A comment to “Pathologizing the Creative Mind. ADHD, neurodivergence labels, & the unmet hunger for self-knowledge” by Brianna Johnson
About Understanding the Mind and its Disorders.
About Understanding the Mind and its Disorders.
I do not authorize psychological nor psychiatric formulations, interpretations nor diagnosis, etc. I am not a Lawyer and this is not Legal Advice. This is no Medical Advice nor Advice of any kind.
A comment to this Post:
I have a lot of writings on this stuff, this is my guide to them:
ADHD diagnoses might not have increased out of mere expectations of parents for children to behave more “normally”.
That is not new rhetoric along the they must be good workers and earn an income, as he/she goes it is not going to happen.
It does happen, it is a common phenomenon among parents, it is shown in parents not letting their kids to fall, be alone in the street, don´t get dirty, etc.
There are reasons: lawsuits, violence, neglect, and its potential prosecution or shaming, guilt, etc.
Statistics showing safety for most children won´t help, since losing a Child is a catastrophic loss when he/she is the single one, or there are only two or three.
The low probability of harm for a Child from a Risky activity does not mitigate the catastrophic loss. Or the loss of their one chance only…
So, as children became less numerous and more expensive individually they might have become more valuable and therefore a bigger investment to take care of.
But that is not all.
The more it became acceptable to have, ask and receive a mental label, the more screenings for them were made. Solicited or offered by parents, teachers, guardians, relatives, and the like.
Since all those mental labels really do not speak of anything real, and there is no way to disprove them in individual cases, truly anyone can be diagnosed with any mental label at any age, the more are given.
The old saying Vada can´t have Prostate Cancer does not apply to Psychiatric labels.
There is no way to discard them forever or for a long time as in the Rest of Medicine, real Medicine, not Psychiatry.
One acceptable mental label for parents is ADHD precisely because in the Discourse it is associated with, so they say, better School Outcomes after pharmacological treatment.
Peter C. Gøtzsche has shown no psychiatric medication improves anything in the aggregate of people taking them. He showed they are more harmful for all, even if some claim benefit or improvement.
In Mad in America there are several articles showing long term pharmacological treatments for ADHD are harmful.
I´ve shown measuring improvement is impossible on Epistemic, Logical, Empiric, and Scientific bases for all Mental Disorders.
The lessening the stigma of mental labels is not new.
When there was the transition from Madhouses to Psychoanalysis there was the incentive to counter the narrative that the mentals were defective, were lesser humans, had bad genes, etc. They needed to be sterilized so they didn´t contaminate the Good People Human Gene Pool. It was that bad…
So they invented the over-sensitive phenotype to appeal to Psychoanalysis customers.
The fainters, the hysterics, the neurotics and the like…
It is quite well narrated in Andrew Scull´s Book “Desperate Remedies”.
Psychiatrists do it all the time: they first claim their clients, their victims, have a brain disease they call disorder, another attenuating strategy, to then claim they need medication for life. It can´t be cured!, you won´t get over it!, never, at all!, it is in your genes…
And without any evidence any Mental Stuff is real and despite a lot of Comprehensive Genetic Studies showing they found nothing explaining more than a 3% fraction of a disorder diagnosis. Some Psychiatrist has called the search for Genes for Schizophrenia: Looking for the Yeti. They came with at most a 3.5% risk of being labeled with Schizophrenia by hundreds of genes with very expensive and sophisticated research. They showed convincingly 97% of the Schizophrenia Label is not genetic. Despite their foolish and misleading use of Twin Studies to deceive the public and themselves. Jay Joseph has written Books and Articles about Twin Studies showing they are useless in the Mental. And Schizophrenia is the Poster Child of Mental Disorders being in the Brain and in the Genes.
—”Absence of Evidence is Evidence of Absence if you looked Everywhere”.
Such is Psychological Violence, and a severe one since uses double messaging that tends to induce submission to the will of the offender, since he or she passes as caring and the only one who knows.
It puts the victim in an incompetent defenseless position for then to embrace the victimizer and his or her ideologies and intents without questioning them…
They´ve done that for decades.
Psychologists do it too, 30-40% of psychotherapy sessions have evidence of verbal/psychological violence towards clients…
They do pressure parents with subtle rhetoric along the lines: don´t you want your child to be happy?, to feel better?, to achieve his or her full potential?.
They are really clever at that… and are moved by money, by their commitment to their career choice. And those career choices most of the time do not lead to income in another line of work: it is a sunk cost for them not worth their victims money. Rarely they can aspire to Direct a Hospital or a Clinic as MadHouse Superintends rarely got to be that.
And most of them probably know half parents are actually violent to their kids and never report it to the authorities as is their obligation. They hide behind their moral Codes, their Ethical Codes instead of following the Law, specially when it comes to a Child who does not have the legal personality to bring charges nor complaints against a parent, in many occasions.
In my Country it is probably for practical purposes in all cases, considering the around 50% prevalence of Parent to Child Violence some Clinical Psychologists have narrated as experienced in their Professional Practice.
Some Mental PseudoProfessionals, I met one, a Psychiatrist, hide behind the if I do that, if I put a formal complaint as is my obligation this kid will end up an award of the State.
Well, such is the Law, this particular Psychiatrist was sharing his culture with me, it is a single instance of a Psychiatrist, but what he spoke is Cultural for them.
Now, he was behaving as a Judge, as a Social Worker, as a District Attorney and as a Lawyer, a Legal representative of the kid in question. When in fact, he was advocating for the Victimizer: the Mother…
He was deciding for all of them, without being any of them.
Finally, if the consideration was the safety of the Child as the fulfillment of your Legal Obligations goes, do a follow up: go follow the kid and complain about any authority that is not doing their job, specially if the Authority harms the Child. If you can´t comply with the Law you must not do what you are doing: you must quit!. Continuing is Bad Faith: doing something despite knowing it is Wrong to do so. Specially if you are not afraid of being prosecuted for it.
That is what a caring Physician must do if he suspects the Child is not properly cared or being harmed and the other authorities are not doing their job!: complain, go to the DA, etc. Ask for help, be caring, legal and humane. Do your best effort for this kid, he/she deserves it.
And I am pretty sure they are not interested in doing that: caring as the Law, Social Norms, Morality and their own Judgement require. Even per their own rhetoric as in those Social Services are nasty to children.
How come you never filed a formal complaint against them if you have seen it!, specially so frequently to be expressed as a General Phenomenon!.
The numbers of 20% of Minors labeled with a Mental Label you quote are a low figure in a larger perspective. Those probably are the ones already caught in the Web of Deceit of All the Mental.
There is an article at least that says 80% of people have at least one mental disorder.
It has given origin to the recently new label of the 20% who can´t be put a label… What is right with this 20%?.
If 20% of the populace working or studying had a disability or significant impairment it would look catastrophic in Education and/or Productivity. I can imagine if 80% did: the World would spin outside its Orbit.
Such is not the case, and if those mental labels do not cause disability, difficulties in performance, impairments that are measurable they can´t be labeled as mental disorders.
Why?, because all mental disorders are diagnosed only when they cause significant impairment!.
Eighty percent of the World Population having significant impairments does not look like the World we have today, and it has gone along predictable lines in terms of productivity and academic achievement, specially when considering the influence of the new new massive media and Social Networks.
Such is another piece of evidence of diagnostic expansion beyond Disgust: labeling as mentally ill, mentally impaired a lot of people who are not impaired at all!.
The world would look an entirely different place!.
Another thing contributing to increased labeling of non impaired medically healthy people is Industry and Guild interests: more medications and more work for Psychiatrists and Clinical Psychologists.
They have Key Opinion Leaders inventing new disorders since decades ago, the new Dream Job for Psychiatrists, who are redefining old ones and creating new ones to have more victims called patients/customers.
One extreme example is Childhood Bipolar disorder.
Another is depression: 60% of depressed women in some communities?. Again, just the impairment would make those villages unproductive…
Most people tend to blame Pharma, such is not the case, the responsible professionals for diagnostic expansion are Psychiatrists and Generalists as GPs, Family Physicians and Pediatricians using those labels and medications instead of carefully explaining how normal childhood behavior looks like.
Those are the Fellows who need to Answer, those are the Individuals who need to Respond and be Accountable. Pharma has already done that by paying Billions of Dollars in Fines and Being too Big to Fall… not too big to Fail…
In many instances even in Adults it has not been studied how frequent Mental Symptoms occur in Non Diseased Populations.
A lot of non diseased persons report auditory hallucinations.
More than 10% express suicidal thoughts, severe and frequent ones.
I´ve personally asked both Clinical Psychologists and Psychiatrists how often their symptoms happen in normal people and they don´t say a number. Some say no normal person has auditory hallucinations, that is false, it has been researched, they reported an absence of evidence as evidence of absence. And he laughed, callously…
So neither Psychologists nor Psychiatrists I have asked know how frequent their symptoms happen in the non diseased population. That goes beyond negligent since it was that way by willful omission.
One of the first things one does when trying to measure an abnormality is measuring normality, there are nomograms for a lot of biological variations.
Clinical Psychologists and Psychiatrists use hunches and guesses, feels, forced standard replies from their victims they push until they get one in their catalog of acceptable ways to label a symptom.
And they start at the severe ones: Psychotic disorders and then run downwards towards the less severe using search satisfaction bias to label with the more severe diagnoses first.
For Childhood Psychiatrists I don´t know. I heard from this Psychiatrist up to the 90s Child Psychiatrists rarely saw their patients, mere narratives from parents.
When I said in order to diagnose then an ADHD kid they needed to fill the reports from Parents and Teachers he chuckled…
He thought by were looking at the Child he could supplant the input from Teachers in a Standardized form.
Another really bad thing, is that I´ve never spoken to a Clinical Psychologist nor a Psychiatrist that in Reality, in Fact knows the difference between a Sign, a Symptom and a Syndrome in Medicine.
Whatever it is for them it´s just a tick box to check, regardless they are handled differently.
All mental disorders mostly deals with symptoms, other observers narratives are still symptoms, even if one of those Mental Labelers sees something that is not a drug harm it is still a symptom.
Real Medicine rarely if at all diagnoses anyone based on mere Symptoms.
Clinical Psychologists and Psychiatrists only use symptoms since they have no Gold Standard, no Biological Test to diagnose any mental disorder.
The DSM itself says it in its first pages: they have no biological marker for any mental disorder. Although in a somewhat confusing way mixing esoteric statements in those few paragraphs.
Another reason why even if they claim they see something and therefore it is a sign when in Reality it is a symptom is that Clinical Psychologists and Psychiatrists lack Objectiveness.
Their symptoms and signs recognition is not Objective, they learn and pretend to measure those merely symptoms with Intersubjective Measures: Inter Observer Agreement Rates.
Those are not Objective measures in Clinical Psychology and Psychiatry precisely because they are Intersubjective!.
And such knowledge is concealed when they report those Agreement Rates: these are paired subjective measurements not objective ones, mind you reader, caveat emptor. Buyer beware…
Even if they report agreement rates of 80% Intersubjective Agreement, which in Reality are closer to chance, and have, apparently gone down as time went by. And still are not Objective agreement rates but Intersubjective.
It is like two clowns agreeing on something not that funny…
So Clinical Psychologists and Psychiatrists only deal with symptoms that cannot be correlated with any Biological Disease because they don´t have a Gold Standard to claim any Biological Disease is present in their patients.
Clinical Psychologists, Ideologists, Influencers and Activists should not talk about Any Disease nor Disorder Publicly because they don´t know Pathology: The Science of Disease. They are not experts in Clinical Medicine, specially not Pathology, which is a Basic Medical Science not a Clinical one, and as such they misinform the Public.
And even if they had signs to label anyone they would not be Signs of Mental Disorders but more likely the harm by Psychiatric medication.
Such has been argued many times before and it has not made any difference.
Except for my argument the Mind is not Real and Empiricism does not Apply to Anything Called Mental, that I think is new, and should be convincing beyond doubt and rhetoric.
But, then again, there are explainers why no one will take such Truths without discomfort, anger, fear, rejection, violence, hate or with acceptance.
No Clinical Psychologist and no Psychiatrist can be a good one or a better one unless they accept:
Why they did what they did? in Honest, Understandable, Remorseful and Guilty manners.
They stop doing what they are doing unless they advertise themselves, they label themselves, they Present Themselves as Practitioners of Fiction.
They repair the harms they´ve done or pay for the Damages.
They submit themselves willingly to the Rule of Law following the Legal Procedures to determine their Criminal, Civil and Administrative Responsibilities.
They accept they confuse, Beliefs, Opinions and Facts and such messy and deceptive thinking has Harms in the Real World.
Etcetera.
And I am sure they are not going to do that willingly, the State must compel them to do that. They as for a long time will do the same than most of their victims: cry wolf on others, they hate us!, they hate Psychiatry!, they are anti-Psychiatry!.
My Answer to that is: Well, if I am proudly Anti Psychiatry You All Pretend to Care for your victims Alegally, Asocially, Amoraly and Areligiously (There is a Link in the last Phrase, Ironically, not clearly visible by the Stereotype). And Against Science, Logic, Reason and Empiricism. So, I am justified in calling on you the way I am doing here: Just think of the Children.
And no Politician and no not big enough group of them is going to get willingly into fixing that Big Enchilada.
Civil Society could not care less until a lot of Children are way too visibly disabled by Clinical Psychology and Psychiatry.
And if it looks hyperbolic Clinical Psychology can disable visibly a Child just consider they can´t understand the World using imaginary words and concepts of Psychology, PsychoBabble, to pretend to understand, live in, and Change the World. That is Magical Thinking…
Those kids, minors and adults using Psychobabble to understand and change the world are using Magical Thinking!.
And they cannot relate nor behave to other people appropriately as Law, Social Norms, Morality and Religion already demand.
They use Psychobbable, Psycholingo, to discard those Normative Systems: Law, Social Norms, Morality and Religion in their lives and try to explain, pretend to understand, approve and encourage their Behavior with mere Psychobbable. To do all that with mere Pscyholingo. To live without Law, Social Norms, Morality nor Religion.
And I am not encouraging violence against them nor anyone else, but they deserve Justice too, we All do, including the erroneously called Mental Health Professionals. In their case my guess is their Justice must be Punitive and Restorative for the Rest of us.
Thanks.
Federico Soto del Alba.
You are asking all the right questions!! Child abuse is unacceptable. Not sure what country you are in but i hope there are others advocating for them.