« Credit Snobs II | Main | Assorted links »
Department of Why Not
In England, this new cognitive approach to psychosis and the efforts of Hearing Voices Network are independent of each other, and are sometimes at odds. H.V.N.’s leading members, for instance, frequently criticize even sympathetic academic researchers for being insufficiently political. Yet both approaches share a similar purpose in seeking to place voice-hearing within the continuum of normal human experience — one, in order to better treat patients, the other, out of a firm conviction that hearing voices need not interfere with leading an otherwise “normal” life. [emphasis added]
Of course that refers to hearing voices that aren't actually there. Here is the full and fascinating story. It advises people who wish to talk back to the voices to carry around cell phones.
How extreme must a single weirdness be, before a person can't much function in the real world or be counted as "normal"?
Posted by Tyler Cowen on March 26, 2007 at 11:51 AM in Medicine | Permalink
Comments
How extreme must a single weirdness be, before a person can't much function in the real world or be counted as "normal"?
I think when you start writing economics blogs, that's it. ;-)
Posted by: Mr. Noah at Mar 26, 2007 12:06:39 PM
hearing voices need not interfere with leading an otherwise “normal” life.
This is the point where we're supposed to note Julian Jaynes & go "hmm."
Posted by: Anderson at Mar 26, 2007 12:27:05 PM
I'm amused to note that I may be less likely than average to hear voices. My "inner speech" mostly isn't in words.
Posted by: Dan Goodman at Mar 26, 2007 12:58:20 PM
Interesting article all the way around. Just got done teaching a lesson on Joan of Arc. 500 odd years ago she could lead France to military victory based on her religious conviction and go down in history as a heroine. Today she'd be thrown in the "looney bin" and subjected to the latest "advances" in psychiatry. An especially interesting tidbit in the article was the admission that the standard Freudian psychiatry of the mid forties to mid sixties was a horrific failure. Whoops - sorry we experimented on an entire generation of people and completely destroyed what were already fragile souls.
Posted by: anne at Mar 26, 2007 1:21:37 PM
So long as they know the voices aren't real, I don't think there's a big problem with hearing them.
Posted by: D at Mar 26, 2007 1:22:28 PM
i don't know that knowing they aren't real is enough. if they yell at you to the point where you physically flinch, I bet you can't function. If they talk over people who are actually talking to you, interefering with your ability to keep or hear a conversation, you can't function.
but if they are just murmuring in the background, like a detuned radio, I bet you can function. Those types of auditory hallucinatinos, where you brain is overly fond of making "sense" from static or other random audio sources ( the fridge, the cars driving by, etc.) and reinterprets them as voices, can probably be handled.
Posted by: anonymous at Mar 26, 2007 1:53:54 PM
In response to anne: While Joan of Arc is now a heroine, she was also, in her own time, thrown into prison, tortured, and burned at the stake. As for the "horrifying failure" of Freudian psychiatry, it was a huge humanitarian advance over what was done to the mentally ill previously. I don't think any generation has a monopoly on treating the mentally ill poorly.
Posted by: anne2 at Mar 26, 2007 1:55:26 PM
So would Bryan Caplan say these people merely have different preferences? ;-)
Posted by: tc at Mar 26, 2007 3:56:22 PM
Auditory hallucinations don't happen in isolation - they are a symptom of functional brain impairment and (I would say) invariably occur with other symptoms such as bizarre beliefs and illogical speech.
www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/delusions
I think there is more-than-a-bit of selective observation or wishful thinking in the soothing notion that there are people who hear voices but are otherwise 'normal'.
Posted by: Bruce G Charlton at Mar 26, 2007 3:57:31 PM
I see that tc has already mentioned Bryan Caplan. On the subject of mental illness, delusions, etc., I highly recommend his article "The Economics of Szasz." It's beautifully thought-provoking. Bryan provides a link to a free copy here: http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2006/09/they_called_me.html
Posted by: jp at Mar 26, 2007 5:57:31 PM
I enjoyed Caplan's paper too, but if you want to know about some of the criticism of Szasz check out the article and bibliography in the Stanford Encyclopedia's entry on mental illness.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mental-illness/
Also, if you watch the Cato video of Szasz (google video it), you'll see an interesting q&a session at the end that reveals some unpalatable implications for the claim that mental illness is a myth.
E.g.: Imagine your friend suddenly snaps, becomes angry and delusionally suspicious of others. Say we are not sure of the exact cause of the change, and that he refuses treatment for reasons that are absurd. Suppose further that we know that if we give him a pill, he'll be back to his former self. In fact, we're almost certain he'll thank us for forcibly treating him afterward.
Thomas Szasz does some hand waving, but essentially says it is immoral to force your friend to take the pill.
I'm not saying that's the wrong judgment, but it does require some adjustments to my moral intuition. Be prepared to commit yourself to that sort of thing if you agree with Szasz.
Posted by: Lee at Mar 26, 2007 6:58:22 PM
For a brief period a friend of mine thought his cat was talking to him. He became intransigently convinced of this and would endlessly debate anyone that suggested otherwise. The voices never strayed to any source so the problem was contained.
Posted by: Kent at Mar 26, 2007 8:17:10 PM
It may have been a humanitarian advance to improve the conditions of those who would already be destined for the alienist's prison, but Freud and the psychiatric movement that developed expanded the definition of "insanity" well beyond what it was before. Even now this continues apace and we are always hearing about increasing rates of X-disorder, as psychiatrists learn to divide and categorize diseases in such a way that each can have its own medicine cabinet.
Psychiatry is mostly bunk mascarading as science; in an increasingly secular culture people turn to psychiatrists instead of priests and suffer for it.
Posted by: John Goes at Mar 26, 2007 8:56:52 PM
[i]Psychiatry is mostly bunk mascarading as science; in an increasingly secular culture people turn to psychiatrists instead of priests and suffer for it.[/i]
As I budding psychiatry resident, there is sadly some truth to this.
However, Szasz's position is compromised by the fact that he never dealt with the severely and persistently mentally ill. Take it from me folks, there is a subset of psychiatric patients who are really mentally ill, who are not simply seeking solace from a secular priest.
These include people with full blown schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, severe depression and disabling OCD.
The danger of the self-help group mentioned above is two-fold. First, that it doesn't account for the severity of the disorder in the individual patient and second that it is universally opposed to antipsychotic treatment of individuals who could really benefit from it.
Posted by: Adam_K at Mar 27, 2007 2:39:16 AM
I have never read Szasz although I'm sure he would share a similar position. Obviously there are people who need a lot of help to function in the world, but in the East there was not historically a comparable notion (from what I understand) that we should lock up those that have certain problems.
You beg all sorts of questions when you decide to change someone's brain chemistry without their consent (perhaps they are unable to consent?), such as the right a person has to change the mind of someone else, what the role of suffering is in the world (materialists may have an easier time brushing aside the benefits of suffering), the role of "mad" people in a healthy society.
Also there is something to be said for the psychiatric profession role in increasing the rate of severe mental disorder by a variety of methods. There is no easy analysis of this but people have a right to be very suspicious of the psychiatric profession and to ask a lot of hard questions about the rights of psychiatric patients, even those a "select few" judge to be in dire need of changes in brain chemistry.
Posted by: John Goes at Mar 27, 2007 7:17:08 AM
I have never read Szasz although I'm sure he would share a similar position. Obviously there are people who need a lot of help to function in the world, but in the East there was not historically a comparable notion (from what I understand) that we should lock up those that have certain problems.
You beg all sorts of questions when you decide to change someone's brain chemistry without their consent (perhaps they are unable to consent?), such as the right a person has to change the mind of someone else, what the role of suffering is in the world (materialists may have an easier time brushing aside the benefits of suffering), the role of "mad" people in a healthy society.
Also there is something to be said for the psychiatric profession's role in increasing the rate of severe mental disorder by a variety of methods. There is no easy analysis of this but people have a right to be very suspicious of the psychiatric profession and to ask a lot of hard questions about the rights of psychiatric patients, even those a "select few" judge to be in dire need of changes in brain chemistry.
Posted by: John Goes at Mar 27, 2007 7:18:02 AM
First, it is not against the law to be psychotic.
In general, among common law jurisdictions, there are only two reasons a psychiatrist (in some cases, a physician) can involuntarily admit a patient and administer antipsychotic medication.
They are:
1) Imminent harm to self
2) Imminent harm to others
I have have seen a number of polite paranoid psychotics who presented to the ER voluntarily, posed no danger to themselves or others and refused our offer of antipsychotic medications that we thought would help them.
Much of what has been written about psychiatry comes from a very different age (Szasz, One flew over the Cuckoo's Nest). These days, psychiatrists are one of the few healthcare practitioners that take the concept of autonomy seriously and worry about violating it.
Posted by: Adam_K at Mar 28, 2007 5:15:19 PM
liqingchao 07年8月21日
google排名
google排名
wow gold
wow gold
powerleveling
powerleveling
wow gold
wow gold
powerleveling
powerleveling
wow powerleveling
wow powerleveling
wow power leveling
wow power leveling
wow power level
wow power level
world of warcraft powerleveling
world of warcraft powerleveling
world of warcraft power leveling
world of warcraft power leveling
china tour
china tour
hongkong hotel
hongkong hotel
beijing tour
beijing tour
翻译公司
翻译公司
上海翻译公司
上海翻译公司
北京翻译公司
北京翻译公司
北京搬家公司
北京搬家公司
鼓风机
风机
风机
货架
光盘刻录
光盘刻录
光盘制作
光盘制作
光盘印刷
光盘印刷
红外测温仪
红外测温仪
超声波测厚仪
超声波测厚仪
超声波探伤仪
超声波探伤仪
频闪仪
频闪仪
涂层测厚仪
涂层测厚仪
电火花检测仪
电火花检测仪
google排名
仓库
仓库
仓库出租
仓库出租
物流园区
物流园区
集团电话
集团电话
四环素牙
口腔常识
口腔常识
口腔医生
口腔医生
网站设计
网站设计
多媒体
监控
监控
监控系统
监控系统
门禁
门禁
门禁系统
门禁系统
搬家公司
搬家公司
条码打印机
条码打印机
牙周炎
牙周炎
Posted by: wslmwps at Aug 21, 2007 2:23:54 AM
大家好，我是臺灣人，從臺灣一個人搬家來到美國，環境很陌生，感覺很孤單。以前在臺灣幾家知名的徵信社工作過，我是一個優秀的徵信工作者，希望早點找到適合自己的工作。希望通過貴站，認識更多的朋友。
Posted by: 謝文豪 at Apr 1, 2008 11:04:34 PM
