I am writing today in response to the commentary I received from my last post. This is for those of you that had questions in regards to my opinion; enjoy.
My gut says that “abolishing” a term simply because it has a …
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You write an engaging commentary.
I believe health diagnoses, like all words, can become antiquated. Think about the use of the label female hysteria. (I think that is similar to the rationale of the CASL members. They believe that schizophrenia labels are misdiagnoses.)
If other labels for the schizophrenia spectrum disorders were found more suitable (descriptive and reduced “negative” stigma) for individuals, then why not change the labels?
The changing of the diagnosis multiple personality disorder to dissociative identity disorder benefited individuals.
I happen to agree if the name is changed, people will simply transfer their old attitudes to the new label. What I would like to see changed is not the bias outside of the system, but rather the bias within. For example, not long ago I encountered two psychiatrists on the internet who told me that schizophrenia is incurable. It’s not, but being told as much by “experts” can be profoundly disabling for those who suffer with the condition.
“I do not believe that the diagnosing criteria for an illness typically takes into consideration the developing circumstance, only the outcome or more specifically the symptoms.”
In the situation you describe I suppose the diagnosis would be “earache” either way but the treatment might vary depending on the cause. For example, if your ear is aching because there is an axe sticking out of the side of your head it would be rather pointless to prescribe medication for a viral infection.
I speak from the position of someone who has gone through an “acute schizophrenic break”. In the time since I’ve actively studied what happened to me and why. Just off the top of my head is a brief list of presumed causes of schizophrenia through the ages…
- Demon possession
- Trauma
- Milk
- Bad parenting
- Cat poop
- Drugs
- Sin
- Meditation/Yoga
- Genetics
- Stress
- Allergies
- Poor parenting
- Nutritional deficiencies
- Child abuse
- Caffeine
- Neurological dysfunction
I think it’s quite possible that a number of causes could play a role in the development of psychosis but the extent to which they do will vary by individual. Personally, I would not describe my own psychotic break as “dopamine dysregulation”. I went through a series of losses as accompanied by trauma. These occurred so rapidly I could not assimilate the impact of those events. Overwhelmed and deeply mired in personal crisis, my “ego” — what I define as one’s belief structure about themselves, the world, and their place in it — fragmented and collapsed.
That was about five years ago. I have been working for more than three years; my relationships have all stabilized; I do not appear to have suffered any long-term negative cognitive effects. It’s worth noting that I have made a full recovery without hospitals, doctors, therapy or medication.
Anyone who sincerely wishes to know more is welcome to read through either of my two blogs: one addresses aspects of my personal experience; the other is devoted to recovery from schizophrenia/psychosis.
I agree. I just found this post today and did not read your earlier commentary. However, I posted a similar opinion on October 10 titled “Even ‘experts’ have really dumb ideas sometimes” ( http://blog.psychlinks.ca/2006/10/10/even-experts-have-really-dumb-ideas-sometimes/ ):
1. we all pretty much know what schizophrenia is, even if Hollywood still mostly gets it wrong – we know what the diagnosis implies in terms of symptoms as well as treatment and prognosis
2. calling it “dopamine dysregulation disorder” wouldn’t be any less stigmatizing – only more difficult to say
3. calling it “dopamine dysregulation disorder” implies (a) that we know what the cause(s) of schizophrenia are and (b) that we know the cause to be a problem with dopamine regulation – neither of those is true
I agree that changing the labels will not provide any particular benefit to clients.
I do believe, however, that abolishing all of the labels will help. Your treatise about how all depressions should be treated the same regardless of cause is an excellent example of the potential damage that can be wrought by these imaginary labels.
A person who has been recently jailed, and is withdrawing from crack cocaine could be called “depressed.” I think it would be more accurate, and more helpful to say that he has been recently jailed and is withdrawing from crack cocaine. It makes perfect sense that he might be feeling down, and probably doesn’t warrant treatment of any kind.
Another client might be someone who has made multiple suicide attempts due to a chronic sense of sadness, and feelings of being alone. Also ‘depressed’ right? But warranting a completely different set of treatment options.
Using “disease” labels in mental health fields as if they had the solidity of diagnosing “mumps” or “measles” is pure self promotion on the part of a mental health professional. Pretending that something so subjective is objective fact obscures the very causes that could be helpful to clients who need help.
Greg,
I don’t believe I mentioned treatment in my commentary, merely diagnosis. I firmly believe in individual treatment plans for each person, but I do think it is helpful if a mental health specialist can narrow down the spectrum of possible treatment options.
The November edition of a prominent scientific journal, Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, includes a review of international studies of how the public understands the causes of schizophrenia. The review, of 37 studies from 17 countries (including the USA, Germany, China, India, Russia, Australia, New Zealand and Britain), concludes that:
“Internationally, the public, including patients and carers, have been quite resilient to attempts to promulgate biogenetic causal beliefs, and continue to prefer psychosocial explanations and treatments”.
The causes cited most often include stress, poverty, family problems and child abuse and neglect. This contrasts with biological psychiatry’s belief that schizophrenia is a brain disease with a strong genetic component.
The other significant finding is that in the rare instances that lay people do adopt a medical model, “Biogenetic causal beliefs and diagnostic labelling by the public are positively related to prejudice, fear and desire for distance”.
Currently many destigmatisation programmes, often funded by pharmaceutical companies, try to teach the public to adopt an illness model. The reviewers conclude, however, that:
“An evidence-based approach to reducing discrimination would seek a range of alternatives to the ‘mental illness is an illness like any other’ approach”, adding that “Destigmatisaion programmes may be more effective if they avoid decontextualised biogenetic explanations and terms like ‘illness’ and ‘disease’, and increase exposure to the targets of the discrimination and their own various explanations”.
The paper’s first author is Dr John Read, editor of the controversial book ‘Models of Madness”, which argues that schizophrenia is an understandable response to adverse life events and documents the role of the pharmaceutical industry in promulgating a simplistic biological approach. Last year Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica published his review of the fast growing number of studies showing that child abuse is a cause of schizophrenia.
Dr Read: “What these two papers suggest, taken together, is that the public may have a better grasp of the causes of hallucinations and delusions than some of us mental health experts”. “All the social causes cited by the public have recently been substantiated by well designed international studies”
“There are two major implications to be drawn. Firstly, all the efforts to educate the public to adopt a biological ideology about mental health have been at best a waste of money and, more probably, extremely damaging in terms of increasing stigma and prejudice. Secondly, mental health services need to move away from the rigidly biological emphasis on drugs and shock therapy and embrace a more evidence-based, balanced and humane approach to understanding and treating human distress”.
Dr Read will present the findings of the review at mental health conferences in Auckland and Los Angeles in November.
“Prejudice and schizophrenia: A review of the ‘mental illness is an illness like any other’ approach”. Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, 2006, 114, 303-318.
John Read. (Department of Psychology, The University of Auckland)
Nick Haslam (Department of Psychology, The University of Melbourne)
Liz Sayce (Disability Rights Commission, London)
Emma Davies (Institute of Public Policy, Auckland University of Technology)
Dr Read: +64 9 373 7599 (ext 85011); j.read@auckland.ac.nz
http://www.psych.auckland.ac.nz/staff/Read/Read.htm
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The poor public perception of the cause of schizophrenia can be blamed on the nonsense explanations given without scientific foundation.
A first understanding of this problem must begin with the knowledge that the disorders of the DSM do not exist. The disorders of the DSM are names given to observed behaviors that have been grouped. Additions and changes are made by APA member voting. There is no science involved. Small wonder that there is a public misperception on the cause of schizophrenia.
Without correct causation it is not possible to known where one “disorder” ends and another begins. Often there are co-morbidity issues involved with the disorders. Why? The obvious answer is that with few exceptions they are all connected by similar causation.
There is a very simple explanation for the altered mental state we call schizophrenia. In fact there are two examples of that mental state with the bizarre delusions, hallucinations, hearing voices, and thought processing problems.
In the 1960’s designers and psychologists found a ‘conflict in the physiology of sight’ when it caused mental breaks for office workers using the first prototypes of close-spaced office workstations. They did not call it a conflict of physiology. It was not named. Outside the United States, in the field of Design, it is called Subliminal Distraction. The cubicle solved the problem by 1968. Where cubicles are used these mental breaks do not happen.
That first accidental encounter with visual Subliminal Distraction has been discounted because the only outcome was believed to be a harmless temporary period of confusion and pseudo-psychotic behavior. No one searched to find other instances and possible outcomes.
VisionAndPsychosis.Net has researched and published that information on the Internet.
Two exercises provide examples of exposure to the same phenomenon. Qi Gong and Kundalini Yoga both cause first psychotic episodes when too many sessions are done in a compact time frame. Users blame failure to perform the exercise kata or Yoga movements correctly but the exercises, performed in groups, create the “special circumstances” that were accidentally found in those 1960’s workstations.
There is circumstantial evidence from the Belgian Polar Expedition of 1898 that this exposure can cause many psychiatric outcomes. That is the seminal incident to demonstrate that depression, fear, and paranoia are the most common outcomes. There was one case of permanent insanity. Mass hysteria has been the previous explanation for the incident.
When the exposure in these two exercises is low level over long periods of time a fixed psychotic altered mental state is created that resembles the form of schizophrenia. The narrow focus of this altered mental state does not cause the life changing disability of schizophrenia.
When schizophrenia is viewed as an altered mental state caused by exposure to visual Subliminal Distraction it explains why so many things can be associated with the disorder and mistaken for causation. The altered mental state can be imposed on any other mental deficit except full blindness. The fully blind are immune.
That can be seen in disorders that rarely have a blind victim. Can you cite a case of PTSD or Panic Attacks for a fully blind person? The partially sighted can be exposed if they have enough peripheral vision to subliminally detect movement to trigger a peripheral vision reflex.
We all have the ability to ignore threat movement we decide is not dangerous to us. When we do that the startle and vision reflex stop. But we cannot control the subconscious level of our mind that subliminally functions to evaluate threat movement and attempt to trigger a vision reflex.
That detection, evaluation, and reflex attempt is a subliminal distraction. When a threshold of exposure is reached the mental break happens. Unlike the exposure limited to exercise sessions mental illness including schizophrenia is an outcome of daily random but significant exposure from Subliminal Distraction.
Studies of the brain deficits in the M-Channel for vision, UGa, may prove to be the inherited factor to cause additional exposure, which accounts for the genetic connection with mental illness. Additionally, inherited personality qualities that create tendencies to watch rather than participate in activities or the propensity to daydream allow additional opportunities for exposure.
The connection for intelligence or creativity and mental illness is that people with increased abilities tend to have activities and employment that support exposure, knowledge work or artisans.
Exposure only happens when someone engages eyes-open concentration to the level that they dissociate knowledge of activity around them. Even then the movement in peripheral vision must be detectable and vigorous enough to trigger the vision reflex.
This vision driven phenomenon explains why schizophrenia onsets in adolescence and why paranoia is often part of the illness. Exposure to SD spikes after puberty causes increased body size in classrooms. The repeating subliminal appreciation of threat from SD eventually colors thought and reason creating paranoia and unattributed fear.
Simple no cost or low cost precautions can create Cubicle Level Protection where it is needed in student work and study areas including computer workstations. Laptops are particularly dangerous for exposure because they can be used anywhere without precautions for CLP
Students are knowledge workers just like office workers. They should have CLP but no one is aware of the problem.
Just informing the public that the problem exists will eventually reach enough people to change the statistics for psychotic mental illness, college suicides, and the strange sudden disappearances of those college students.
Hi
I would like to thank you ladies and gentlemen for your help. I’m writing a paper about multiple personalities and the types. But i would also like to know if skitzo and DID were considered the same. Im 12 so keep the lingo down a little if you would thank you.
My email is hannahyourmom@gmail.com
After reading Jennifers comments, I believe perhaps you are missing the point. You seem to take a very individual approach to people you treat, which I can only praise you for.
The problem is schizophrenia is not an accurate discription of anything. If it is merely a diagnosis of symptoms as you say, then Why do you then refer to the patient as a schizophrenic rather than a person with schizophrenia symptoms?
Does a person have schizophrenic symptoms or are they schizophrenic?
For your example…
You say you have ear ache. U are not an ear achic! Say you have a broken arm, you are not a broken armic? Why is this? I dont believe you can therefore compare mental health labels to other physical illness labels.
http://www.caslcampaign.com/