quote:

There was a time not so long ago, that treating the symptoms was all they could do for someone with cancer. Does that mean they should not have treated a cancer patient?

a) There was a time--just a bit longer ago than current living people can recall, perhaps--when treating the symptoms was all they could do for someone with cancer and what they did to treat the symptoms was "bleed" you. We've gotten better with cancer, but you could make the case that a time existed--not even archeologically ancient time, just a bit "back when"--when you might have been well advised to avoid the doctors if you had the misfortune of falling sick, because the doctors tended to be worse than the disease.

b) There was a much earlier time--archeologically ancient for this one--when treating the symptoms was all they could do when you were possessed with evil spirits or the Gods had put curses upon you (or however they conceptualized the problem) was to drill holes in your skull in hopes that airing out its contents would improve your outlook. This process was called "trephination", and some folks apparently even survived it, based on the regrowth of bone tissue at the trephination sites.

With cancer, we've made significant progress and have a much better understanding of what the disease itself is all about. With "mental illness", we haven't made appreciable progress since the days of trephination when it comes to understanding what's really going on with those so diagnosed, and statistically speaking our skills at treating symptoms is only marginally better.

Side Note A: In the late 1800s, when the mental health field was new and young, its founding fathers were NOT Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung and their little couches and penis envy theories. Not that I have much appreciation for psychotherapy either but that's not where the field has its roots. The founding fathers were Emil Kraepelin and Eugen Bleuer.

Side Note B: When the mental health field was new and young, it had some successes with the medical model of mental illness. One mental illness was proven to have its origins in a bacterium passed via sexual intercourse, and we know it today as "syphilis". Another was described with increasing accuracy and eventually understood with great precision and given the name "epilepsy" long before we had EEG machines that could show rhythmical firing patterns in misbehaving brains in the course of what had long since been identified and called a grand mal seizure. So OF COURSE there was a lot of optimism and enthusiasm about the likelihood of eventually figuring out the physical causes of EVERY disorder of mood and thought! But you may notice that neither of these ailments is now classified as "mental illness". What happened is that EVERY TIME WE CAME TO UNDERSTAND ITS PHYSICAL CAUSE, a pattern of symptoms or behaviors previously called "mental illness" was reclassified in terms of that physical cause. One hundred and some-odd years later, WHAT'S LEFT IN THE 'MENTAL HEALTH' BARREL ARE THE ONES THAT NEVER YIELDED SUCH AN UNDERSTANDING.

 

Original SDMB thread - The Role of Culture in Mental Illness

See my previous post on this same thread

 

The SDMB Posts