http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/18/op...l-illness.html
The article raises points that seem obvious to me, but they seem to go against the grain of conventional viewpoints on the way our brains work. I noticed a similar proclivity for obsessively categorizing types of intelligence and creativity-- a resistance to the idea that both the arbitrary categories themselves and the abilities within those categories are fluid.The report says that there is no strict dividing line between psychosis and normal experience: “Some people find it useful to think of themselves as having an illness. Others prefer to think of their problems as, for example, an aspect of their personality which sometimes gets them into trouble but which they would not want to be without"...In 2013, the institute’s director, Thomas R. Insel, announced that psychiatric science had failed to find unique biological mechanisms associated with specific diagnoses. What genetic underpinnings or neural circuits they had identified were mostly common across diagnostic groups. Diagnoses were neither particularly useful nor accurate for understanding the brain, and would no longer be used to guide research...Our current diagnostic system — the main achievement of the biomedical revolution in psychiatry — drew a sharp , clear line between those who were sick and those who were well, and that line was determined by science. The system started with the behavior of persons, and sorted them into types. That approach sank deep roots into our culture, possibly because sorting ourselves into different kinds of people comes naturally to us...The implications are that social experience plays a significant role in who becomes mentally ill, when they fall ill and how their illness unfolds. We should view illness as caused not only by brain deficits but also by abuse, deprivation and inequality, which alter the way brains behave. Illness thus requires social interventions, not just pharmacological ones.
It might be interesting to think about those quotes in terms of this essay:
(I chose that quote kind of arbitrarily, you should read the whole thing if you haven't.)They accepted that one could be both guilty and mad; less guilty the madder one was; guilty certainly, but someone to be put away and treated rather than punished; not only a guilty man, but also dangerous, since
quite obviously sick, etc. From the point of view of the penal code, the result was a mass of juridical absurdities. But this was the starting point of an evolution that jurisprudence and legislation itself was to precipitate in the course of the next 150 years: already the reform of 1832, introducing attenuating circumstances, made it possible to modify the sentence according to the supposed degrees of an illness or the forms of a semi-insanity. And the practice of calling on psychiatric expertise, which is widespread in the assize courts and sometimes extended to courts of summary jurisdiction, means that the sentence, even if it is always formulated in terms of legal punishment, implies, more or less obscurely, judgements of normality, attributions of causality, assessments of possible changes, anticipations as to the offender's future. It would be wrong to say that all these operations give substance to a judgement from the outside they are directly integrated in the process of forming the sentence. Instead of insanity eliminating the crime according to the original meaning of article 64, every crime and even every offence now carries within it, as a legitimate suspicion, but also as a right that may be claimed, the hypothesis of insanity, in any case of anomaly. And the sentence that condemns or acquits is not simply a judgement of guilt, a legal decision that lays down punishment; it bears within it The body of the condemned an assessment of normality and a technical prescription for a possible normalization.
It seems like conventional wisdom still says that brains look like this:
instead of this:
which imo has terrible implications for the way we treat and see each other, especially in terms of crime/punishment.
Anyway, I'm not sure that I have anything controversial or debatable to say, but I figured I start the thread because I find the subject interesting and maybe people will take the topic in unexpected directions, post articles, or whatever. I thought the above article was worth sharing.
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