illness

Behaviour. Is it choice or is it pre-determined?

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Take a look at the following two articles both from the USA. The first is about three mentally ill people who were all involved in serious incidents after stopping their medication. David Tarloff a schizophrenic hacked to death a psychologist, Lee Coleman slashed two while on a rampage and Khiel Coppin a “disturbed” teenager confronted Police and was shot dead, The article suggests tracking mentally ill patients and ensuring their compliance with medication regimes by monitoring Medicaid payments.

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Following on from the first post titled “Does mental illness exist” after which Ted argued passionately, if unconvincingly, that coercive psychiatry was contrary to the principles of Natural law and was morally wrong. It occurred to me that if Psychiatry, coercive or otherwise, is to have any validity at all then it must be able to objectively describe and classify what is a mental illness. The Szaszian view of psychiatry is that mental illness is based on a fallacy or category mistake by ascribing abnormal behaviour patterns to physical disease categories. But even within Psychiatry there is an ongoing debate about how mental illnesses should be classified.
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Following on from the debate sparked off by “on the borderline” as well my own philosophical musing on the nature of mental illness and Psychiatry it appears clear to me that Psychiatry obviously involves a theory of mind. This often leads to mental health professionals being accused of playing “mind games” or seeking to control and manipulate patients’ thoughts either with therapy or with mind altering drugs. Psychiatry as a form of social control is a subject that has been written about by Roy Porter (2002) and Michael Foucault (2001) at great length

The mainstream view in Western Psychiatry is that mental illness exists and that it can be objectively described and treated. A relativist view however would argue that what we call mental illness is not an absolute transcultural or temporal fact and that descriptions of abnormal social behaviour change across time and geographical boundaries. A broken arm may be a broken arm in 14th century Florence and in the Kalahari desert of today, but ideas of madness vary considerably between these times and places.
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I found this the other day.

“Lord Laidlaw of Rothiemay has admitted to receiving treatment for “sex addiction” at a private clinic, likening it to alcohol dependency. But is it really?

It’s a term that first came to widespread attention when actor Michael Douglas was admitted to rehab in 1990 and it was reported, inaccurately he later claimed, that he was a sex addict.

More recently, comedian Russell Brand admitted to spending a week at a centre for sexual addiction in Philadelphia.”

But are so called sex addicts really suffering from an illness or just making excuses for being excessively promiscuous?
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