From: PhilSin-AT-aol.com
Date: Mon, 22 Jun 1998 10:03:58 EDT
Subject: Re: Heidegger and Psychiatry


     Rick, In a message dated 97-10-11 13:39:00 EDT, you write:

<< When you ask  "What does it mean, what's going on when someone reports that
 "I am depressed"?", I think it a very important question.  Most people
 using such words are not qualified to be making a medical diagnosis 

     The first thing we need to address here is the word "qualified". What
does qualify someone to make this "medical" diagnosis?

     Can you count?? 

     That's all the qualification you need. The current diagnostic system in
psychiatry requires only a lumping and counting of "symptoms" to make a
diagnosis of a brain disorder. Forget precipitants, they don't count. Forget
phenomenological considerations or inquiries into meaning and significance.
Too unscientific. Forget the role of the media, marketing, and the American
vulnerability to promises of simple solutions to complex problems (that
previously fueled the widespread prescription of opiates, amphetamines, and
benzodiazepines for human distress, and most recently the prescribing of new
drugs for obesity, all by those "qualified" to make medical diagnoses). Not
relevant.

 Get the point?


       You mentioned:

  If we take the case that "Language is the
 House of Being", when one says, "I am depressed",


     I think one of the most fascinating aspects of watching the growth of the
medical model in psychiatry has been the opportunity to watch language at
work. I have witnessed a change in the signifier "depression" from a term used
to try to describe a state of emotion to a word that describes an illness. Not
just in the minds of "experts", but throughout the culture. That gets me
thinking about babies being born today. They will be shaped into beings who
conceive of negative emotions as a technical issue. They will have a hard time
ever getting behind this background intelligibility. Will they become the
brain-tissue-based beings we are intent on creating? What will that world be
like?


     Yours

     Phil




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