Psychiatry

[for context sake, it's worth noting that i'm watching garden state while i write this]

it's been a while since i've posted a good rant, so maybe this has been a long time coming. Today I came across a book review for "Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became A Mental Illness". I definitely plan to read it.

For at least a decade now, I have had issues with psychiatry (what an ironic way to phrase that). my uncle, a clinical freudian psychoanalyst--last time i checked freudian theory was...archaic?--loves to tell me that he is sure i will ebcome a psychologist. I can't blame him. my interest in philosophy of mind has me browsing through at least as many books classified as cognitive science, neurology, and psychiatry as philosophy books. also, psychology would be a fine way to blend philosophy with medicine. But i have too much against psychology as an institution to seriously consider jumping in.

"Shyness" addresses one of my many reasons for hating on psychology: the ideology of better living through chemistry. Psychiatry attempts to cure illnesses of the mind, but a large number of these "illnesses," as robert pirsig points out, often can only characterized in the context of culture. A disease in psychiatry is basically anyway someone can be "different" from some imaginary norm, usually in a way that "disrupts" their life. basically, is someone has a character trait that makes them inefficient as tools for society, they have diseased minds.

According to the Shyness, there is another way psychiatry characterizes diseases: if we can give drugs to cure it, then we should. I often like to use ADD as my exemplar anti-psychiatry disease. Sure, there exist people who's inability to concentrate is a legitimate disability. But let's be serious here. The LARGE majority of the ritalin-popping public are just poeple who think the pill helps em out.

So let's call this shit what it is. Social anxiety disorder may exist. But the vast majority of people who take paxil are jsut your average run-of-the-mill wallflowers. fuck, i'm one of em. but i don't need paxil, i jsut need the right environment. i happen to think certain parties have hostile vibes, and just don't get comfortable enough to jump in.

still. right now i'm living in a foreign country where i previously only knew family; no one my age. I go out on my own all the time and have tons of fun, and am making friends more easily than i ever have in my life. fuck paxil. not taht i've ever been on it or anything, but i think that most people don't need drugs, they need experience. most people aren't mentally ill, they're just humans.

who the fuck do psychiatrists think they are, telling people they are abnormal? almost every psych-major i knew in college was in it to figure out what was wrong with themselves. shit, freud was so fucked in the head he even managed to project his neuroses onto more than a few of his patients.

Of course, then there's always the conspiracy-of-capitalism paranoia that is often attributed to western medicine by alternative medicine types. but the author makes a pretty convincing case for this kind paranoia with respect to american psychiatry. inf act, it's sort of the focus of his book, as i understand it.

From the article:

“Every marketer's dream is to find an unidentified or unknown market and develop it. That's what we were able to do with social anxiety disorder,” a product director for the drug told Advertising Age magazine.

fucked up, right?


ugh...i just invited my uncle to talk about the article. his newest attempt to get me to become a shrink:

uncle: "you need to get psychoanalyzed! just as an experience!"

me: "you think i've never been to a psychologist?"

uncle: "not a psychologist, a psychoanalyst. it's different! you will see, you will like it. it's very
close to philosophy."

maybe i should become a philosophical counselor. it's very close to psychoanalysis!