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I think you are trying to hold me responsible for someone else's post. I had no comments on drowning anyone.
You were responding to a thread that referred to the drowning of a child by her mother for religious reasons so I assumed that was what you were discussing. What is the "it" that shouldn't be called insanity, in your opinion then? Just fundamentalist religion in general? If so, I agree.
Infancy? Mental health practice has existed in some form or another for over 200 years. Maybe you meant "scientifically primitive and logically flawed despite all the major advances in every other medical specialty".
It is the conceit of every generation to imagine that its science has taken things as far as they can, or in the inverse, that whatever has transpired over a sufficiently long period of time is predictive of how much will transpire over the next period. Progress is uneven.
I would consider medical science to be in its infancy also, albeit rather further advanced because it is trying to crack generally easier "nuts". Think of Dr McCoy of the original Star Trek, disparaging the barbarity of 20th century medicine "sewing people up like garments". "Modern" medicine still allows and inflicts much suffering, particularly at end-of-life, but I still am glad my wife can get a knee replacement rather than expect to be crippled for the rest of her life.
Yes we can agree to disagree. Overall, FWIW, I am not particularly impressed with mental health care in the US as I've experienced it and I'm even willing to call parts of it a scam. Particularly the drug peddlers. The county mental health system has to medicate my son for depression as a gateway to other services but there's no endgame either. They just keep futzing with his meds and fixating on a comorbidity at the expense of the main problem. There is little or no communication with his talk therapist and, I sense, some degree of professional hostility between them. What he really needs is his benefits coordinator and vocational rehab assistance, so we put up with the other stuff despite it being basically a waste of time and money, so that we can get to the bits that actually might be of some help.
So I'm not entirely disagreeing with you. I'm just not willing to call it all a communist plot or something. Imperfect as the DSM V is, it's at least an attempt to systematize and objectify understanding of mental illness and provide more consistent diagnoses. I don't know what we have that's better. My son isn't as capable as you clearly are of taking charge of his life and indulging in self-help. It's not my role to wipe his butt for him. So I'm trying to surround him with support systems that will keep him out of trouble when I eventually slip this mortal coil. Do you have a better idea than to work with what's there to work with?
A final note on the culpability of parents in mental illness. When parents are truly at fault, little is to be gained by shaming and blaming and that doesn't necessarily equate to them doing less than they knew how to do at the time. Much of mental health surfaces lots of interesting but ultimately unactionable information about how the patient came to be as they are. What's needed is practical help with improving symptoms and outlook and prognosis. And then of course there is the simple fact that sometimes the parents aren't at fault. In my case I contributed zero to my son's issues, although it can be argued that I chose a hideously bad gene donor to co-create him with, and like most parents of schizoid personalities I did not recognize the depth of his issues until they were more obvious in early adulthood. Whatever. I owe my son the best life I can give him and I owe society the least burden I can leave it with, and I'm doing what I know how to do, as always. If I were to be automatically judged and shamed for a situation that exists and needs to be dealt with, I don't know how that would help. At all. Most particularly how it would help my son. Might make other people feel smug and superior, but would not reduce net human suffering.
I regard blame-fixing as a religiously grounded impulse that generally serves no useful purpose.
I consider religious beliefs in the supernatural as a form of a thinking disorder mostly with some delusional ideas thrown in. In terms of Bible believing Christians, it manifests it's forms in what I call compartmentalization. You can have a reasonably intelligent adult in other parts of their lives but when it comes to their religion, the thinking becomes irrational. When you believe as an adult that snakes talk, donkeys talk, a man lives in a whale for 3 days and other such nonsense, I can only conclude you have not learned the difference between fables and reality in elementary school or that you have a thinking disorder as mentioned before.
Yay for America. Religion is called insanity, believing you are the opposite gender is not....coming out of the closet gets you a phone call from the president, and we just redefined marriage.
Yay.
That has to be the quote of the day. Good, no, Great post Vizio!
I consider religious beliefs in the supernatural as a form of a thinking disorder mostly with some delusional ideas thrown in. In terms of Bible believing Christians, it manifests it's forms in what I call compartmentalization. You can have a reasonably intelligent adult in other parts of their lives but when it comes to their religion, the thinking becomes irrational. When you believe as an adult that snakes talk, donkeys talk, a man lives in a whale for 3 days and other such nonsense, I can only conclude you have not learned the difference between fables and reality in elementary school or that you have a thinking disorder as mentioned before.
And I think just the opposite of you and I'm a very stable, upstanding citizen. The board members of the local library voted me to be president of the board (which I've been for quite a number of years now) and I've been voted in by the citizenry every four years.
Just because I believe the God Who created the entire universe is capable of keeping someone alive in a giant fish (by the way, the Hebrew does not say it was a whale), does not call into question my sanity. I think there is actually something wrong with those who don't believe God is capable of doing great things.
And I think just the opposite of you and I'm a very stable, upstanding citizen. The board members of the local library voted me to be president of the board (which I've been for quite a number of years now) and I've been voted in by the citizenry every four years.
Just because I believe the God Who created the entire universe is capable of keeping someone alive in a giant fish (by the way, the Hebrew does not say it was a whale), does not call into question my sanity. I think there is actually something wrong with those who don't believe God is capable of doing great things.
Of course with your God all things all possible. The Muslims, Hindus and all the other people on this planet who have believed in thousands of different Gods through the ages could tell me the same thing about other so called supernatural events and things that defy reality as we know it. There is nothing special about you stating that YOUR God can do all these things. The analogy holds true. What's so far fetched about the Bible is that we are supposed to believe that the talking snake, talking donkey and man living in a fish for 3 days occurred only during the times in history covered by the Bible which is supposedly since the beginning of time in the Garden of Eden. You and those who believe in these talking animals need to go to the zoo and ask to see the talking snake and taking donkey exhibit and see what looks you get. Then you need to look out side your Bible and see if there ever has been solid evidence that animals like snakes and donkeys have spoken to people. Not secondhand stories or myths or somebody told me they talked to a donkey but actual substantiated evidence that this occurs in nature. Otherwise I'm going to look at the stories as just that...stories. Supernatural stories require extraordinary evidence and just because they are written down in some book, doesn't count.
What is nice about this thread is that underscores the opposite. No one ever seems to think that atheism or agnosticism might be a product of insanity.
Interesting. So can I suggest that all psychiatrists are delusional too when they strongly believe ("diagnose") people with chronic schizophrenia and ignore the "invalidating evidence" of World Health Organization longitudinal epidemiologic studies which prove that complete spontaneous recovery from psychological woes is not only possible but a statistical probability when patients take no medication and are unequivocally supported and treated like normal members of their respective society? Unfortunately many quacks teach "unhappy delusions" as well, like lifelong and incurable mental defectiveness that can cause actual self-fulfilling prophecies like permanent disability and suicide.
I wasn't even discussing the merits (or lack thereof) of the psychiatry profession.
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