectual intelligence designated IQ.
It is my observation that many, but of course not all, main stream mental health professionals have undoubtedly high IQ but appallingly low EQ. This leads to another old and somewhat philosophical statement that suggests that the intellect (IQ) makes a wonderful servant but an appalling master.
For me it is easy to see how psychiatry has handed over the reigns almost completely to the intellect and consequently has been led away on a "journey to hell" with many unfortunate clients taken along for the ride. Many sub disciplines of main stream science are not too far behind.
Perhaps I would go as far as to say that large sectors of western society are caught up in the "intellect my master paradigm" leading to over dependence on binary thinking which in turn leads to the proliferation of the "blame game" and similar aberrations of human cognition.
The challenge of course is how to best push back against this very destructive trend without simply indulging in more of the blame game which just adds to the problem rather than pointing towards any possible solution.
With its DSM tick-a-box approach, psychiatry tries to reduce depression, for example, to a “chemical imbalance of the brain.
THIS is hitting the nail hard on the head.
The town planning analogy hit closer to home than the psychiatry stuff for me. Anyone who's tried to reason with a municipal board knows that technocrats love pretending complex human messes are just math equations waiting to be solved!
Once upon a time, therapists talked their patients through the concept of a double bind, another way of describing a wicked problem. That approach seems to have vanished.
Is there a diagnostic category for prolonged psychic pain as the result of feeling abandoned or betrayed? Pills are hardly a remedy for that. Most of what life throws at us can only be dealt with by facing our reality, preferably with someone who will walk with us through the pain. A true therapeutic contract cannot be a one up one down relationship, which is as you point out, is how psychiatry works today.
Joanna Moncrieff in her book "The bitterest pills" thoroughly critiques the edifice you describe.
Moncrieff's scholarship is exceptional and impossible to ignore. Psychiatrists must surely know that treating symptoms without seeking to address causes is unethical. Surely carrying that knowledge inflicts moral injury. Moncrieff's position once seen cannot be unseen. Is this one of the reasons that psychiatrists develop depression?
With respect, mainstream psychiatry does indeed manage to ignore Moncreiff's work, mainly by not seeing it, as in "there's none so blind as will not see."
Do psychiatrists develop depression more than the rest? I asked a colleague who for years saw Drs on behalf of medical board. Strictly speaking, psychiatrists should take as many drugs as the rest of the population, but they don't. She said it's because they get all their families on drugs instead. Nifty.
Rittel and Webber's ten features of a wicked problem seem to me to be horrifically flawed.
There is however a generic term which at least in theory appears to relate to things like values and emotions. It is called emotional intelligence, designated EQ, as compared to intellectual intelligence designated IQ.
It is my observation that many, but of course not all, main stream mental health professionals have undoubtedly high IQ but appallingly low EQ. This leads to another old and somewhat philosophical statement that suggests that the intellect (IQ) makes a wonderful servant but an appalling master.
For me it is easy to see how psychiatry has handed over the reigns almost completely to the intellect and consequently has been led away on a "journey to hell" with many unfortunate clients taken along for the ride. Many sub disciplines of main stream science are not too far behind.
Perhaps I would go as far as to say that large sectors of western society are caught up in the "intellect my master paradigm" leading to over dependence on binary thinking which in turn leads to the proliferation of the "blame game" and similar aberrations of human cognition.
The challenge of course is how to best push back against this very destructive trend without simply indulging in more of the blame game which just adds to the problem rather than pointing towards any possible solution.