diemen said:
Look, if you are honestly starting a thread in FYM with the expectation that only a narrow vein of topic is to be allowed, and dissent is unwelcome, then you're in the wrong place.
People have stories. Personal, tragic stories; some shared in this thread. They all seem to suggest that there was something mental to begin with.
Okay okay. Nothing new I haven't heard before. No offense, people. Same old same old. Good for you they're working. Tough it's not. Everyone shares similar stories.
I started this thread to suggest there are possibly other causes to mental illness.
Besides medication, a mild traumatic brain injury to a toddler (running into something, bump on the head) can significantly change the child's behavior and make them aggressive. That seemingly small incident can have an effect for years. (Daniel Amen, MD "Change Your Brain, Change Your Life")
I can point out other cases in "history".
In the late 19th century, French physician Benedikt Morel discovered an increasing number of adolescents and young adults were exhibiting what he called "precocious dementia", and it spread across Europe. Asylums were filled with these young adults and kids. In 1920s, Carl Jung gave it a new name "schizophrenia." Then, ahem, Dr. Healy received data figures from 19th century North Wales that suggested lead poisoning may be one of the two leading causes, the other being childbirth methods by male obgyns with anesthesia and forceps. (Here's a freebie link:
The Madness of Young People | Mad In America
I can bring up the story of German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin who in the late 1800s researched the outcomes of patients at an aslyum in Estonia. He observed and identified patients who suffered what he called "dementia praecox", also came to be known as "schizophrenia", basically more or less similar to the "precocious dementia" mentioned in the previous paragraph. But in a 1990 article British historian Mary Boyle "convincingly argued" in her article "Is Schizophrenia What It Was? A Re-analysis of Kraepelin's and Bleuler's Population" that many of Kraepelin's "dementia praecox" patients were undoubtedly suffering from a viral disease, encephalitis lethargica, which in the late 1800s had yet to be identified. (I'm partially plagiarizing verbatim Whitaker right now without quotes. It's on page 90-91. Sorry.) Basically. the encephalitis lethargica patients got lumped with the schizophrenics, and once they were separated from that group, the patient group that remained was no longer "dementia praecox group."
....
Basically: "The referents of schizophrenia gradually changed until the diagnosis came to be applied to a population who bore only a slight, and possibly superficial, resemblance to Kraeplin's." says Boyle.
In other words, what was a whole other disease got whittled down to Kraeplin's narrow definition of what he called "dementia praecox"/schizophrenia.
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I can also bring up Whitaker's story (I'm paraphrasing to the best of my ability, which probably sucks) that around 1970s, there was a politics going around in psychology (in particular, psychoanalysis) and psychiatry. Psychoanalysis was on the wane, and psychiatry has rising. But psychiatry did not earn the same respect as the mainstream medical field. So psychiatry had to win approval for being legitimately biomedical. While DSM-II focused on "neurosis", DSM-III was arbitrary compiled to serve as "a defense of the medical model as applied to psychiatric problems." (quote from Colubmia U Robert Spitzer who spearheaded the project) DSM-III became their bible and key to legitimacy.
...
"But as critics at the time noted, it was difficult to understand why this manual should be regarded as a great "scientific" achievement.
No scientific discoveries had led to this reconfiguring of psychiatric diagnoses. The biology of mental disorders remained unknown, and the authors of DSM-III even confessed that this was so.
APA President Theodore Blau wrote that DSM more of a "political position paper for the APA than a scientifically-based classification system."(Whitaker 269-270)
....
I can bring pull up all these documentations (though by now, my cynism tells me no one will bother reading citations).
And after all these citing documentation I've given in these posts, what do I get? ... Your/their disagreement. Not mine.
I'm not disregarding people's protest about their experiences. All I'm saying is that there is possibly a different angle to mental illness no one has really thought to examine or have known about.