Viewing Psychiatry and Education as Quackery
By John L. Waters
July 6, 2005
© Copyright 2005 by John L. Waters. All Rights Reserved
It's possible to view modern psychiatry and modern education as quackery. To see how, read on.
Educators, educational psychologists, and psychiatrists identify a shy child as "schizoid." Years later, after continual social pressures and other stresses have produced a much stronger personal reaction, the psychiatrists label the same person a "schizophrenic." The types of schizophrenic presently featured in the DSM-IV are (1) Catatonic schizophrenics produce bizarre body movements and unusual postures. (2) Paranoid schizophrenics produce delusions of reference and/or delusions of persecution. (3) Hebephrenic schizophrenics produce inappropriate affect and florid symptomatology (hallucinations and delusions.)
Problems arise because a schizophrenic will exhibit symptoms of one type of schizoprenia and then exhibit symptoms of another type. The elaborate classification in the DSM-IV falls flat. Another problem is that medications which work on one type of schizophrenic work on the other types. There isn't any objective way to distinguish these three types because they are all expressions of the same condition. A third problem is that the medications used to modify the symptoms of schizophrenia have some profoundly negative side effects.
Quote from a paper by Joseph A. Lieberman, III, M.D., M.P.H.
"Since atypical antipsychotics tend to have lower rates ofside effects than the conventional agents, they can be in-valuable to the treatment of schizophrenia. The risk of sideeffects does exist, though, and anticholinergic side effects,if left untreated, have the potential to cause serious medicalcomplications. Physicians can help patients avoid thesemedical complications through awareness of the signs andsymptoms of anticholinergic side effects and of effectivemanagement of these symptoms."
Another system for subdividing schizophrenic patients is based on symptom dimensions. (1) Psychotic symptoms include hallucinations and delusions. (2) Negative symptoms include blunted or restricted affect, social withdrawal, and poverty of speech. (3) Verbal communication problems and bizarre behavior are included in the third symptom dimension, which is called disorganization. This system of subdividing schizophrenics has led to a much new research. No breakthrough, however, is being celebrated.
All this is flat-out quackery, supported by hundreds of millions of dollars paid by gullible citizens. Independent research by the world-famous psychologist Hans Jurgen Eysenck suggests a better idea.
Eysenck has written a book entitled "Genius: the Natural History of Creativity." (Eysenck, H. J. (Hans Jurgen), "Genius : the natural history of creativity"
Publisher: Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 1995.) In this book he argues that creative geniuses and schizoprenics both have a high degree of divergent thinking he calls "psychoticism." This divergent thinking enables both the creative genius and the psychotic to get all sorts of wacky ideas. Geniueses tend to be odd. My English is less subtle than Eysenck's, but you get the point. Better yet, don't just read this article. Read Eysenck's book yourself.
Eysenck argues that environment makes a big difference. His research indicated that on the average, recognized creative geniuses were cultured in a positive nurturing social environment relatively free of stress. Recognized schizophrenics had to endure a great deal more daily stress. Talk about shell shock! Decades of hard knocks produced insanity in the schizophrenics. In a better culture all or nearly all of these children high in psychoticism will develop into creative geniuses. Testing this idea is possible! Just raise under optimal conditions one hundred orphans scoring high in psychoticism. Record the results. Compare with an equal number of "controls" who grow up in some crime-infested neighborhood and attend a traditional school.
The creative genius-enhancing parameters will include (1) optimal daily diet, (2) daily exposure to fine music, fine art, real science, and other inspiring subjects produced by creative geniuses. (3) Genius teachers will be present to guide and inspire. (4) Other parameters yet to be determined will be added over time.
Psychoticism produces divergent thinking, so that the child doesn't stay on a single track. In saltations the child who has high psychoticism moves back and forth among many subjects. To a child with high psychoticism, the same object suggests many other objects and one word or sentence suggests different ideas. In the same amount of time a simple sketch suggests ten different apparently unrelated ideas or things. Rather than spend three hours a day learning "facts" by rote, a child high in psychoticism sometimes breaks into florid imagination (not yet a florid psychosis) and gets a lot of funny answers. If kept in pedagogical chains, boredom and other negative brain activities will set in. A few days of traditional school teaches the child with high "psychoticism" that school is a hell hole. The trapped child will LEARN HOW TO ESCAPE from school. Multiply that early lesson by one thousand and you get THE ANSWER. Many congenitally bright young people become disillusioned and eventually they drop out or freak out. Society is the big loser because society loses the benefit of their natural talent.
Imaginative people can help create a better educational system and a better culture which is not so destructive to what's natural in nature and what's natural in children, especially the children who are most gifted in creative exploration and in "psychoticism."
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About the author: John L. Waters is an amateur psychologist and independent researcher on self-healing, integration, and
problem-solving. John has created thousands of drawings, paintings, instrumental music and songs, prose works, and poetry, and he has used his research to help persons solve a difficult problem. For
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