Posted: Jul 21, 2014 6:43 pm
DavidMcC wrote:Keep It Real wrote:DavidMcC wrote:Keep It Real wrote:...
Guilt and innocence are a matter for the law, and for judging what you think of somebody. Like I said, people need to be held accountable for their actions, even though ultimately they are not.
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The bit I've bolded for you needs attention. Please justify this strange claim. It seems to come back to your claim that we make decisions as if we were ants.
The perceiving indevidual is a flicker of consciousness. It is that consciousness, that perceiving being which suffers as a result of bad decisions. We make decisions based purely on environmental and biological influences beyond our control. If one eats too many mars bars it is because greed got the better of the desire to be healthy - the factors which influenced that decision are entirely beyond consciousness's control - therefore people aren't responsible for their actions.
It's so fucking blatantly obvious I can hardly believe an adult with so much as a glimmer of introspective hypothetical philosophical insight would call it a "strange statement".
This is ridiculous! Of course we have some conscious control of our important decisions, even if we often give into the unconscious when it comes to how many Mars bars we eat!
I can hardly believe an adult would say what you just said!
I don't think it's ridiculous. It merely means that attempting to assign responsibility beyond agency (like guilt) is unsupported. Even a "consciously controlled" decision (whatever the fuck that means) is the result of a combination of genetic, developmental (historic) and variables in the current physiology and environment. Every behaviour is, even if we don't precisely know all the variables in a particular instance.
epepke wrote:WRT the topic, when it comes to psychiatry, we're not dealing with individuals. We could, and to some degree we used to. There used to be a psychoanalysis culture, or even a listening to the patient culture, but it's gone. (It was admittedly expensive and not very effective.) Now, there is explicitly a culture of not listening to patients and instead just sorting them into categories as quickly as possible. It doesn't seem to work very well, either, though. It's time, I think, to do some serious reconsideration of the categories, the psychiatric assumptions about groups of people, and how they are sorted.
Some of this is in fact happening. There is some recognition that talking therapy and things like CET can help a lot of depressed individuals. Ten years ago, there was none, and there was great hostility toward the idea.
I don't think that only the psychoanalytic culture was worried about designing treatments according to the individual patient. The behaviour analytic one too (see for a review of some of these issues from that pov http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22477707) and also practically all the psychotherapy trends I know of.
I think that sorting people into categories might be mainly useful for administrative purposes like counting how many people need insurance and the like, for constituting groups for research and not so much for determining treatment (at least not for psychotherapy).
epepke wrote:This whole thread is an obvious example. It's all about what model reduces the stigma.
So people can say, "ah, this isn't a character defect; it's a chemical imbalance."
It wasn't too long ago that people could say (and some still do), "ah, this isn't a character defect; it's demonic possession." Or "ah, this isn't a character defect; it's original sin."
Those aren't very good models for treating people. They are, however, great models for social engineering. You convince people of something (say, "Jesus will help you") for some social purpose, such that it will calm people down and make them more docile, most of the time. Until they go postal, but then you have a prison.
It is worthy of note that the first, and I still think the only, Nobel Prize in psychiatry was given to the inventor of the lobotomy. It was originally sold and promoted simply as a way to make a patient more docile and easier to take care of, "like a cat." Arguments that it was actually good for the patient rather than the caretaker didn't start appearing until much later, after it was in fairly widespread use.
Under that kind of history, I have a hard time seeing clearly that the later arguments reflect reality rather than simply serving as a way to make people who do and order lobotomies feel better about themselves as benefactors. They might very well be true, but I get a bit skeptical, though it seems to be frowned upon on rational skepticism.
This seems to me to happen a lot, not just within psychiatry but within all medicine and, well, pretty much everything else.
That is certainly a valid concern, but given also the much more limited role syndromes can also take suggests to me that whether this is happening or not has to be assessed in more specific terms. (btw sorry for meddling in)