The Myth of Multiple Personality Disorder
With nonsense like this going on and being so influential, it’s hard to get completely up in arms about Scientology’s ignorance and rejection of modern psychiatric science.
And Repressed Memory Syndrome! Oh gods…remember the 80s and early 90s? All the kids suing relatives and old neighbours over their repressed memories of sexual abuse? People went to JAIL over those alleged memories.
notcuddles—actually, the bottom of the article: Via The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, NPR, Mayo Clinic, Psychology Today.
And I wasn’t discussing Scientology as a whole…I was looking around for a quick “here’s a group that dismisses psychology” and they came to mind first. It was quick and glib—my intention was that we dismiss Scientology because it’s completely made-up and crazy, so their dismissal of psychiatry just seems one more reason to add to the list of proof (of their crazy)…but then we discover that there are parts of psychiatry that are equally dubious.
My attitude is based on a lifetime of resentment that while people will easily agree to dismiss religion as being silly because it’s not scientific but based on people and their ideas, that anything that can call itself Science is automatically Truth. (I’m not the slightest bit religious btw) Science is constantly held up as Truth. And with that, Medicine and Psychiatry. And then time and time again, we find that there are psychiatric diagnosis based on assumption, guesswork and sheer fantasy. We give over care of our psyches to people who we trust to take care of them because we believe that they are essentially scientists—dispassionate, interested only in truth and facts, they possess the knowledge we don’t but which we need to be better. But they are people doing work based on assumptions about the reasons for assumed behaviour (ADD was first observed in British poorhouses in the late 1800’s—the doctor observing the behaviour labelled it as the result of poor parenting). Education, experience, life can all change those assumptions. (I once had a psychiatrist try to explain to me that “there was no way” that being raised with an abusive alcoholic father could possibly have affected me negatively—turns out he had worked on a native reservation for a decade and that was his standard of measurement for “affect”, rather than any actual “scientific” principle.)
MPD has never ever had universal acceptance from the psychiatric field; it’s never had an overwhelming acceptance. Even with psychiatrists who have had patients who could be considered MPD—that’s one of the reasons for the change in classification and division into different disorders, and why (as the article suggests) many doctors now try to treat the issues which cause the behaviour and not worry about labelling the behaviour.
We now live in a world where we understand that doctors are only human and not perfect—where two people with the exact same set of symptoms for cancer could see two different doctors and end up with two radically different treatments depending on that doctor’s research, experience, prejudices and ideas. We need to have that same level of awareness about psychiatrists, to go in educated, and to know what we’re talking about…and to understand what they’re talking about and why.
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tokyo4dinner reblogged this from keiren-smith
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notcuddles reblogged this from keiren-smith and added:
good, I’m glad some schmuck without any kind...credentials, writing on
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keiren-smith posted this
