Talk:Mental illness denial/Archive2

Overlap between antifeminism and anti-psychiatry
Crank source: http://www.thedailysheeple.com/the-number-one-mind-control-program-at-us-colleges_022017 Reverend Black Percy (talk) 17:40, 9 February 2017 (UTC)

Forms of denial
To what extent are there different forms of denialism - so some people argue that specific forms of mental illness do not exist (rather than argue over where the boundary is/perceptions changing over time) and some claim that mental illness as a whole does not exist? Anna Livia (talk) 16:31, 13 September 2017 (UTC)

Tana Dineen's "Manufacturing Victims"
I came across this thing on TV Tropes of all places. I haven't read it, but here's my impression after reading a few reviews and previews:


 * She doesn't seem to be particularly famous, so some promotions of her book oversell the impact she's made.
 * She doesn't deny all mental illness, but she seems to e.g. blame depression sufferers for failing to take "personal responsibility".
 * She likes to accuse psychology of being pseudoscience.
 * She believes the "psychology industry" is trying to turn healthy people into patients, and to keep them dependent on their therapist instead of preparing them to move on with their life.
 * Her website goes as far as saying the effects of it are "damaged people, divided families, distorted justice, destroyed companies, and a weakened nation". Yes, really.

(1) Is there any merit whatsoever to her claims (other than "a few psychologists are useless or malicious, and therapy doesn't help everyone"), or is it just another Big Pharma conspiracy theory? (2) Should we even bother addressing her claims? As I said, she doesn't seem to be particularly influential. ThineAntidote (talk) 11:07, 8 May 2018 (UTC)

Remaining problems
Involuntary commitment still exists for people who are deemed a danger to themselves or others. While Mental Health isn't nearly as bad as it used to be the involuntary commitment of people who attempt suicide or display self-destructive behavior is still unjustified. If a person is feeling depressed or has suicidal thoughts and wants treatment then of course they should receive treatment but if they just want to kill themselves then why lock them up to try and keep them alive against their will? I'm also puzzled by the argument that if a person later decides they want to live then that somehow invalidates their earlier desire to die or if that change was facilitated by involuntary psychiatric commitment then that somehow makes that commitment justified. I would also like to submit that Mental Health uses a double standard by never treating the reasons why a person finds to live with the same scrutiny as the reasons why a person wants to die. Personally I know my own desire to live is based entirely on irrational impulses and emotional/subjective reasoning.
 * This is now addressed in anti-psychiatry.Neiltyson1fan (talk) 19:32, 22 December 2019 (UTC)

Section on the difference model
I feel like whoever wrote the section on the difference model doesn't have a good grasp on mental disorders.

"ADHD and autism come with strengths and harmless differences as well as difficulties" - ADHD doesn't come with "strengths and harmless differences", especially if it continues into adulthood. It's actively debilitating on all facets of life for a majority of patients. Literally the entire point of ADHD as a psychiatric diagnosis is that the inattentiveness and restlessness actively impedes functioning to the point it requires medical intervention. And that's before we get into its very high comorbidity with other psychiatric disorders, like depression, bipolar disorder and generalized anxiety disorder.

I'm not going to touch the autism one, I ain't opening that can of worms.
 * As someone on the spectrum myself, I will simply say that while the model's attitude of promoting greater acceptance is commendable and that there are parts of autism that can be strengths when harnessed correctly, the model fails to remember that we live in a society made by and (for the most part) for neurotypical people and therefore we must ultimately play by their rules, albeit with the possibility of finding a future middle ground more conducive to people on the spectrum in the future. --174.205.19.67 (talk) 16:02, 17 October 2018 (UTC)

"Whether the disability causes suffering is also important to note. For example, the difference model might make sense for a healthy schizophrenic woman whose voices tell her not to forget to buy milk at the store, but might not be helpful for a frightened schizophrenic woman whose voices tell her to hurt herself and to trust no one" - That is not how schizophrenia works and this assessment is so inaccurate it may actually be dangerous. There is a lot more to schizophrenia than just auditory hallucinations; what about her negative symptoms? What about her cognitive deficits? Those two are more important to a schizophrenic patient's functioning and quality of life than the positive symptoms. Hell, what about the other positive symptoms like disorganized thinking, or delusions?

Normally, I'd fix it (by taking away that paragraph entirely), but then I'd have to touch the identity politics of the difference model and I wouldn't touch that with a sterilised ten foot surgical steel pole being held by some other bloke. -- 18:43, 16 October 2018 (UTC)
 * I mean, the underlying medical definition of any "mental disorder" requires by technical necessity "affects the quality of life", so I feel like you get the toupee problem. ikanreed 🐐Bleat at me 19:24, 16 October 2018 (UTC)


 * Do we have to cater to identity politics here? I really wouldn't want to be an author in a Politically Correct encyclopedia (and not in an anti-Politically Correct either). Political opinions should never enter the equation in the first place. A synthesis one could make from the paragraph is that difference model proponents, instead of denying the illness itself, deny the psychiatric evaluation that the illness is the cause for the worsened quality of life. Instead, they blame the society for this effect. This is essentially not any better. Persons that receive the diagnosis are often relieved when the cause of the problems is recognized as an illness, instead of it all being their fault. The diagnosis allows them to receive treatment, which is again something that would be denied if following the denialists. As such, while more subtle, the difference model is harmful for the same reason as outright mental illness denial. --DrH (talk) 13:26, 17 October 2018 (UTC)
 * I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that.
 * The positions of neurodiversity proponents vary, but in general they don't deny that the illness itself is the cause of lowered quality of life. They just reject the label of "illness" or "disorder", claiming it's just a difference in brain function, a position I find hilariously quaint at best as our understanding of the underlying mechanisms of mental disorders improve. But I like the underlying intent; removing the stigma plaguing mental health. The stigma is part of the relatively high treatment dropout rates for various mental disorders, and frankly makes me unreasonably mad.
 * Others say, on top of that, society should adjust to patients who refuse treatment, which, again, while well-intentioned, speaks to an incredible lack of understanding of how mental disorders impair functioning.
 * Then you have the social constructionists claiming schizophrenia is a social construct. And sociologists ask why the hard sciences don't take them seriously.
 * Anyway, I removed the paragraph in its entirely because it makes me see red. 16:34, 17 October 2018 (UTC)
 * The only academic in history I can find making the absurd claim that schizophrenia is a social construct is a "hard science" psychiatrist (just like you) Thomas S. Szasz, and I had to go back to the fucking 60s to find him doing so. And his actual arguments were a bit more complicated than you imply, namely that recent(at the time) abuses had people institutionalized for cases of schizophrenia that were not at all in line with diagnostic criteria, suggesting that it was a convenient blanket being thrown over more complex cases, which yeah, starts to sound socially constructed.  ikanreed 🐐Bleat at me 02:09, 18 October 2018 (UTC)
 * I was thinking of Michael T. Walker, actually, who argued all mental illnesses are social constructs, because... language creates reality? And therefore all psychiatric diagnoses are social in nature? 13:32, 18 October 2018 (UTC)
 * Well, I don't think you understand what social construct means. Just like saying race is a social construct doesn't mean differences in skin color don't exist, so saying mental illness is a social construct doesn't imply people who are dysfunctional on a mental level and suffering from it don't exist. But psychiatric diagnoses are obviously socially constructed, which is evident from the simple fact that they differ based on culture and time, the demarcations between them (an adult who was diagnosed with schizophrenia in the 1970s may be diagnosed with autism now; an adult who is diagnosed with borderline personality disorder now may be diagnosed with complex PTSD in a few years from now) and whether a given condition is to be treated as a mental illness is subject to change.
 * Psychiatry, like all of medicine, does have problems with practicing psychiatrists abusing their power and not only individual practitioners but also organizations harboring common societal biases against various social groups and minorities (women, non-heterosexual people, gender variant people, intersex people, poor people, people of color, uneducated people, and last but not least people identified as disabled, mentally ill or non compos mentis, and – for example – under- or sometimes also overestimating their abilities), and it is important to acknowledge this. However, it can be done without denying the concept of mental illness in general. Nuance is crucial: for example, a dire economic situation, criminalization and minority stress can all contribute to depression, making it more than a plain brain dysfunction but also affected by social factors; this does not mean that depressed people should never be treated or receive medication, but their autonomy needs to be respected and their social situation should be improved. This can all still work as criticism largely internal to psychiatry, however (yet informed, for example, by activism), without discrediting the field as a whole. The neurodiversity paradigm (whose goals are often misrepresented or misunderstood; at its base, it's simply a reaction against the tendency to treat disabled and mentally ill individuals as intrinsically inferior and incompetent, and not deserving of the same rights as neurotypical individuals) and other forms of activism do have valuable contributions to make. The same is true for approaches that challenge norms which serve at the basis for pathologization of behavior that is not inherently problematic or harmful and thus cannot be classified as inherently disordered. This is, in fact, the main issue in psychiatry: the long-standing unwillingness to consider the voices of the clients themselves. --91.7.1.139 (talk) 21:00, 25 May 2019 (UTC)

Moving stuff to a new page
That doesn't have to do with mental illness denial or is only tangential. To anti-psychiatry specifically. This page is mostly about Szasz-type thought, which of course overlaps heavily with anti-psychiatry but != anti-psychiatry. I don't think previous writers were being malicious, but rather they didn't want to go through the trouble of also creating an anti-psychiatry page as well.Neiltyson1fan (talk) 19:33, 22 December 2019 (UTC)

Arguments against are very weak
The "arguments against" section appears to be split into 3 arguments. We have paragraph 1, then "yet another problem" opens paragraph 2, and then a neuroplasticity subsection. I'll look at them in order. Paragraph 1 immediately concedes some ground, stating that some things considered mental illness are "simply a category with which people may be labeled so they can receive extra help." This isn't an argument against mental illness denial. It concedes that the illness doesn't exist, but suggests that the linguistic category is useful. For other illnesses, paragraph 1 notes that sometimes they shift onto things with a biological basis, but this doesn't present any argument for mental illness really existing. In fact, if all mental illnesses fit into these two categories, either being "really just a linguistic category" or "really a misdiagnosis for a neurological condition" then mental illness denial has won. Hardly an argument against. The second paragraph states "there could be some dysfunction there that is unseen." That's an obvious retreat to the possible. To argue against mental illness denial, you need to argue for the existence of mental illness, not just for the possibility of mental illness. The rest of paragraph two is dedicated to an irrelevant ramble about migraines followed by a clarification on what mental illness deniers believe regarding treatment for supposed illnesses. The third and final argument, then, is that "advances in the research of neuroplasticity have made this even more silly." Here, it's noted that giving someone chemicals to temporarily worsen their memory allows them to recall traumatic events without issue. It even jokes "turns out you can cure almost anything by suppressing memory of an event, wow, much science." Well... exactly? People get smashed to help them deal with bad memories too. This does absolutely nothing to prove that they have an illness. It just shows that memories can be difficult, and that chemicals can damage memory, something which mental illness denial doesn't stand against. Overall, this section is awful. If this is the best it gets then we might as well burn down the local psych ward now. 2A00:23C7:400:E000:1504:6E51:B74F:CFD2 (talk) 22:29, 24 November 2020 (UTC)