It looks like you're using an Ad Blocker.
Please white-list or disable AboveTopSecret.com in your ad-blocking tool.
Thank you.
Some features of ATS will be disabled while you continue to use an ad-blocker.
Originally posted by CoolerAbdullah786
reply to post by dxdydz
No I am not deducing that they are NOT bipolar, nor did they say they believe they are not. I am merely stating matter-of-factly that they claim to be biploar, meaning they were diagnosed as such. That is their claim. "A doctor diagnosed me as being bipolar." That's it. I don't know if they truly are or aren't. I am not questioning whether they are or aren't. Just seems to me that you can't walk a city block without bumping into 25 people who have been diagnosed as being bipolar. I believe it's overdiagnosed.
Originally posted by liejunkie01
I have to disagree.
I have a friend that is in a mental institution right now because he quit taking his head meds.
The Myth of the Chemical Cure
A Critique of Psychiatric Drug Treatment
Joanna Moncrieff
Print Pub Date:
December 2007
Online date:
December 2008
DOI:
10.1057/9780230589445
ebook ISBN:
9780230589445
Print ISBNs:
9780230574311 HB 9780230574328 PB
296 pp
>> Social & Cultural Studies Collection 2008
This book exposes the traditional view that psychiatric drugs correct chemical imbalances as a dangerous fraud. It traces the emergence of this view and the way it supported the vested interests of the psychiatric profession, the pharmaceutical industry and the modern state. Instead it is proposed that psychiatric drugs 'work' by creating abnormal brain states, which are often unpleasant and impair normal intellectual and emotional functions along with other harmful consequences. Research on antipsychotics, antidepressants and mood stabilisers is examined to demonstrate this thesis and it is suggested that acknowledging the real nature of psychiatric drugs would lead to a more democratic practice of psychiatry.
Author Biography
JOANNA MONCRIEFF is an academic and practising psychiatrist. She is a long-standing critic of psychiatric drug treatment and has published numerous articles in medical journals. She was a founding member and is the co-chair person of the Critical Psychiatry Network.
Original Article
Social Theory & Health (2010) 8, 370–382. doi:10.1057/sth.2009.11
Psychiatric diagnosis as a political device
Joanna Moncrieff a
a Department of Mental Health Sciences, University College London, Gower Street, London, W1W 7EJ, UK.
E-mail: [email protected]
Abstract
Diagnosis in psychiatry is portrayed as the same type of activity as diagnosis in other areas of medicine. However, the notion that psychiatric conditions are equivalent to physical diseases has been contested for several decades. In this paper, I use the work of Jeff Coulter and David Ingelby to explore the role of diagnosis in routine psychiatric practice. Coulter examined the process of identification of mental disturbance and suggested that it was quite different from the process of identifying a physical disease, as it was dependent on social norms and circumstances. Ingelby pointed out that it was the apparent medical nature of the process that enabled it to act as a justification for the actions that followed. I describe the stories of two patients, which illustrate the themes Ingelby and Coulter identified. In particular they demonstrate that, in contrast to the idea that diagnosis should determine treatment, diagnoses in psychiatry are applied to justify predetermined social responses, designed to control and contain disturbed behaviour and provide care for dependents. Hence psychiatric diagnosis functions as a political device employed to legitimate activities that might otherwise be contested.
Keywords:
psychiatric diagnosis; philosophy of mental illness; psychiatry as social control; social construction of mental illness