Posted by Chairman_MAO on March 7, 2006, at 12:11:42
In reply to Re: oh » Chairman_MAO, posted by linkadge on March 4, 2006, at 9:27:34
Specifically, I am in agreement with the Rat Park investigator, who said:
" The disease model has been "embellished in the news media", to the point, he writes, "where the belief in drug-induced addiction has acquired the status of an obvious truth that requires no further testing." The widespread acceptance of this belief "is a better demonstration of the power of repetition than of the influence of empirical research ..." [9]
See also: http://www.szasz.com/addiction.pdf
and various works by Stanton Peele.Mental illness CANNOT be a medical illness per se because physiological pathologies of the brain are the domain of neurology. A pathology is nothing except that which is identifiable post-mortem. My suffering of depression is irrelevant to this. The suffering in mental illness is real, and there certainly may be undetected abnormalities on a psychobiological level. However, until what such a problem is can even be defined--which it is has not, otherwise antidepressant monographs would not claim that the mechanism of action is unknown--there is no such thing as mental illness as defined by most psychiatrists and other professionals in the field. If you know of an argument to the contrary (especially in a peer-reviewed publication or other scholarly work) I am always interested in hearing it. Despite what you may think I have a very open mind about this, and have never heard anything that vitiates the Szasz argument.
poster:Chairman_MAO
thread:613775
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20060304/msgs/617025.html