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consistency wrote:Regina wrote:Templeton wrote:Regina wrote:
Ah, I get it now. Six-year-olds are your typical viewers of porn, whereas adult males go out and sniff the roses.
What age are you?
Why the disrespectful asinine behavior? This is so typical of Ratskeptians. The questions and opinions are given in earnest and then you act like that.
Regina, you might learn something if you think a little bigger. Maybe the example could have been better, but the intent was worthy, and well thought out.
The intent was technology, and while porn might not be what the kiddies are watching they certainly are exposed to television, and the internet at six years old and younger. They most certainly spend more time engaged in those sedentary activities than children their age did 20 years ago. Relevant? Only a small mind wouldn't be able to see what the intent was, and it's relevance.
I'm the cheerful type, you know. And no, I don't see "it's" relevance because it was the opposite of well thought out.
But let's talk about your idea.
Would you say that girls watch significantly less TV than boys? And that they are more physically active?
Girls are naturally social because of society and therefore more likely to have friends in person, while boys have been brainwashed by society into believing that we have no emotions, we should not cry, we should be strong, etc.. therefore we have been repressed and the majority of us have slipped into using external stimulants excessively to compensate for our repressed feelings.
Its A LOT more complicated than I lay it out.
Hm, so girls are conditioned by society, but in a more natural way than boys? Or do they possess some kind of "social gene" which boys lack?Girls are naturally social because of society
Regina wrote:
Hm, so girls are conditioned by society, but in a more natural way than boys? Or do they possess some kind of "social gene" which boys lack?
Breathlessly awaiting the research.
Templeton wrote:Regina wrote:
Hm, so girls are conditioned by society, but in a more natural way than boys? Or do they possess some kind of "social gene" which boys lack?
Breathlessly awaiting the research.
And you think that society doesn't condition children based on their gender? Hmmm I can't barely wait for the research on that, and while you're at it, would you care to reference the "social gene" you're talking about? That ought to be interesting.
You see Reg, anybody can act like an ass - It just happens to be far too common around here.
Girls are somehow more natural than boys, who repress their emotions which is unnatural. Because of society. So gender determines either natural or unnatural conditioning. Or maybe there's no conditioning at all for girls, because they are naturally social. It's hard to tell, hence I introduced the "social gene". I can make up shit like the next guy.Girls are naturally social because of society
Cito di Pense wrote:Mr.Samsa wrote:Diagnosis and treatment of mental disorder has nothing to do with social conformity and social efficiency.
You and I disagree fundamentally on this point. I don't insist that it has everything to do with social conformity and efficiency, but that they are considerations in the diagnosis and treatment, considerations that apparently some self-styled 'experts' find they can ignore.
Clive Durdle wrote:Personally, I blame chairs.
Shrunk wrote:It's a long thread, and I'm not sure where the best place for me to butt in would be, so this seems as good a spot as any:Cito di Pense wrote:Mr.Samsa wrote:Diagnosis and treatment of mental disorder has nothing to do with social conformity and social efficiency.
You and I disagree fundamentally on this point. I don't insist that it has everything to do with social conformity and efficiency, but that they are considerations in the diagnosis and treatment, considerations that apparently some self-styled 'experts' find they can ignore.
IMHO, you're both getting close to the correct answer, but not quite getting there. I agree that "social conformity and efficiency" play a role in determining the diagnosis of ADHD, but I don't think this is any different from the case with any other disease or disorder.
Certain variations in the architecture of the coronary arteries and myocardium lead to a situation in which a person is unable to walk more than a block without getting chest pain and turning blue. Other variations allow a person to run a marathon in just a little over 2 hours. At some point between the two we draw a fuzzy line that separates "sickness" from health, and start precribing interventions of various degrees of invasiveness for those on the wrong side of the line. But the position of that line is not going to be determined just by science, but also by social expectations and values. Few people are going to begrudge the first guy medications (though there will be some people who cast moral aspersions on those who suggest them to him, and insist he should rely just on living a good, clean life, eating his veggies and exercising). If the second guy takes medications to achieve his remarkably efficient cardiovascular functioning, though, he'll be called a cheater. I don't really see that it is purely science that is guiding that distinction.
We make similar value judgments over pretty well everything we call a "disease" or "disorder", but we are able arrive at consensus views with so little rancour in most cases that we don't realize this is what we are doing. We get a lot touchier when it starts to involve particular manifestations of neurological functioning, however. It seems to me this is mostly the case with those functions that were once (and which, to some, still are) attributed to the "soul".
Beatsong wrote:It's easy to see that Cito has a valid point, and that Mr Samsa's claim that "diagnosis and treatment of mental disorder has nothing to do with social conformity and social efficiency" is wrong, by looking at the changing conceptions of mental disorder over time. Not long ago, if you were homosexual you had a mental disorder - and it was in fact defined as a disorder due to causing distress and impairment in the same way as ADHD is now. If you grow up in a society where homosexuality is considered vile and sinful and you're expected to get married to someone of the opposite sex and have children and enjoy it, then being afflicted by homsexuality IS distressing and impairing.
Nowadays of course, in western societies at least it is not defined by the medical profession as a disorder. So what's changed? Society's values, that's all. A disorder is something that causes people distress or impairment of functioning in relation to their environment. There is no other meaning of distress or impairment, since nobody lives separately from an environment. And since society and its values are a huge part of that environment, when they change the definition of what's a disorder will necessarily change too.
Beatsong wrote:I agree with that, generally. Surely, however, one could make a clear distinction between such diseases and those that cause death. If we accept it as a pretty near-universal assumption of the human condition that people want to go on living and medicine should aim to help them do so, then diseases and disorders serious enough to cause death are surely going to be judged as bad by definition in any society, and not subject to the claim of social relativism you make here.
One could say that something like sever schizophrenia is near this mark. If for example a person is so deluded they genuinely think they can fly, then it's likely that delusion is going to cause death or at least very severe injury eventually if left unchecked, regardless of the social circumstances. But it's difficult to think of any behavioural disorders like ADHD that can be directly linked to inevitability of death in the way that sever cancers or heart attacks can.
Beatsong wrote:It's easy to see that Cito has a valid point, and that Mr Samsa's claim that "diagnosis and treatment of mental disorder has nothing to do with social conformity and social efficiency" is wrong, by looking at the changing conceptions of mental disorder over time.
Beatsong wrote:Not long ago, if you were homosexual you had a mental disorder - and it was in fact defined as a disorder due to causing distress and impairment in the same way as ADHD is now. If you grow up in a society where homosexuality is considered vile and sinful and you're expected to get married to someone of the opposite sex and have children and enjoy it, then being afflicted by homsexuality IS distressing and impairing.
Beatsong wrote:Nowadays of course, in western societies at least it is not defined by the medical profession as a disorder. So what's changed? Society's values, that's all. A disorder is something that causes people distress or impairment of functioning in relation to their environment. There is no other meaning of distress or impairment, since nobody lives separately from an environment. And since society and its values are a huge part of that environment, when they change the definition of what's a disorder will necessarily change too.
Cito di Pense wrote:It's easy to see why I don't want to quibble with this, but rather, to amplify it according to my lights, and also not to disagree with what Shrunk said, either. I don't know how to view 'deviance' in any other way than in relation to a norm, and I indicate both in purely statistical terms when something can be measured that gives us robust statistics. Which mostly means knowing something about your confounding variables, and so forth.
You see the morass that the profession of 'abnormal psychology' has gotten itself into over the decades, mainly in having to play catch-up with norms of all sorts of distributions they didn't think to try to identify last year.
What I can't abide are self-styled experts who blow into the room sporting brightly-coloured images of brain-scans held aloft with statistics gathered by social psychologists and purporting to tell me what, precisely, the problem really-o, truly-o IS.
What's the aim? Well, yes, society has to defend itself, whether it's from the social and financial costs of unnecessary coronaries, or disruptive kids in classrooms where an undisrupted curriculum developed by educational psychologists is just as deadly dull as being in a crowd that's too noisy to get any thinking done.
stijndeloose wrote:"Personalizing"?
Cito di Pense wrote:stijndeloose wrote:"Personalizing"?
I disagree. It would be ad hom to assert that someone took a particular position w.r.t. ADHD because of having self-diagnosed as such or accepted a diagnosis from someone else. Anyone who lets someone else diagnose them with ADHD is already on the back foot. Unless it makes a great excuse, a leg up in an otherwise free-for-all competition. All you have to do is game the system into treating ADHD as an affliction. I empathise. I really do. ADHD really precludes a career in physics, but other departments leave their doors wide open to people who want to research their own peculiarities in the guise of researching human diversity.
Fallible wrote:Don't bacon picnic.
stijndeloose wrote:Cito di Pense wrote:stijndeloose wrote:"Personalizing"?
I disagree. It would be ad hom to assert that someone took a particular position w.r.t. ADHD because of having self-diagnosed as such or accepted a diagnosis from someone else. Anyone who lets someone else diagnose them with ADHD is already on the back foot. Unless it makes a great excuse, a leg up in an otherwise free-for-all competition. All you have to do is game the system into treating ADHD as an affliction. I empathise. I really do. ADHD really precludes a career in physics, but other departments leave their doors wide open to people who want to research their own peculiarities in the guise of researching human diversity.
That doesn't explain where you think Mr.Samsa was personalizing the discussion, though.
Fallible wrote:Don't bacon picnic.
Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder
The diagnostic criteria for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in DSM-5 are similar to those in DSM-IV. The same 18 symptoms are used as in DSM-IV, and continue to be divided into two symptom domains (inattention and hyperactivity/impulsivity), of which at least six symptoms in one domain are required for diagnosis. However, several changes have been made in DSM-5: 1) examples have been added to the criterion items to facilitate application across the life span; 2) the cross-situational requirement has been strengthened to “several” symptoms in each setting; 3) the onset criterion has been changed from “symptoms that caused impairment were present before age 7 years” to “several inattentive or hyperactive-impulsive symptoms were present prior to age 12”; 4) subtypes have been replaced with presentation specifiers that map directly to the prior subtypes; 5) a comorbid diagnosis with autism spectrum disorder is now allowed; and 6) a symptom threshold change has been made for adults, to reflect their substantial evidence of clinically significant ADHD impairment, with the cutoff for ADHD of five symptoms, instead of six required for younger persons, both for inattention and for hyperactivity and impulsivity. Finally, ADHD was placed in the neurodevelopmental disorders chapter to reflect brain developmental correlates with ADHD and the DSM-5 decision to eliminate the DSM-IV chapter that includes all diagnoses usually first made in infancy, childhood, or adolescence.
The_Metatron wrote:"An ampere is several electrons flowing past a point in a little bit of time."
See what you can build with that.
¿why in God's name should we compare the success of behavioral technology with physical ones, when they have different goals? You can bring all the laser beams and mathematical equations about what is going on inside the sun or a black hole, but that won't help a person suffering from the most simple form or phobia, or make a dog respond to your commands. It would be like comparing basketball points with football goals, that would only start making (some) sense if we were able to previously develop some formal system of equivalence, like between meters and inches.
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