This all strikes me as both fun and funny, racquetball player that I am - you know, the one stick & ball sport where the stick is strapped on… Nothing funnier than seeing one of those cut loose and shatter against the front wall!

But most importantly, this little device - in a quite direct, unabashed manner - may become the ultimate tool of Masturbation Nation…

Think of the endless possibilities! Skin Flute Hero and Victoria’s Little Secret - prompting a groundswell of concerned parents to endorse an interdisciplinary Catholic Skool Smackdown )

Imagine - just one simple programmable multifunction hand-held plastic unit for all your needs - Strap one on today!

Now I also think biopsychiatry, if you or a loved one is ever deeply unfortunate enough to become involved, has its core weakness unearthed here when it comes to this ‘dualism’. … When you are concerned about the fact that an entire medical fraternity has been throwing darts at a board for fifty years with psychotropics, and the growing millions of undeveloped children being labelled and drugged based on ‘brain chemistry imbalances’ you begin to understand how far reaching an effect ideology can have on us.

Doesn’t the failure of Cartesian dualism vindicate biopsychiatry, since it makes “the mind” a bodily function as easily remedied with drugs as any other ailment of the physical body? A brain chemical imbalance is a psychological condition. There is no seperation; the only distinction is which level we choose to look at it from, whether our phenomenological experience of it (psychology), or from the biological mechanics of it (biology).

It is madness and I can tell you categorically that lifelong mental illness doesn’t exist.

I can tell you categorically that it does. The criteria for mental illness is actually pretty cut-and-dry—when it interferes with a person’s ability to live the way they want to live. There are lots of people who have life-long problems like that, and it’s because there’s no distinction between “mind” and body.

I can tell you that any schizophrenic that has repeated psychosis for years is a victim of two pronged attack from 1. the toxic chemical brain damage inflicted by psychiatry post diagnosis and 2. the status and social anxiety of being labelled a genetically inferior defective human being who is objectified as an outsider for life.

You make it sound as if schizophrenia itself plays no role at all, and that’s simply not true. Now, in the anthropology of medicine, there’s a distinction made between disease (the actual, biological condition), sickness (the phenomenological experience of being “sick”), and illness (the sociological experience of being “sick”). In thesis #22 I made much of Western biomedicine’s myopic focus on disease alone, and praised traditional medical systems for how well they address sickness and illness, and with regards to schizophrenia specifically, it is absolutely true that the illness can at times be worse than the disease, and that other cultures show much healthier ways of dealing with that. It’s also true that our medicines, like any other technology, are subject to unintended consequences (see thesis #16). But if you’re going to suggest that without medication or social pressures that schizophrenics would just be hunky-dory, I think you’ve vastly underestimated the burden schizophrenics have to bear.

Psychiatry, like religion but in a different way is insanity by consensus, disease by consensus, delusion by consensus.

You’re really barking up the wrong tree on this one. Mike briefly worked in a psychiatric hospital, and has a psychology degree, and while I don’t have the certification, it’s only by a few credits; it’s been a long-time fascination of mine. Even Giuli, with her family’s background in social work, has had occasion to visit and work with psychiatric patients. Now, if you want to talk about over-diagnosis of psychiatric medication, or the lack of attention Western medcine gives to illness or sickness, that can be a very fruitful discussion. But psychiatry as a religion? Perhaps in our attitudes towards it, but psychiatry itself is a very methodical medical science. There’s problems in the underlying paradigm, I think, so we can have a fascinating discussion about the philosophy of science in general, but what you write here is sheer hyperbole. Psychiatrists, by in large, are trying to help people as best they know how, and while their failures are matters of concern, the fact of the matter is that their methods do work. There are plenty of people out there who have psychological problems that keep them from living their lives the way they want, and psychiatry helps them to do that. There are some people who would destroy themselves without the aid psychiatrists give them. There’s no sense in romanticizing mental illness; it is illness, just like congestive illness or gastrointestinal illness or any other kind of illness, because the “mind” is a function of the body, and can become diseased as easily as any other part of the body.