Diseases are regularly misdiagnosed as one another in all fields of medicine, and the skill and thoughtfulness of the individual physician comes into play here.
On some level what you are describing is always going to be a problem in the treatment of people with mental illness, because some of these patients genuinely do not understand themselves or their symptoms in the moment, and would not make decisions in their own best interest. It's not good or moral to always give that kind of "freedom" which is really just abandonment and neglect.
Of course, like everything in America, mental illness is overcriminalized and overmedicalized. The demands of capitalism for an obedient, orderly population of workers and consumers definitely contributes to what it means to be "dysfunctional." The interventions that are given for these patients are not at all benign. But I wager that some form of psychiatry would still exist under socialism and that it would still have some of these ethical quandaries you are alluding to.
Maybe I don't understand your point. I thought you were saying that the problem with psychiatry is the interpretation of patients' subjective experiences as "symptoms," so that eg. a person with PTSD denying that they have bipolar disorder is paradoxically interpreted as a "symptom" of bipolar disorder. That just sounds like shitty medicine to me.
But yes also subjective experiences are the symptoms of psychiatric disorders and I don't see a way around this. It's the same in therapy... a counselor trained in CBT is going to challenge a depressed patient's automatic negative thoughts about themselves, recognizing those thoughts as symptoms rather than something completely valid and true.
And I still think that even in a socialist society you wouldn't be able to treat active psychosis, or mania with homicidal or suicidal ideation (to name a couple obvious examples) with talk therapy. You need someone who is trained in interpreting these symptoms within the framework of psychiatric disorders, and in treating them. Neurologists really don't ever prescribe medications for psych diseases.
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Diseases are regularly misdiagnosed as one another in all fields of medicine, and the skill and thoughtfulness of the individual physician comes into play here.
On some level what you are describing is always going to be a problem in the treatment of people with mental illness, because some of these patients genuinely do not understand themselves or their symptoms in the moment, and would not make decisions in their own best interest. It's not good or moral to always give that kind of "freedom" which is really just abandonment and neglect.
Of course, like everything in America, mental illness is overcriminalized and overmedicalized. The demands of capitalism for an obedient, orderly population of workers and consumers definitely contributes to what it means to be "dysfunctional." The interventions that are given for these patients are not at all benign. But I wager that some form of psychiatry would still exist under socialism and that it would still have some of these ethical quandaries you are alluding to.
deleted by creator
Maybe I don't understand your point. I thought you were saying that the problem with psychiatry is the interpretation of patients' subjective experiences as "symptoms," so that eg. a person with PTSD denying that they have bipolar disorder is paradoxically interpreted as a "symptom" of bipolar disorder. That just sounds like shitty medicine to me.
But yes also subjective experiences are the symptoms of psychiatric disorders and I don't see a way around this. It's the same in therapy... a counselor trained in CBT is going to challenge a depressed patient's automatic negative thoughts about themselves, recognizing those thoughts as symptoms rather than something completely valid and true.
And I still think that even in a socialist society you wouldn't be able to treat active psychosis, or mania with homicidal or suicidal ideation (to name a couple obvious examples) with talk therapy. You need someone who is trained in interpreting these symptoms within the framework of psychiatric disorders, and in treating them. Neurologists really don't ever prescribe medications for psych diseases.
deleted by creator