QUOTE(Malleus @ Tue 10th November 2009, 4:13pm)
QUOTE(Milton Roe @ Tue 10th November 2009, 9:46pm)
Um, how do YOU know whether or not most behavorioral disorders are rooted in a physical condition?."
I don't need to "know", I simply need to be able to find Occam's Razor. For many conditions, nothing is explained by the medical model of "illness" that can't be equally well explained by more straight-forward psychological explanations.
Or to put it another way, I don't believe in mental illness for the same reason I don't believe in ghosts, or life after death.
But you have not a single instance where somebody provably survived death, or some ghost was proven to exist. If you did, you'd have a tough time applying Occam's razor to all the other cases. You could say that if you found 99 swans that weren't black, that the 100th would also not be black. That might be Occam's razor, but Occam cannot be trusted even there. If you do find ONE, then what does Occam tell you THEN?
In the case of mental illness, we have many types of psychosis which are demonstrably caused by physical factors, many (indeed most) of which were initially not recognized. For example mental illness in niacin and thiamin deficiencies, and later increased risk of schizophrenia in soldiers who had sustained pentrating head wounds. Inductively, I would suppose that many more causes of mental illness have yet to be identified, and that we have not come to the point that "psychological explanations" suffice for all the remainder that we have not so-far classified as "organic." Occam's razor doesn't really apply here: I could just as well argue that the fraction of psychoses associated with physical causes has risen over the years, and that Occam's razor suggests that it will continue to rise to 100%.
QUOTE
Your analysis is also very simplistic, ignoring as it does the cultural aspects of "mental illness". Many of those revered as saints in medieval times would be considered the most hopeless lunatics if they were alive today. When do you think that the concept of mental illness first emerged?
It's hard to say, but roughly it does correspond to the time of the post-Newtonian enlightenment, when religious explanations for everything were on the wane.
However, if you give up religion, you're left as a mechanist. The brain is a mechanical computer, programmed by culture, and all the programming shows up as mechanical changes to tissue (firmware)-- some of it reversible and some not. By this reasoning, there are no "purely" psychological behavioral problems. They're all a result of some change in the brain which may (or may not) be reversible by further verbal conversation or behavioral modification. Simple enough. Why do you assume they should be? Do you really think that every change I can make to a mechanical computerized system with a software command, is reversable with a software command fix? I sure as hell am not going to make you head of National Computer Security, then. Again I'm arguing inductively, but if you want to toss out religion and view the brain as a very complicated mechanical device, you have little other choice but to argue by analogy to the computers we do understand.
And if you want to argue from biology, there are any number of experimental models were you can show that behavioral imprinting on young animals is absolutely irreversible later with the same techniques. What is your "psychological" model for that? Indeed the same is true for humans in ways that are very familiar: for example, most people can learn to speak any given language (or more than one) without an accent, if exposed to it as toddlers. But it's a rare person who can learn a second one without any accent, after puberty. The psychological stimuli are the same, but the outcomes are different. So what is the "psychological" explanation of that behavioral imprint? What would Occam say?