

Life: a medical condition - zcrar70
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7967851.stm

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dkarl
I don't see any problem with classifying and labeling aspects of our behavior
and experience that we might not like. We claim to accept that nobody is
perfect, yet we cling desperately to the idea that only a small minority of
people should be described as "defective." We would very much like to believe
that our defects, though they are known to us, cannot be publicly identified
and named.

When I think about it that way, it seems utterly bizarre that people feel
threatened by labeling and classifying common personality traits as
pathological. Yet, the fear is reasonable for four reasons.

First, mental health practitioners have the power to stigmatize a condition
merely by naming it. The stigma is a relic of the past and will probably
change when people realize that utterly trivial conditions can be recognized
and named. Severity and degree of social undesirability are illogical
distinctions that psychological thinkers simply cannot maintain, any more than
physicists could have maintained an arbitrary distinction that "heavy" things
have something called "weight" which can be measured, but "light" things do
not have any weight at all.

Second, giving something a medical name creates the presumption (at least
among laymen) that it requires expert treatment. Doctors know better, but many
of them are not above exploiting this impression to manipulate a patient into
accepting treatment.

Third, the creation of a label creates much more than a psychological
diagnosis with a clinical definition. Laymen and experts alike fill in the
gaps with assumptions and best guesses to create a complete stereotype, a
story with a beginning, middle, and end. People will speculate about the
underlying logic, original causes, and inferable consequences, and they will
assign far more weight to these speculations than is justified by scientific
evidence. This is obviously bad, but I don't think it is any different from
how people have thought since time immemorial. These prejudices will just fall
into place next to existing prejudices about race, gender, astrological sign,
and hair color. If you think things can possibly get any worse in this regard,
you don't understand how people currently think ;-)

Fourth, the diagnosis of a "mental disorder" gives government an opening to
intervene and an alibi for doing so. In the United States, freedom is a sacred
thing and the most popular reason for circumscribing government power. If the
government can claim it is intervening in a matter where a citizen _already
has no freedom_ then it has already dispensed with the most powerful objection
against government interference.

An aside: This is rather a puzzle for people like me who regard free will as a
religious belief (for me, free will _is_ my religion, my only possibly
antiscientific conviction) and who balk at introducing religion into politics.

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asciilifeform
The powers-that-be have long ago declared that the non-medical use of any drug
is "abuse." Thus, coloring the problems of everyday life as medical conditions
is the only way people have been able to fight back against this restriction:

<http://www.etfrc.com/ChemicalImbalances.htm>

The idea of "perfect health" - especially in a society which forces us to live
in ways we are not evolutionarily adapted to (i.e. externally imposed sleep
schedules, processed foods, on-demand performance) - is entirely mythical.
There are drugs which make the modern condition more bearable, and millions of
people have decided that hacking the medical profession in this way is an
acceptable price to pay for the freedom to control one's body.

