[lutusp]

I recommend that you avoid thinking of yourself as having some kind of disease. The term "mental illness" is a sneaky and ill-defined term meant to put mental behaviors on a par with physical ailments. But in fact, all mental behaviors are adaptations to specific environments, and some are more effective than others (some aren't effective at all).

To refute this, one would have to start by identifying someone who died of a mental illness. Such things don't happen.

Also, the causative agents for real illnesses can be viewed in a microscope, which means they are present or absent as a matter of empirical fact. Mental illness diagnoses are dispensed through the opinions of psychologists, and psychologists are famous for not agreeing about anything.

The only people who benefit from the stigma of a "mental illness" are psychologists, who pretend to be doctors (which they aren't) able to offer meaningful treatments (which they can't) for the mental illnesses they have created by voting rather than research. All the new mental illnesses going into the new DSM (about to be published) were included there by secret votes, not evidence.

Imagine if real scientists behaved like psychologists: "Is there life on Mars? Rockets are expensive — let's vote!"

[maxerickson]

If you want to take this stance, you need to be criticizing psychiatry (and a psychiatrist actually is a medical doctor).

[lutusp]

> If you want to take this stance, you need to be criticizing psychiatry ...

When I talk to psychologists, they invariably say the problem is with psychiatrists. When I talk to psychiatrists, they invariably say the problem is with psychologists. But if human psychology were a science, this lame dodge would not exist, because both psychology and psychiatry would be united by a single theoretical framework, like the one that unites cosmology and particle physics (i.e. the Standard Model).

Particle physicists attend cosmology conferences, and cosmologists attend particle physics conferences, for the reason that both fields have the same theoretical framework and because discoveries in either field affect the other. And because physics is a science.

Psychiatrists don't attend clinical psychology conferences, and clinical psychologists don't attend psychiatry conferences, for the reason that there is no theoretical framework that unites psychiatry and psychology, and that, in turn, is because psychology is not a science.

> (and a psychiatrist actually is a medical doctor)

Yes, but a psychiatrist's medical degree is in general medicine, not psychiatry. There is no mental doctor, there are only physical doctors. The existence of a medical degree program in advance of psychiatric training is just a way to confer an unearned status to psychiatry.

When you call a psychiatrist "doctor", you are acknowledging his medical training, not his psychiatric training. If psychiatry were a science, of course, this would all be different.

Any questions?

[maxerickson]

I suppose the first one would be how many actual conversations inform your first paragraph?

[lutusp]

Hundreds, over decades. Reference: http://arachnoid.com/building_science

[maxerickson]

It's sloppy to label that a reference in that context. It does nothing to establish that you have had hundreds of such conversations. (You could just say you have already written your thoughts about it there, and that page certainly indicates that you have thought about it quite a lot, even if it does not directly document any conversations.)

Anyway, if you are going to take the hard line that those fields aren't doing people any good, you might as well make it clear that you are lumping them together (take the hard line meaning loudly advocate for that position on comment boards and such).