Freethought & Rationalism Archive

echidna · 07-10-2002, 08:53 PM

OOTLS, your suggestion re. the Columbine kids is a good example of the mistakes which can be made by the reductionalist and highly profitable pharmaceutical industry.

Contrary to the theists, children are not born with strong senses of right and wrong. As such they are capable of much cruelty as they are growing up. I don�t seek to trivialise Columbine, it was an extreme atrocity, but it highlights the origins of our morality.

However most of us can remember many acts as children which we would never commit today, personally I am ashamed at my treatment of animals. But by automatically treating this chemically, we overlook and misunderstand the whole nature of morality and the way we learn it. Must every act of cruelty, bullying and meanness now be treated with a drug ?

Reductionalists & pharmaceutical marketing executives would happily have us as compliant zombies popping our daily Soma, instead of addressing the complex human nature of our behaviour.

The high prescription of Ritilin clearly demonstrates that Huxley�s Brave New World is already here.

Of course Columbine was also mostly a Gun Control issue anyway IMO.

[ July 11, 2002: Message edited by: echidna ]

AtlanticCitySlave · 07-11-2002, 05:44 PM

"Sorry, books and 'popular works' don't cut it as plausible evidence. If you don't have the time to back your sweeping allegations with references from the peer reviewed scientific literature, you don't have time to raise your credibility above zero."

-This is simply pure laziness on your part, since the book and popular works I suggested go into detail of studies, where to look elsewhere, etc. (Breggin isn't exactly a nobody in modern critiques of biological psychiatry). Perhaps you have all the time in the world, but I have a life outside the computer and cannot scrounge around looking for dates and journal articles to suit your fancy (on a discussion board no less). If you cared enough, you'd look yourself. Besides, I think DK has taken you to task regardless. Oddly enough, your anecdotal evidence concerning your family is as useless to me as my books and popular works are to you.

Philosoft · 07-11-2002, 07:05 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by echidna:


Philosoft, before we rush off and brand all non 50th percentile people as being �chemically imbalanced�, I�d suggest that such rigorous adherence to �normality� in itself is overly simplistic. Many such people are torn between self-respect, and that who they are, also includes such a psychiatric �abnormality�.

Countless schizophrenic and bipolar geniuses, how about a PC alternative, �chemically different�, but not automatically imbalanced.

Agreed. My beef was with Atlantic's wholesale dismissal of chemical reductionism altogether. Clearly, chemical reductionism isn't the whole story but to suggest that mental disorders, especially those of affect, are not related to brain chemistry is downright silly. If neurotransmitters and hormones didn't affect our behavior, we would never get hungry or horny.

echidna · 07-11-2002, 07:25 PM

Sorry to be picky Philosoft, actually I usually hate Pcness.

I don�t have any medical neurones, but the little reading I have done suggests that the electrochemical processes governing us are spectacularly poorly understood.

There seems a high risk in believing that simply because ingestion of one chemical creates a certain behavioural outcome, then some degree of causality can automatically be associated with that process. That is to say, if a drug makes one feel happy, that in no way means that we have discovered the chemical process of �happiness�.

I�m not yet confident that our behaviour is quite so easily reduced. Take a simple drug, alcohol, wildly different behaviours in different individuals and also very dependent on their mood at the time. The pharmaceutical industry still strikes me as being extremely hit and miss, and many of their scientific behavioural �explanations� still seem very dodgy.

echidna · 07-11-2002, 07:40 PM

I�d also hasten to add, that to my knowledge, many common behavioural disorders, as yet have no objective physiological definition :

ADD / ADHD
Aspergers
Autism
Many forms of developmental delay (in non-PC terms, mental retardation)
Depression

Although MRI�s & PET�s have made great inroads, the behavioural diagnosis comes first, the objective diagnosis a very poor second.

Psychologists worldwide are tripping over themselves to discover new ones every day and immortalise their names after a disorder. And wherever one is reliant on a behavioural diagnosis, one will fall victim to the quite pseudoscientific realm of subjective values.

Needless to say I am quite sceptical of many of the newer �disorders� and their rampant diagnosis, which seems more driven by the invoice than any real science.

Much of the behavioural industry is just pseudoscience, a socially acceptable way of �doing drugs�.

AtlanticCitySlave · 07-13-2002, 02:23 PM

"My beef was with Atlantic's wholesale dismissal of chemical reductionism altogether."

-Which I never did.

Starboy · 07-13-2002, 03:37 PM

quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If someone doesn't answer this soon, I'll just assume that most atheists get "morally" angry only because of the way certain events affect them emotionally. Either your moral outrage is due to some real moral wrong, or it isn't.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Is there a difference? I always thought anger was an emotion, no matter what kind of anger it was?

Starboy

[ July 13, 2002: Message edited by: Starboy ]

Philosoft · 07-13-2002, 03:43 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by echidna:
Sorry to be picky Philosoft, actually I usually hate Pcness.

I don�t have any medical neurones, but the little reading I have done suggests that the electrochemical processes governing us are spectacularly poorly understood.

Not as poorly as some would have us believe.

Quote:

I�m not yet confident that our behaviour is quite so easily reduced. Take a simple drug, alcohol, wildly different behaviours in different individuals and also very dependent on their mood at the time. The pharmaceutical industry still strikes me as being extremely hit and miss, and many of their scientific behavioural �explanations� still seem very dodgy.

Brain chemistry is a massively complex and interconnected collection of observation and theory. You'll never hear me claim that all symptoms of schizophrenia are cured by giving the patient L-dopa. However, it doesn't even seem worthy of my time to consider that chemical treatments are entirely worthless. The idea the nicotine can cause changes in behavior by mimicking a natural neurotransmitter and damaging certain receptor sites is well-established. There are no serious schools of thought that suggest smokers' behavior is caused by neglect or mistreatment. Of course, Atlantic's notion that drugs are generally overprescribed has merit, IMO. But to claim they don't work because they have side-effects is wrong-headed. Probably, the answer lies somewhere in the middle. A combination of drugs and counseling has always seemed like a good idea to me.

Philosoft · 07-13-2002, 03:47 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by AtlanticCitySlave:
"My beef was with Atlantic's wholesale dismissal of chemical reductionism altogether."

-Which I never did.

What did you mean by this:

Quote:

In fact, there is no evidence, period, that anyone with any type of "mental illness" has a "chemical imbalance".

It's been a few years, but I recall that it's possible to induce schizophrenic symptoms (and Parkinson's at the other extreme) in patients solely by manipulating dopamine levels.

AtlanticCitySlave · 07-15-2002, 06:23 PM

What I meant by that was there is no way to determine if we have chemical imbalances prior to taking medication. The only chemical imbalances we can detect in brains is the result of taking drugs, since the brain reacts to the drugs as a toxic agent. You cannot legally or ethically open someone's skull, insert some type of measuring device, and then say "see, chemical imbalance". All studies suggesting there are chemical imbalances, or that "mental illness" is biological have serious problems, so serious in fact that many researchers are continually arguing, in the background, against biological approaches to psychiatry.
The FDA only does testing for a small period of time concerning drugs, with research generally taking place first on healthy mammallian brains (non-human animals), then being tested on healthy volunteers, and then finally being tested on people who they think the drug would help. At no time is someone's brain opened up and a doctor says "see, chemical imbalance". Considering the widespread usage, if you will, of all the chemicals in our brain, especially serotonin, it's silly as of now to say people have "chemical imbalances".
It is also a complete insult to people to say that they have no control over how they are, when they simply do. Branding them as "chemically imbalanced" people is, again, silly, and it's only a marketing ploy to keep people on drugs for their lives and keep companies generating massive profits from drugs that don't work any better than a placebo or sitting down and talking with a good friend. A doctor's visit of five minutes can end with someone on Prozac or some other drug for years, when the real problem may just be they need a good conversation with someone over their wife leaving them.
I also do not hold that because all of these drugs have side-effects they should not be taken. Rather, I hold that since these drugs do not work they should not be taken. Almost all drugs, not including neuroleptics (which basically only cause chemical lobotomies) have a 75% placebo effect, with the other 25% being an active placebo effect.
I also do not hold that people should not be allowed to take drugs. I feel that people who are PROPERLY INFORMED should be able to take any drug they want, including ritalin or crack for all I care. What concerns me is the hills of lies that surround biological psychiatry and the use of drugs in the world today. Most people, unfortunately, trust what their doctors tell them, and it amazes me how people don't say "huh?" when their doctor tells them they have a chemical imbalance just from talking to them a couple times and never actually looking at their brain.

07-10-2002, 08:53 PM	#31
echidna Veteran Member Join Date: May 2001 Location: Melbourne, Australia Posts: 2,832	OOTLS, your suggestion re. the Columbine kids is a good example of the mistakes which can be made by the reductionalist and highly profitable pharmaceutical industry. Contrary to the theists, children are not born with strong senses of right and wrong. As such they are capable of much cruelty as they are growing up. I don�t seek to trivialise Columbine, it was an extreme atrocity, but it highlights the origins of our morality. However most of us can remember many acts as children which we would never commit today, personally I am ashamed at my treatment of animals. But by automatically treating this chemically, we overlook and misunderstand the whole nature of morality and the way we learn it. Must every act of cruelty, bullying and meanness now be treated with a drug ? Reductionalists & pharmaceutical marketing executives would happily have us as compliant zombies popping our daily Soma, instead of addressing the complex human nature of our behaviour. The high prescription of Ritilin clearly demonstrates that Huxley�s Brave New World is already here. Of course Columbine was also mostly a Gun Control issue anyway IMO. [ July 11, 2002: Message edited by: echidna ]</p>

07-13-2002, 03:37 PM	#37
Starboy Banned Join Date: Jun 2002 Location: Tallahassee, FL Reality Adventurer Posts: 5,276	quote: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- If someone doesn't answer this soon, I'll just assume that most atheists get "morally" angry only because of the way certain events affect them emotionally. Either your moral outrage is due to some real moral wrong, or it isn't. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Is there a difference? I always thought anger was an emotion, no matter what kind of anger it was? Starboy [ July 13, 2002: Message edited by: Starboy ]</p>

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07-11-2002, 05:44 PM	#32
AtlanticCitySlave Banned Join Date: Jun 2002 Location: New Jersey Posts: 251	"Sorry, books and 'popular works' don't cut it as plausible evidence. If you don't have the time to back your sweeping allegations with references from the peer reviewed scientific literature, you don't have time to raise your credibility above zero." -This is simply pure laziness on your part, since the book and popular works I suggested go into detail of studies, where to look elsewhere, etc. (Breggin isn't exactly a nobody in modern critiques of biological psychiatry). Perhaps you have all the time in the world, but I have a life outside the computer and cannot scrounge around looking for dates and journal articles to suit your fancy (on a discussion board no less). If you cared enough, you'd look yourself. Besides, I think DK has taken you to task regardless. Oddly enough, your anecdotal evidence concerning your family is as useless to me as my books and popular works are to you.

07-11-2002, 07:25 PM	#34
echidna Veteran Member Join Date: May 2001 Location: Melbourne, Australia Posts: 2,832	Sorry to be picky Philosoft, actually I usually hate Pcness. I don�t have any medical neurones, but the little reading I have done suggests that the electrochemical processes governing us are spectacularly poorly understood. There seems a high risk in believing that simply because ingestion of one chemical creates a certain behavioural outcome, then some degree of causality can automatically be associated with that process. That is to say, if a drug makes one feel happy, that in no way means that we have discovered the chemical process of �happiness�. I�m not yet confident that our behaviour is quite so easily reduced. Take a simple drug, alcohol, wildly different behaviours in different individuals and also very dependent on their mood at the time. The pharmaceutical industry still strikes me as being extremely hit and miss, and many of their scientific behavioural �explanations� still seem very dodgy.

07-11-2002, 07:40 PM	#35
echidna Veteran Member Join Date: May 2001 Location: Melbourne, Australia Posts: 2,832	I�d also hasten to add, that to my knowledge, many common behavioural disorders, as yet have no objective physiological definition : ADD / ADHD Aspergers Autism Many forms of developmental delay (in non-PC terms, mental retardation) Depression Although MRI�s & PET�s have made great inroads, the behavioural diagnosis comes first, the objective diagnosis a very poor second. Psychologists worldwide are tripping over themselves to discover new ones every day and immortalise their names after a disorder. And wherever one is reliant on a behavioural diagnosis, one will fall victim to the quite pseudoscientific realm of subjective values. Needless to say I am quite sceptical of many of the newer �disorders� and their rampant diagnosis, which seems more driven by the invoice than any real science. Much of the behavioural industry is just pseudoscience, a socially acceptable way of �doing drugs�.

07-13-2002, 02:23 PM	#36
AtlanticCitySlave Banned Join Date: Jun 2002 Location: New Jersey Posts: 251	"My beef was with Atlantic's wholesale dismissal of chemical reductionism altogether." -Which I never did.

07-15-2002, 06:23 PM	#40
AtlanticCitySlave Banned Join Date: Jun 2002 Location: New Jersey Posts: 251	What I meant by that was there is no way to determine if we have chemical imbalances prior to taking medication. The only chemical imbalances we can detect in brains is the result of taking drugs, since the brain reacts to the drugs as a toxic agent. You cannot legally or ethically open someone's skull, insert some type of measuring device, and then say "see, chemical imbalance". All studies suggesting there are chemical imbalances, or that "mental illness" is biological have serious problems, so serious in fact that many researchers are continually arguing, in the background, against biological approaches to psychiatry. The FDA only does testing for a small period of time concerning drugs, with research generally taking place first on healthy mammallian brains (non-human animals), then being tested on healthy volunteers, and then finally being tested on people who they think the drug would help. At no time is someone's brain opened up and a doctor says "see, chemical imbalance". Considering the widespread usage, if you will, of all the chemicals in our brain, especially serotonin, it's silly as of now to say people have "chemical imbalances". It is also a complete insult to people to say that they have no control over how they are, when they simply do. Branding them as "chemically imbalanced" people is, again, silly, and it's only a marketing ploy to keep people on drugs for their lives and keep companies generating massive profits from drugs that don't work any better than a placebo or sitting down and talking with a good friend. A doctor's visit of five minutes can end with someone on Prozac or some other drug for years, when the real problem may just be they need a good conversation with someone over their wife leaving them. I also do not hold that because all of these drugs have side-effects they should not be taken. Rather, I hold that since these drugs do not work they should not be taken. Almost all drugs, not including neuroleptics (which basically only cause chemical lobotomies) have a 75% placebo effect, with the other 25% being an active placebo effect. I also do not hold that people should not be allowed to take drugs. I feel that people who are PROPERLY INFORMED should be able to take any drug they want, including ritalin or crack for all I care. What concerns me is the hills of lies that surround biological psychiatry and the use of drugs in the world today. Most people, unfortunately, trust what their doctors tell them, and it amazes me how people don't say "huh?" when their doctor tells them they have a chemical imbalance just from talking to them a couple times and never actually looking at their brain.

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