I am not a scientologist. I am a member of a DIFFERENT group that is against psychiatry and psychiatrists: their prior victims, in the form of the psychiatric inmates' liberation movement.
I, like you (DocCathode that is), was once diagnosed schizophrenic. There does, of course, exist a logical position (in the Venn-Diagram sense) in which schizophrenics exist, but not everyone diagnosed schizophrenic is schizophrenic. My contention that they are a sloppy bunch of diagnosticians doesn't in any way refute that, although it indicates that the number of people diagnosed who aren't really schizophrenic is quite high. (It could also indicate that there is a large number of schizophrenics who have not been so diagnosed).
So I cannot rest my claim that schizophrenia doesn't exist on the sloppiness of diagnostic procedures alone.
Allan's corollary: If we stipulate that our ability to distinguish UFOs (whatever they may--or may not--be) from other explicable atmospheric phenomena is not good, that doesn't prove there are no UFOs at all.
Obviously, in the denotative sense of "does the DSM-IV description of 'schizophrenia' describe a pattern of behaviors and experiences that actually exists", there is schizophrenia. Just as there are, of course, Unidentified Flying Objects. As to what either of them MEAN, what they actually ARE, though...
Schizophrenia is conceptualized, popularized, discussed, treated, researched, and diagnosed AS A BIOLOGICAL DIFFERENCE OF THE BRAIN which is THE CAUSE OF disturbances of thought and feeling which, in turn, are conceptualized as ENTIRELY NEGATIVE, WITHOUT VALID MEANING, i.e., BRAIN STATIC. Just as the folks who "believe in UFOs" believe that they are ships piloted by intelligent extraterrestrial aliens who observe and manipulate affairs down here on earth.
As shorthand, many people on this board would probably say they "don't believe in UFOs", by which they do NOT mean that they do not believe that some flying objects are unidentified. In a similar vein, I say that there is no schizophrenia because in the sense that the field of psychiatry conceptualizes it, there isn't.
Original SDMB thread - The Role of Culture in Mental Illness
See my next post on this same thread
See my previous post on this same thread