By Marvin Ross
The current pandemic is bringing out all the anti-science mayvens including those in the anti-psychiatry faction. Covid is having a major impact on our anxiety and depression thanks to the isolation we must endure, the economic impact and the very real fear of contracting the virus and dying. Mind you, I do have to wonder how people coped during the depression and the second world war. Those periods were longer than what we’ve endured to date. In fact, the best comment I heard was from General Rick Hillier, the former Chief of the Canadian Defence Staff and NATO Commander in Afghanistan, who has been put in charge of Ontario’s Covid vaccine distribution. He said if Canadians could storm the beaches of Normandy, why can people not sit on their own couches and go nowhere to defeat this.
A valid point but in response to the mental distress all this is causing, psychologist John Read has used that to attack the validity of schizophrenia in Psychology Today. He begins his article with:
During the pandemic, increased incidences of distress can be portrayed as proliferations of mental illnesses such as ‘Depressive Disorder’ and ‘Anxiety Disorder.’ Alternatively, we can talk about our fears, worries, grief, pessimism, and despondency as understandable reactions to the general crisis and to our personal losses, actual and anticipated.
I have to agree with him when he says he prefers the second explanation that these feelings are reactions to the reality we all face. Some, he suggests, are claiming that these reactions are diagnoses based upon the medical model. But, then, he veers off into revisiting the work of Emil Kraepelin and Eugen Bleuler who first described schizophrenia. From their perspective, he says, they discovered schizophrenia whereas, in reality, they invented it.
The problem Kraepelin faced, he said, was that some people actually got better when he argued that the condition was incurable. Bleuler, however, went on to suggest that Kraepelin had grouped together a number of very different conditions so Bleuler began using the term the schizophrenias. Unfortunately, the plural has been forgotten as it does account for why the outcomes and severity of the condition vary.
As for the symptoms listed by these two, Read states that they “read rather like a list of broken social norms.” Read then concludes that there is no evidence to suggest that any of this is a biological disease. Kraepelin was unable, in 1913, to find any abnormalities in the brain but who is surprised by that? He then asserts that this absence of any biological proof continues today. The hyperlink he provides as proof of that does not work but the footnotes go to one of his own writings and to that of another of the anti-psychiatry psychologists. He ignores a great deal of current evidence.
The only thing someone diagnosed today with schizophrenia gets is a great deal of medication and stigma. Of course, he ignores how many people have had their lives improved by the use of these pharmaceutical agents. He ends by stating that:
Today, when we experience severe levels of distress and grief, whether or not it is related to the pandemic, we deserve better than scientifically meaningless, medical-sounding labels that wrongly imply there is something biologically defective about us as individuals, which in itself is depressing, and that run the risk of unnecessary medical interventions.
Of course, the reference to unnecessary interventions is one of his own negative articles about the role of anti-depressants.