Posted by Isaac | Posted in Life | Posted on 01-09-2002
And you, because you are just so eager to eat this nice, juicy steak, get a piece lodged in your throat. Oops. So you’re coughing and turning blue.
But that’s ok – there’s a doctor at the table.
He walks up to you. “Oh. You’re coughing,” he says. “You probably have a cold. Here’s some cough syrup, take it and if it doesn’t clear up in a few days, let me know.”
You cough, sputter and die. Oops again. Hate it when that happens.
See, that’s the problem with naming a disease based on symptoms alone. Many very different diseases have similar symptoms. Are those persistent headaches caused by stress, or a brain tumor (actually, your doctor will really appreciate it if you go in and see him, thinking you have a brain tumor, EVERY time you have a headache – just try it!)? Does your throat hurt because you’ve got strep or just because you were yelling at the concert the night before? Obviously, courses of treatment are much different in each case, and a doctor would be in pretty big trouble if he diagnosed one as the other.
But now, let’s say you’re a little kid and you go into a psychiatrist’s office. And your parents, who have taken you in on the recommendation of your teacher, explain the problem. They tell the psychiatrist you’re always so fidgety, and you never pay attention in class. You’re always too busy doing something else, you’re always incredibly easily distracted. You tell them that you’re bored with school all the time, that you already know everything the teacher is saying. Besides, you tell them, you like the way your brain can think about ten things at once, not getting any line of thought garbled, how you can free-associate really easily. They don’t seem to listen, though.
So they have you do a test. They sit you in front of a computer. “Here’s a game for you to play for 30 minutes,” a nurse tells you. Oh cool, a game, you think. Then you notice the monochrome monitor. Wait a minute. What kind of game uses a monochrome monitor?
She points to the screen, where a solid rectangle sits. “There’s going to be a square that appears either in the top half or the bottom half of the rectangle,” she explains, pointing out for your benefit the location of each half. You glare at her, but she doesn’t seem to notice. “Any time it’s in the top half [another gesture], you press this little button here.” Uhh, right, you think. Half an hour of this shit?
She leaves the room and you’re alone, in the dark except this single, bright fucking orange rectangle. Orange. And so you start to think. There must be some pattern to this, some percentage of times it appears in one half versus the other. Right now, it seems like maybe 2/3 of the time, it’s in the bottom half. So you start to anticipate a little bit. If it’s appeared in the bottom half several times in a row, you pounce on the button the next time one is about to show up, anticipating it. And sometimes you’re wrong, but you’re mostly right. The test moves through phases of different percentages, and you adjust your mental game a bit, getting better at it as you go. And you think you’re pretty clever.
Test results come back later. You’re impulsive, the results say, and have little control over said impulses. Diagnosis: ADD with hyperactivity components. They put you on a drug that, in tests done on lab rats, is indistinguishable from cocaine. You can’t really do all the free associating you used to do. You can concentrate on your classes, sort of, but you become frustrated with the fact that you’re still not learning anything. You continue through school making decent grades, but you don’t really like to learn anymore. You graduate with honors and go to a state school, and then have a job managing a small group of people. And your parents have told you what you used to be like without your meds – rambunctious, always doing silly things, and never sitting still � and you’re so grateful you ended up on Ritalin.
ADD is perhaps the most obvious of the many created “disorders” and “syndromes” that litter modern psychiatry like so many discarded orange peels and cigarette butts. ADD, which can be used to describe children who are misbehaved, stupid brats acting up to get attention or geniuses who are stifled by classes that move too slowly for them. Of course, it’s in a psychiatrist’s best interest to diagnose a disorder.
Of all the kinds of doctors, psychiatrists and psychologists are really the only ones who can really profit by telling you there’s something wrong with you when there’s not. Any other doctor could end up proven wrong if he said, say, you had a chronic kidney problem. But “mental health professionals” can’t really be proven wrong. And nearly everyone’s personality seems to indicate some kind of disorder. The only people who wouldn’t be diagnosed with something by a very thorough shrink would be so boring they’d put anyone of note to sleep.
The problem with psychiatry today is the same problem that medicine had several centuries ago. We have a few generic remedies that we sort of think help somehow, but we’re not entirely sure how. We use each of our remedies for many different diseases, and we don’t even really know the causes of the diseases themselves. It’s medieval. And just as in medieval times, not knowing the causes of the disease and treating with general remedies based on vague symptoms makes it so treatment causes more harm than good.