> "Another way of thinking about it: of the 298 mental disorders in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, zero have been cured. That’s because we don’t really know what mental illness is..."
I'm of the firm belief that today's understanding of psychological maladies is comparable to mid-19th century theories of the causes of disease - when doctors had little idea of the causality of infectious disease or cancer or heart disease (indeed they had no way of distinguishing between transmittable infectious diseases and other types of illness).
Take the importance of insect control and water treatment and condoms in preventing infectious disease from bubonic plague to cholera to HIV and syphilis - they just had no idea until Koch and Pasteur came along. It's probably safe to compare this to our current advertising system, which deliberately makes people feel miserable about various aspects of their appearance and social status with the goal of convincing them that buying some product or other will fix their lives - and it's especially damaging when developing children and teenagers are the targets.
The fact that capitalist consumer society norms are as much as source of mental illness in modern populations as the filthy open sewers of old European cities were of infectious disease is a concept I suspect today's corporatized academic institutions will have a hard time accepting.
A further issue is that currently illegal psychedelic drugs show more potential for understanding and treating a wide variety of mental illness conditions under controlled conditions than any of the widely prescribed antidepressants do, and yet most governments are rigidly opposed to their legalization.
I'm of the firm belief that today's understanding of psychological maladies is comparable to mid-19th century theories of the causes of disease - when doctors had little idea of the causality of infectious disease or cancer or heart disease (indeed they had no way of distinguishing between transmittable infectious diseases and other types of illness).
Take the importance of insect control and water treatment and condoms in preventing infectious disease from bubonic plague to cholera to HIV and syphilis - they just had no idea until Koch and Pasteur came along. It's probably safe to compare this to our current advertising system, which deliberately makes people feel miserable about various aspects of their appearance and social status with the goal of convincing them that buying some product or other will fix their lives - and it's especially damaging when developing children and teenagers are the targets.
The fact that capitalist consumer society norms are as much as source of mental illness in modern populations as the filthy open sewers of old European cities were of infectious disease is a concept I suspect today's corporatized academic institutions will have a hard time accepting.
A further issue is that currently illegal psychedelic drugs show more potential for understanding and treating a wide variety of mental illness conditions under controlled conditions than any of the widely prescribed antidepressants do, and yet most governments are rigidly opposed to their legalization.