After almost three decades and 20 billion dollars in funding for genetics research and so-called neuropsychiatry, we’ve learned exactly nothing that is clinically useful.
At the same time, there have been many clinically identifiable consequences resulting from this seemingly never-ending elusive mission:
- A sense of helplessness and hopelessness for those who believe that they are genetically destined to become addicted to alcohol, trapped in psychosis, depressed for “no reason,” a criminal, a Jets fan, etc.
- Blaming the body instead while often ignoring the horrors of the world and/or the need to change our lives
- Allowing for the scapegoating of the poor little gene so that those in power never have to worry about losing said power.
Perhaps most excitingly, it has also resulted in amazing capitalistic opportunities beyond just the world of academia…
Need a New Pair of Genes? On Sale Now for Only $499!
In one of the latest examples of profiteering from the gene fad, there is now an app to determine your personal level of gayness. This is not a joke.
For about the same price as a Starbucks latte, one can take their genetic data (supplied by 23andme for your convenience if you’d like), upload it, and BAM! You’ll be placed along a gradient of gay.
Cool, right?!
No matter the fact that the study upon which this app is based determined that across half a million subjects, at most 25% of sexuality could be explained by genetics. So, at least ¾ of who you are attracted to has to do with a bazillion other factors besides your genes. But such facts would not make for a nice app.
Let’s definitely not consider the tyrannical regimes that determine homosexuality a crime deserving of the death penalty. Do not wonder how easy it would be for a government official to grab a sample of your saliva and determine you gay. Then kill you. Legally. No, whatever you do, ignore this reality — someone’s making money off an app!
Soon they’ll have one to determine your level of schizophrenia, too!
Sure, the best studies to date looking for genetic associations to the category of schizophrenia find a link that might explain about .25 to 2% of the variance in the population (i.e., it explains nothing). But researchers who “know” that “schizophrenia” is clearly genetic won’t let that stop them.
The most recent exciting headline has announced that researchers have finally found real biomarkers to diagnose schizophrenia! And it can be done through a simple hair sample!
Wow! What a headline!
I mean, once one reads on to the nitty gritty silly little details, it seems that this was really about a “subtype” of schizophrenia never before identified, that the tests done on real humans rather than mice were done postmortem (and therefore on people who had been on decades of psychiatric drugs and who knows what else), that the researchers themselves determined that the likely root cause was early inflammatory stress in childhood (*cough* trauma/stress), and that the altered gene expressions were epigenetic (*coughing fit* environmentally caused *dies coughing*).
But, hey, what’s a little bit of nuance or science when it comes to making a name for yourself?
The President of the United States has even suggested that “neurobehavioral” technology can predict mass shootings. Alternative facts have now become our new reality. What a great day and age for Silicon Valley!
It’s only a matter of time before there is an online section of Amazon offering new and improved genes for all who 23andme determines to be less than ideal. Personalized ads based on your genetic code!
Healthy Stock Only Please
In the early 20th century, academic scholars, philanthropists, and liberal governments were also very excited about research coming out of a blossoming field of study. It was called eugenics.
In brief, eugenics was a field that was determined to create a master race, free from idiocy, poverty, criminality, color, and non-Christians. The Nazis didn’t invent this. Psychologists did for the most part.
For a bit of detailed commentary on eugenics and psychology, see here, here, and here.
Eugenics researchers amassed an enormous amount of work detailing all the ways in which those perceived as flawed in some way were shown to be of defective stock. Eugenics was also based on research from horses and peas.
After WWII, and Hitler, understandably such research was frowned upon. Eventually, however, organizations and groups under this umbrella rebranded. The new acceptable line of study became known as the field of genetics (note: not all genetics research is bad).
Which leaves us where we are today.
Researchers have now embraced the idea that PTSD is a heritable disease with a genetic base. A recent study has claimed to have actually found the loci of the genetic risk! This exciting new finding explains up to a whopping 5-20% of variation across tens of thousands of people. In other words, once again, it means absolutely nothing. At least according to scientists who actually care about truth and, um, science. But, hey, who needs nuance or, say, empathy. Nay, we can now celebrate our newfound proof that even PTSD is a result of defective stock!
US military officials may be having a heart attack en masse with the sheer excitement of it all. Training men and women to become killing machines and then balking when they cannot just revert to the domesticated drone that is many a modern-day citizen is a US military specialty. Now, they have psychological science on their side!
The soldier is not haunted to his very soul by death, cruelty, injustice, terror; nope, he clearly has faulty coding in his brain and soon we’ll have just the pill to fix it.
And, of course, such research doesn’t just affect veterans. The wider population of trauma survivors are also included.
Oh, how abusers across the globe must be getting their party hats on!
The girl subjected to many years of sexual abuse is not wounded to her core by violations, gaslighting, deathly fear; negatory, she is of inherently faulty design passed down through her substandard bloodline for being upset or untrusting or haunted by her past.
Bow Down to the Science Gods
Make no mistake: this is about the religion of scientism, not about science.
The ideological quest for the genetic underpinnings of supposedly un-understandable phenomena such as hearing voices, atypical beliefs, and altered states is one based on faith, not fact. To give the benefit of the doubt, acknowledging the horrors of the world and how our lifestyles unjustly affect, at random, people (and other animals) is terrifying. Feeling helpless in the face of existential dread is intolerable.
But, this is not an excuse.
With the ever-increasing evidence of trauma and its innumerable aftereffects, it is becoming increasingly impossible to ignore.
It seems, though, that if we can no longer deny the traumatic origin of such experiences, then instead we must still blame someone or something so as not to feel helpless or at the mercy of the random chaos of the world. And the religion of geneticism appears to dictate that any reaction to trauma that is not some variation of “get over it” is a result of a defect in the phantasmal gene.
Pull Those Darned Boot Straps Up Already
“What’s the matter? Why are you still upset about [murder, rape, child abuse, chronic oppression]? Get over it already.”
That’s the sentiment of much of Western society and internalized by survivors of tragedy. And these beliefs only serve to further solidify self-hatred and pain.
Perhaps a study needs to be developed to search for the faulty gene variations that result in a complete lack of compassion. Or the gene that makes people worship money and success. Or the gene that causes people to function just fine in the face of horror and go on as if nothing ever happened. Perhaps we can create an app for that.
The thing is, these gene studies show little, if any, identifiable pathway between genes and the numerous traits and behaviors suggested to be caused by our wiring. Even E. Fuller Torrey, star disciple of the medical model, has called the Human Genome Project, aptly, “a dud.”
It is downright frightening where this stuff will lead us.
I Want Off This Ride
If newspapers and other outlets started placing “studies” and apps and other nonsense in their entertainment sections right alongside the horoscopes, then perhaps this would all be fine. Everyone’s entitled to their beliefs, right? Well, unless your beliefs involve aliens, the CIA, or wanting fairness and compassion in the world. Those beliefs can be found in your hair as a result of your coding.
The problem with taking these ideological proclamations as fact is that people are suffering, even dying. Politicians argue for increasingly restrictive policies and scapegoating those deemed “mentally ill” for violence. Suicide rates continue to increase, particularly for our supposedly respected veterans. We have skyrocketing rates of substance abuse and depression. The opioid epidemic.
Will this train stop before it crashes and burns and flies right off the side of a mountain into the fiery pits of molten lava?
“Pickle!” “Pickle!” It’s a safe word. I’m screaming it at the rooftops. “Pickle!” I forfeit. Get me off this train. Just please, please make it stop.
So much commentary portent in this article I don’t know where to begin. But with regard to this little ditty… “Researchers have now embraced the idea that PTSD is a heritable disease with a genetic base. A recent study has claimed to have actually found the loci of the genetic risk”,
Great! Now we know who to send into combat! Before anyone can be sent into war (battle), they must first prove to not possess this “genetic base”. I mean… that not only sounds fair, but think of the “billions” saved by the VA with regard to ‘all’ PTSD treatments. And, now that we have the “science” here (snicker, snicker..), why don’t we exchange all known children currently in traumatic environments with children without this “loci of genetic risk”? I can think of a dozen examples from which this kind of science(tism) and the living, no-skin-in-the-game data collide like an apocalyptic wet dream. Good article Noel!
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“After almost three decades and 20 billion dollars in funding for genetics research and so-called neuropsychiatry, we’ve learned exactly nothing that is clinically useful.” Hurray for psychiatry!
“Allowing for the scapegoating of the poor little gene so that those in power never have to worry about losing said power.” Thank you for confessing to one of psychiatry’s and psychology’s actual goals. This explains why the school social workers want to drug the well behaved children who get 100% on their state standardized tests – kill off the potential competition – prior to them even growing up. Classy.
“Let’s definitely not consider the tyrannical regimes that determine homosexuality a crime deserving of the death penalty.” Oh, like the psychiatrists and psychologists used to be.
“But researchers who ‘know’ that ‘schizophrenia’ is clearly genetic won’t let that stop them.” Except, of course, when the “schizophrenia” symptoms are created with the “schizophrenia” treatments, which makes “schizophrenia” an iatrogenic illness, not a “genetic” one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroleptic-induced_deficit_syndrome
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxidrome (anticholinergic)
“Alternative facts have now become our new reality. What a great day and age for Silicon Valley!” It’s been that way for decades, actually. William Casey, CIA Director 1981-1987: “We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.” Hopefully, the “mental health” workers will some day wake up.
“In brief, eugenics was a field that was determined to create a master race, free from idiocy, poverty, criminality, color, and non-Christians. The Nazis didn’t invent this. Psychologists did for the most part.” And now the psychologists and psychiatrists push the opposite theology, kill all the intelligent, white, Christians!
“Oh, how abusers across the globe must be getting their party hats on!” Absolutely, the pedophiles are ruling Western civilization, and have been celebrating, and “writing” books about how magnificent they are, for decades!
https://www.amazon.com/Pedophilia-Empire-Chapter-Introduction-Disorder-ebook/dp/B0773QHGPT
https://www.blurb.com/b/2934828-mag-men
“And the religion of geneticism appears to dictate that any reaction to trauma that is not some variation of ‘get over it’ is a result of a defect in the phantasmal gene.” No doubt, a lunatic Lutheran non-clinical psychologist said something similar to “get over it” to me just recently, after unsuccessfully attempting to steal all my “too truthful” work. He did confess to being a worshipper of the thieving globalists banksters, who want to steal everything from everyone, however.
“What’s the matter? Why are you still upset about [murder, rape, child abuse, chronic oppression]? Get over it already.” No, we’d prefer to take our country to one which has the rule of law, and we’d like justice. The child rape covering up religions, who are still, and have for decades or longer, been utilizing the psychologists and psychiatrists to cover up the wealthy’s “zipper troubles,” do have insurance to pay for those crimes.
https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2019/01/23/18820633.php?fbclid=IwAR2-cgZPcEvbz7yFqMuUwneIuaqGleGiOzackY4N2sPeVXolwmEga5iKxdo
https://www.madinamerica.com/2016/04/heal-for-life/
https://books.google.com/books?id=xI01AlxH1uAC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false
https://virtueonline.org/lutherans-elca-texas-catastrophe-coming-lesson-episcopalians
“It is downright frightening where this stuff” has led us. We live in a completely lawless society today, largely thanks to psychiatry and psychology, and the undeserved power they’ve been given.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kUpMecbv8g
Apparently at the will of the communists, at least according to the communist manifesto.
I don’t forfeit. But I did pray to “Get me off this [runaway] train” decades ago. I still believe God will judge all fairly.
https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/soulasylum/runawaytrain.html
Because I saw the writing on the walls, decades ago. America needs a return to law and order, and that means taking away the psychologists and psychiatrists’ power. Their belief system is all “bullshit,” even according to the author of the DSM.
https://www.wired.com/2010/12/ff_dsmv/
And it’s “invalid,” as even confessed by the former head of NIMH.
https://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/directors/thomas-insel/blog/2013/transforming-diagnosis.shtml
I hope our, primarily child abuse covering up, “mental health” workers, who can NEVER bill ANY insurance company for EVER helping ANY child abuse survivor EVER, without first misdiagnosing them:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/your-child-does-not-have-bipolar-disorder/201402/dsm-5-and-child-neglect-and-abuse-1
Are finally awakening to the reality that covering up child abuse, for profit, is still illegal in the USA. And all the “mental health” workers need to get out of the child abuse and rape covering up business. Our society needs to actually go back to the rule of law.
“Everything the American [mental health] workers believes is false.” Wake up “mental health” workers, and yes, we all need to get off this runaway train to hell. Because I believe that’s where all the child rape covering up “mental health” criminals will be going. “Don’t say I didn’t, say I didn’t warn you,” since I have. This societal, fraud based psychological and psychiatric created, primarily child rape covering up, nightmare needs to end.
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Schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, clinical depression, etc. are not real diseases or illnesses, but only the names given to certain symptoms that fall within a given “spectrum”. Accurate prediction of an individual’s likely presentation of such symptoms now or in the future can be made by the spectrographic analysis of a hair (or other tissue sample). This is called Tissue Mineral Analysis and has been used for security clearance purposes since the 1970s. I could never be so lucky again as to have learned about this and followed the diet and supplement recommendations to quickly recover in 1982. My “treating” psychiatrist, who later rose to presidency of the APA, was infuriated.
http://www.arltma.com/FAQ.htm
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Congratulations! 🙂
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I saw some good documentaries by a guy named Adam Curtis Noel. One, the Century of the Self (2002) particularly relevant to what your describing above. An analysis of the Trump era being Hypernormalization (2016).
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0193231/?ref_=nv_sr_1?ref_=nv_sr_1
Well worth watching if you have time.
I think it might be worth updating this to Century of the Selfie. And is Greta Thunberg mentally ill as our Politicians seem to be claiming?
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Thank You for that important article. I must add something really important, because it may help some people to understand the empirical fallacy of scientific era.
James Hillman on the folly of reducing mind to brain:
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The upshot of genetic studies leads in two (!) directions: a narrow path and a broad one. The narrow road heads toward simplistic, monogenic causes. It wants to pinpoint bits of tissue and correlate them with the vast complexity of psychic meanings. The folly of reducing mind to brain never seems to leave the Western scene. We can never give it up because it is so basic to our Western rationalist and positivist mind-set. The rationalist in the psyche wants to locate causes you can put your hands on and fix.
Machines provide the best models for meeting this desire. Take them apart, find their inner mechanisms, and then adjust their functioning by modifying their ratchets, enriching their fuel, greasing their connections. Henry Ford as father of American mental health. Result: Ritalin, Prozac, Zoloft, and dozens of other effective products for internal adjustments that we consume in abundance, millions of us, daily or twice daily. The simplistics of monogenic causes eventually leads to the control of behavior by drugs–that is, to drugged behavior.
Robert Plomin, on whose passionate, prolific, and perceptive writings this chapter has frequently relied, urgently warns against using genetics in a simplistic manner. He states: “Genetic effects on behavior are polygenic and probabilistic, not single gene and deterministic.” I gather from him a warning to psychiatry: Do not capsize your noble vessel under the weight of pharmaceutical, insurance company, and government gold, and do not set your compass toward Fantasy Island, where genetics will define “disease entities in psychiatry.” “We have learned little about the genetics of development [how genes act and interact over time] except to appreciate its complexity.” Therefore we can never arrive at that equation where one defective gene equals one clinical picture (except for true anomalies like Huntington’s chorea).
These warnings have little effect; simplistic thinking fulfills too many wishes. The heads of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison are carved into the Mount Rushmore of the mind. The monster of mechanism appears in every century of modern Western history and must be watched for by each generation–especially ours, when to hold out for “something else” besides nature or nurture means believing in ghosts or magic.
Ever since French rationalism of the seventeenth (Marin Mersenne, Nicolas de Malebranche) and eighteenth (Etienne de Condillac, Julien Offroy de La Mettrie) centuries and right through to the positivism of the nineteenth (Antoine Destutt de Tracy, Auguste Comte) in which all mental events were reduced to biology, a piece of the collective Western mind had been yolked like a dumb ox to the heavy tumbrel of French mechanistic materialism. It is astounding how people with such subtle taste as the French and with such erotic sensibility can go on and on contributing so much rationalist rigor mortis to psychology. Every import that arrives from France must be inspected for this French disease, even though it carries the fashionable label of Lacanism, Structuralism, Deconstruction, or whatever.
Today rationalism is global, computer-compatible every-where. It is the international style of the mind’s architecture. We cannot pin it to a particular flag, unless to the banners of the multinational corporation that can spend big bucks turning psychiatry, and eventually psychological thinking, and therefore soul control, toward monogenetic monotheism. One gene for one disorder: Splice the gene, teach it tricks, combine it, and the disorder is gone, or at least you don’t know you have it. The narrow path leads back to the thirties and forties of psychiatric history, though in a more refined manner and with better press releases. From 1930 into the 1950s, correlating specific brain areas with large emotional and functional concepts provided the rationale for the violence of psychosurgery and the lobotomizing of many a troubled soul at odds with circumstance.
The narrow path is yet more retro, going back to the skill analysis of Franz Josef Gall (M.D., Vienna, 1795), who settled in Paris and was much appreciated by the French. From him came the “evidence” that skull bumps and declivities could be correlated with psychological faculties (a system later called phrenology). Much as they are today, the faculties were given big names, such as memory, judgment, emotionalism, musical and mathematical talent, criminality, and so on. Refinement in methods over the years does not necessarily lead to progress in theorizing: 1795 or 1995–material location, and then reduction of psyche to location, prompts the enterprise.
The contrary direction to narrowing nature to brain simplistics is expanding nurture to a far more embracing notion of environment. If environment means literally what’s around, it must also mean whatever is around. This because the unconscious psyche selects quite arbitrarily among the stuff encountered every day in the environment. Tiny and trivial bits of information may have huge subliminal psychic effects, as the days’ residues in dreams show. We do dream of the damnedest things! Much of each day is never noticed or recalled, but the psyche picks up the environmental flotsam and delivers it to the dream. The dream–a processing plant recycling the environment, finding soul values in junk. The dream–an artist, appropriating images from the environment for recollection in tranquility.
Because we walk about in fields of psychic realities that influences our lives, we have to broaden the notion of environment in terms of “deep ecology,” the hypothesis that the planet is a living, breathing, and self-regulating organism. Since anything around can nourish our souls by feeding imagination, there is soul stuff out there. So why not admit, as does deep ecology, that the environment itself is ensouled, animated, inextricably meshed with us and not fundamentally separate from us?
The ecological vision restores to environment also the classical idea of providentia–that the world provides for us, looks out for us, even looks after us. It wants us around, too. Predators, tornadoes, and blackflies in June are only pieces of the picture. Just think of all that’s delicious and sweet-smelling. Do birds sing but for each other? This breathable, edible, and pleasant planet, invisibly serviced and maintained, keeps us all by means of its life-support system. Such would be an idea of nurture that is truly nurturing.
“Environment,” then, would be imagined well beyond social and economic conditions, beyond the entire cultural setting, to include every item that takes care of us every day: our tires and coffee cups and door handles and the book you are holding in your hands. It becomes impossible to exclude this bit of environment as irrelevant in favor of that bit as significant, as if we could rank world phenomena in order of importance. Important for whom? Our understanding of importance itself has to change; instead of “important to me,” think of “important to other aspects of the environment.” Does this item nurture what else is around, not merely us who are around? Does it contribute to the intentions of the field of which we are only one short-lived part?
As notions of environment shift, we notice environment differently. It becomes more and more difficult to make a cut between psyche and world, subject and object, in here and out there. I can no longer be sure whether the psyche is in me or whether I am in the psyche as I am in my dreams, as I am in the moods of the landscapes and the city streets, as I am in “music heard so deeply/That it is not heard at all, but you are the music/While the music lasts” (T.S. Eliot). Where does the environment stop and I begin, and can I begin at all without being in some place, deeply involved in, nurtured by the nature of the world?
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Maybe the causes of mental distress are too obvious to be noticed. People seem to look everywhere. Doesn’t it have to do with basic needs, especially in childhood? When we get our needs, we turn out strong and resilient, and when we don’t, there is all this confusion about what could have happened.
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Intresting point dfk. Might explain why I managed to survive being tortured and kidnapped by mental health services (and the ensuing ‘gaslighting’ as a result of complaining) I mean it seemed bizarre to me that these people were surprised at the reaction of a man who had been ‘spiked’ with benzos and had a knife planted on him for police to find and obtain an “acute stress reaction” to loosen the lips knowing I wouldn’t talk to a filthy verballing public officer. Because it does constitute the use of a known torture method, and lying to police and saying a citizen is your “patient” to have them transported against their will to your place of work is kidnapping.
Still, i’ve sent letters to many people who simply don’t wish to know, in fact AHPRA are so incompetent they send you out a complaint form to complain about how your complaint was dealt with. I think many of these people have adopted the methods used by the child raping priests to ensure no action is taken, ie that criminality is viewed as “character flaw”. They are happy with nurses arranging ‘spikings’ with date rape drugs and concealing evidence from both the police and doctors.
The chronology of documents shows the Senior Medical Officer writing down the effect of being spiked with benzos as symptoms of a mental illness requiring the administration of enough anti psychotics to lay an elephant out for a week.
I just can’t help but wonder how many folk have died as a result of this criminal who is receiving support from others prepared to commit serious offences to enable him. Anybody want to see the documents sent to the Mental Health Law Centre that they called “editing”? I dont know that taking documents out that show ‘spiking’ with benzos and give the appearance that a citizen has been their “patient” for more than ten years is “editing”. I’d call it fraud, authorised by the Clinical Director. Can’t prove the intent? I could if they stopped threatening witnesses, and of course continuing with the ‘refoulment’ under the Convention against the use of Torture. There are folk who know why these fraudulent documents were sent to the Law Centre, and I hope the new cars and offices they obtained were worth it. Take your 30 pieces of silver Judas.
And what they attempt to do once they have ensured assistance is no longer available? Some tell me they don’t have the stomach for it, but obviously there are those who do
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I consider myself a scientist who is alarmed at the absurdity of the scientism of psychiatry and its advocacy that lived experience hardly affects emotions. Thank you for articulately addressing this issue.
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Hello! Saw your article and wanted to comment!
I have been treated by psychiatrists for much of my life and do not agree with their guesswork in terms of medication treatments. Clearly, they have no theory to justify their treatments.
If you were to look closer at the promising avenue that genes may provide for understanding mental disorders, you may be surprised to find a better possible diagnostic definition.
Psychiatry is horribly misguided, in a denial all to their own doing in a lot of realms of biology in general. The best science comes from neuroscientists as they are the ones leading the discoveries about the brain and its development, along with the impact of gene mutations, etc..
Answers ARE arising to the mystery of mental health. The door in is to follow the path of genes. There are many twists and turns, complications.
Could it just be that the human brain is constantly developing itself over-and-over again throughout life not just infancy or childhood! We don’t really know yet.
It’s looking like the brain can be altered (damaged) at many places and stages. That, in general, the illnesses that are undefinable today, will most likely be found to have many multiple causes. Very discouraging, I’m sure.
Keep asking why. Forget psychiatry. It’s been 60 years, even more. Go toward neuroscience. Biology. Newer science.
Thanks for your article! I ‘get’ your frustrations.
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If PTSD is proof of defective genetics what about veterans who lose a limb or two?
Well if they hadn’t had defective genes then stepping on that land mine wouldn’t have blown off their legs now, would it?
Eugenics is tied to the idea that all crimes–especially bizarre, violent ones–are committed by Criminal Types. The Poor Stock Lovecraft loved to rant about before WWII. Not just POC if you read up on eugenics.
All bad behaviors are hereditary. Hence it’s justifiable to injure/imprison/kill “defective criminal types” innocent of wrong doing.
Psych treatments DO KILL quite often. But as long as the intention was not to kill, it can’t be held against them legally.
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I think the argument is if they had the right genetics, they wouldn’t MIND so much that their limbs had been blown off.
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Noel
Great blog.
I would only quibble with your use of the word “scientism.” Unfortunately, this word is used in multiple ways by people on both sides of the political spectrum. More often than not, it is used as a way to attack legitimate science from Right Wing perspectives.
The examples you have used in this blog are ALL examples of BAD science that cannot be substantiated by the legitimate use of the scientific method. So why not just call it “bad” or “illegitimate” science instead of the very confusing term “scientism,” which implies that it is somehow bad to be “too scientific.”
Richard
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As always an interesting piece Noel,
“Perhaps a study needs to be developed to search for the faulty gene variations that result in a complete lack of compassion. Or the gene that makes people worship money and success.”
Yes, as it stands psychiatrists always think it is “others” with faulty genes. We need to find out what egregiously faulty gene is responsible for the controlling, maleficent, power-seeking behavior that drives so many psychiatrists!
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Rosalee, I believe they act that way because they choose to. Unscientific and old fashioned of me I know.
IQ, height, bone size, hair color are hereditary traits. But good and evil are not.
Poor cognitive skills are not the same as greed, violence, or the burning desire to control others. As far as those traits go I guess not-so-bright underdogs can have them too. But they hurt far fewer people than intelligent, highly educated medical experts lacking conscience and compassion.
Most people with low intelligence I know are unusually sweet and kind. Their warm, generous hearts should put the smarties to shame.
Attributing wickedness to weakness and stupidity (aka bad genes) doesn’t cut it. Hitler did not start World War II because of weakness or stupidity.
Weakness is not a crime. But the APA has basically classified it as such.
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Yes, Rachel I do agree with you!
If ‘faulty genes’ were the reason psychiatrists wreak so much harm on innocent people it might not be as egregious. They definitely choose to act the way they do. After a snarky young female psychiatrist inflicted a great deal of harm on me during cancer treatment I said to my spouse “how could ANYONE be that stupid”. His reply was “No one is THAT stupid – it was intentional”. And he is right.
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Excellent work. Thank you for writing this.
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I just wanted to thank everyone for their comments and the expanded conversation. As to Richard’s suggestion that this is all just “bad science,” I stand by my use of the word scientism. The whole point is that this is about faith, dismissing and outcasting heretics, finding the meaning of life in genes and biological reductionism, and worshipping a certain belief system. There is little in this work at this point that is science, bad or otherwise. It is religion. And, yes, there can be too much science in my opinion when it takes over to the point that what cannot be studied or measured becomes meaningless or ignored. There is much that cannot be studied or explained by science (i.e., love, art, life) and when “scientists” pretend that isn’t the case or belittle such things, we are no longer in the realm of science but instead of religion.
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Richard and Noel are both right.
“Scientism” is pseudo science.
Genetics is legitimate science. Eugenics is scientism or fake science.
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Except in the case of rare diseases like cystic fibrosis and tay-sachs, which are caused by single genes, even with complete genomic information (which is so far not possible), predictions are meaningless and misleading.
23andme was prohibited by the FDA in 2013 from marketing information to customers about genetic risks because reporting it is misleading (see Richard O. Prum’s The Evolution of Beauty p.79-80, 2017). Increasingly loose regulations in a capitalist society make for increasingly worse science.
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I saw a woman in the hospital whose behaviour confused me. I realised that she had Angelmans Syndrome (or what used to be called Happy Puppets Syndrome). I mentioned this to the staff and they laughed at me. Anyway, i ended up discussing it with her psychiatrist and he had a vague recollection of the syndrome (its genetic). What i realised later was that it didn’t matter what the cause of the behaviours was to these people, they were taking her off down the same path anyway, drugs and incarceration.
So even when the science is done, it makes no difference anyway. The predetermined outcome is drug em and drop em.
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