In England, this new cognitive approach to psychosis and the efforts of Hearing Voices Network are independent of each other, and are sometimes at odds. H.V.N.’s leading members, for instance, frequently criticize even sympathetic academic researchers for being insufficiently political. Yet both approaches share a similar purpose in seeking to place voice-hearing within the continuum of normal human experience – one, in order to better treat patients, the other, out of a firm conviction that hearing voices need not interfere with leading an otherwise “normal” life. [emphasis added]
Of course that refers to hearing voices that aren’t actually there. Here is the full and fascinating story. It advises people who wish to talk back to the voices to carry around cell phones.
How extreme must a single weirdness be, before a person can’t much function in the real world or be counted as "normal"?
How extreme must a single weirdness be, before a person can’t much function in the real world or be counted as “normal”?
I think when you start writing economics blogs, that’s it.
I’m amused to note that I may be less likely than average to hear voices. My “inner speech” mostly isn’t in words.
So long as they know the voices aren’t real, I don’t think there’s a big problem with hearing them.
In response to anne: While Joan of Arc is now a heroine, she was also, in her own time, thrown into prison, tortured, and burned at the stake. As for the “horrifying failure” of Freudian psychiatry, it was a huge humanitarian advance over what was done to the mentally ill previously. I don’t think any generation has a monopoly on treating the mentally ill poorly.
Auditory hallucinations don’t happen in isolation – they are a symptom of functional brain impairment and (I would say) invariably occur with other symptoms such as bizarre beliefs and illogical speech.
http://www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/delusions
I think there is more-than-a-bit of selective observation or wishful thinking in the soothing notion that there are people who hear voices but are otherwise ‘normal’.
I enjoyed Caplan’s paper too, but if you want to know about some of the criticism of Szasz check out the article and bibliography in the Stanford Encyclopedia’s entry on mental illness.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mental-illness/
Also, if you watch the Cato video of Szasz (google video it), you’ll see an interesting q&a session at the end that reveals some unpalatable implications for the claim that mental illness is a myth.
E.g.: Imagine your friend suddenly snaps, becomes angry and delusionally suspicious of others. Say we are not sure of the exact cause of the change, and that he refuses treatment for reasons that are absurd. Suppose further that we know that if we give him a pill, he’ll be back to his former self. In fact, we’re almost certain he’ll thank us for forcibly treating him afterward.
Thomas Szasz does some hand waving, but essentially says it is immoral to force your friend to take the pill.
I’m not saying that’s the wrong judgment, but it does require some adjustments to my moral intuition. Be prepared to commit yourself to that sort of thing if you agree with Szasz.
It may have been a humanitarian advance to improve the conditions of those who would already be destined for the alienist’s prison, but Freud and the psychiatric movement that developed expanded the definition of “insanity” well beyond what it was before. Even now this continues apace and we are always hearing about increasing rates of X-disorder, as psychiatrists learn to divide and categorize diseases in such a way that each can have its own medicine cabinet.
Psychiatry is mostly bunk mascarading as science; in an increasingly secular culture people turn to psychiatrists instead of priests and suffer for it.
I have never read Szasz although I’m sure he would share a similar position. Obviously there are people who need a lot of help to function in the world, but in the East there was not historically a comparable notion (from what I understand) that we should lock up those that have certain problems.
You beg all sorts of questions when you decide to change someone’s brain chemistry without their consent (perhaps they are unable to consent?), such as the right a person has to change the mind of someone else, what the role of suffering is in the world (materialists may have an easier time brushing aside the benefits of suffering), the role of “mad” people in a healthy society.
Also there is something to be said for the psychiatric profession role in increasing the rate of severe mental disorder by a variety of methods. There is no easy analysis of this but people have a right to be very suspicious of the psychiatric profession and to ask a lot of hard questions about the rights of psychiatric patients, even those a “select few” judge to be in dire need of changes in brain chemistry.
First, it is not against the law to be psychotic.
In general, among common law jurisdictions, there are only two reasons a psychiatrist (in some cases, a physician) can involuntarily admit a patient and administer antipsychotic medication.
They are:
1) Imminent harm to self
2) Imminent harm to others
I have have seen a number of polite paranoid psychotics who presented to the ER voluntarily, posed no danger to themselves or others and refused our offer of antipsychotic medications that we thought would help them.
Much of what has been written about psychiatry comes from a very different age (Szasz, One flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest). These days, psychiatrists are one of the few healthcare practitioners that take the concept of autonomy seriously and worry about violating it.
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