Archive for the ‘Doctors, therapists and other health hazards’ Category
Euthanasia for doctors only
Sigmund Freud, who for decades had suffered from cancer of the mouth, refused analgesics until the end. He then had himself prescribed a lethal sedative. In the same way, I am informed that modern doctors afflicted with painful and terminal conditions regularly make their quietus with an overdose of morphine, without necessarily being willing to [...]
Gynaecological knowledge
The Catherine Breillat film ‘Romance’ features a quite unerotic scene in which a patient is used to train medical students in gynaecological examination. Because the scene is not faked, and the half-dozen actors really do insert their hands, up to the wrists, into Caroline Ducey’s vagina, male audiences may acquire their first notion of what [...]
Sanity and income
It is often said that mental ill-health is correlated with poverty. In one way this is true by definition. The old inflection, ‘I am firm, thou art obstinate, he is pig-headed’ has its equivalent in the field of mental health: ‘I am rich and eccentric, thou art middle-income and troubled, he is poor and insane.’ [...]
The invention of memory
There was once a young lady who was enabled, through the technique of repressed-memory recovery, to recall regular rape by her father, resulting in two coathanger abortions. Funnily enough, somatic examination demonstrated not only that she had never been pregnant, but that she was virgo intacta. I do not know how she herself reconciled the [...]
You still need to do the right thing
Arthur Koestler wrote a novel called ‘Arrival and Departure’ about a young man who undergoes classical psychotherapy, resulting in the discovery that his rage at the dictator of his country is a displacement emotion related to a childhood neurosis. It is something to do with the “family romance”, a rabbit and a flowerpot. He is [...]
It does SO apply to us
Kant’s Categorical Imperative, ‘Act as if the maxim of your action were, through your will, to become a universal law’, reads like a reformulation of the Golden Rule, ‘Do as you would be done by’. Unkind things are sometimes said about Teutonic long-windedness. But this is unfair; ‘Do as you would be done by’ does [...]
Bad metaphors in psychotherapy
Several pseudo-sciences, especially economics and popular psychology, borrow the mechanical and thermodynamic concept of ‘equilibrium’, assuming with no further ado that this must always be a Good Thing. Now, unlike the Terran atmosphere, the Martian atmosphere is in chemical equilibrium with the surface. The result is that the planet possesses no motor for life. Equilibrium [...]
The Universal Stigmatisation Personality Disorder
We are all comfortable with saying, ‘I have a pain in my foot’, because everyone thinks of ‘I’ as something separate from, and possessing, a foot. Having become accustomed to speaking of disease and malfunction of the body as something separate from the ‘I’, however, we proceed to talk of someone ‘having’ a mental illness [...]
Dissidents and mental health
Let us imagine a society in which the laws are so widely drawn that everybody contravenes at least half a dozen every day, possibly without even knowing it. Most of the time life will go on as normal, for the police cannot arrest the entire population, including themselves. What will happen instead is that every [...]
How to make literate people seem nuts
The Minnesota Multiple Personality Inventory, one of the classic questionnaires designed to reveal personality disorders, used a double variable in such a way that anyone with any sensitivity to language was going to be very confused. For example, it asked you to rank the statement ‘I have sometimes thought about killing myself’ on a scale [...]
