Today there is a story going around about a mom who left the U.S. so she could continue to give her son bleach enemas to ‘cure’ him of his diagnosed autism spectrum disorder.
Where in the world did this mom and many, many other parents come up with the idea they could ‘cure’ their children of their behaviors, thoughts, and ways of sensing the world around them? Who defines a human being according to a list of mental and behavioral symptoms?
Psychiatrists and psychologists do, that’s who. Psychologists and psychiatrists tell us children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder engage in the world with disordered cognitive, social, and behavioral ‘symptoms.’ It horrifies me, the thought of all the little children being poked, prodded, and violated so adults can attempt to ‘cure’ them from their allegedly symptomatic existence.
The idea people can be mentally and behaviorally disordered is a paradigm for understanding the human personality that is macabre and barbaric. The paradigm that people can be disordered is a conceptual mistake and a hold-over from the days when psychology was a philosophy and not even close to anything resembling a science.
That a person can lead a disordered existence is a conceptual mistake that has slipped through the cracks because psychology and psychiatry do not believe in evaluating, re-evaluating, refining, or consolidating their theories of behavior, cognition, or personality. Psychology has thrown all of its personality and behavioral theories from 1879 through the present into one big pot of theoretical stew. Psychology students are given big dollops of theoretical stew with a side of conceptual mashed potatoes.
Name any psychological theory, such as personality theory or emotion theory, and then research it. You will read anywhere from 2 to 20 theorists’ opinions that are equally weighted. It is up to the student to decide, pot-luck style, which theories and concepts he would like to apply to his research and practice. The psychological theories used to define and describe psychological disorders have never been clearly or uniformly defined or described in the first place. The fields of psychology and psychiatry are chaotic, unstructured, unscientific and the controversy that has plagued the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) since its inception is for good reason.
Name any psychological theory, such as personality theory or emotion theory, and then research it. You will read anywhere from 2 to 20 theorists’ opinions that are equally weighted. It is up to the student to decide, pot-luck style, which theories and concepts he would like to apply to his research and practice. The psychological theories used to define and describe psychological disorders have never been clearly or uniformly defined or described in the first place. The fields of psychology and psychiatry are chaotic, unstructured, unscientific and the controversy that has plagued the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) since its inception is for good reason.
Why doesn’t psychiatry and psychology evaluate, refine, clarify, and unify its existing concepts and theories in order to apply them uniformly for research and practice? Well, these fields are devoid of a paradigm to guide their observations, research, and practices, that’s why. The current paradigm of DISORDER that guides what gets written into the DSM exists by default. The paradigm of default is that people can be mentally and/or behaviorally DISORDERED due to PSYCHOLOGICAL FACTORS.
And as long as the paradigm of ‘disorder’ due to ‘psychological factors’ is the guiding ideology used by the psychiatrists who make up and then vote on the disorders written in the DSM, there will be people who will try to seek ‘cures’ for these alleged disorders.
Can our behaviors and our thoughts and even our senses be disordered? This makes neither linguistic or biological sense, let alone logical sense.
The sad fact is, psychiatrists get away with not having theoretical clarity or a unified paradigm because psychiatrists claim people are far too complicated to understand definitively. Psychiatrists believe making up disorders as explanations for why people think and behave as they do is the best they can do for the time being. Psychologists believe there are far too many ‘psychological factors’ lurking inside of people to ever fully understand people anytime soon. And this is the absolute truth. Read any text about psychology or psychiatry and to a number they say they do not know anything definitely about what causes people to think and behave as they do, and they don’t expect to for a long time to come. Psychologists and psychiatrists openly and unashamedly acknowledge that although they are the reigning experts on human behavior they do not understand people and their DSM is a flawed book because of it. They openly admit that that making up and then voting on behavioral, cognitive, personality, and social disorders to put into the DSM for the purposes of diagnosing and treating potential psychiatric patients is the best they can do considering all they don’t know. This would be comical if the consequences of their bumbling weren’t so tragic.
As the experts on human behavior who freely admit they know little about why people behave as they do, they put most of their stock in the mysterious entities they have named psychological factors. What is a psychological factor exactly? Where do psychological factors reside in a person? Do psychological factors reside in a person’s brain, in his body, in society?? Exactly how to psychological factors impact the behaviors and thoughts of people? The DSM is based upon the existence of psychological factors that allegedly affect people and have the power to cause them to think and behave in disordered ways. Yet for all the power psychological factors allegedly have over people, the term psychological factor has never been clearly defined or even unclearly defined. It is a non-term, term. Psychology and psychiatry are chock-full of vague, unclarified, non-term, terms like poor self-esteem, trust issues, mood, mood disorder, difficult temperament, character, positive thinking, negative thinking, attachment disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, dissociative disorder, borderline personality disorder, etc. The whole DSM is filled with vague terminology.
The term autism was coined by a man named Eugene Blueler in 1908. Bleueler used the word autism to describe a patient of his who he believed had retreated into himself. Auto means self. Ism, when used medically, means a condition or disease. So autism is a disease of the self. Specifically, Blueler defined autism as the morbid self-admiration and withdrawal within self.
Do you think a single psychiatric student from, say, Harvard, Yale, or Lorain County Community College between 1910 and 2015 could have lobbied for re-evaluating and refining the term autism and the definition behind it?
How rigid is this field that they make few structural changes since the 1900's? They add new research constantly, but they never refine or re-evaluate old ideas, theories, terms, or research. I would love to say this field needs a paradigm shift. But it would need a paradigm to shift in order to shift it. It needs a bloody paradigm to begin with, and it needs one yesterday.
As long as autism is defined as a disorder, “Autism Spectrum Disorder,” and as long as autism is described as a list of behavioral symptoms, people will seek cures.
Allen Francis, the psychiatrist who led the writing of the DSM-4 and professor emeritus and former chair of psychiatry and behavioral science department of Duke University came out of retirement to criticise the newly revised DSM-5 because he has come to realize the DSM has contributed to psychiatric fads, diagnostic inflation, and over-medication, particularly of children. Francis believes the DSM is a book that has pathologized normal human thoughts and behaviors.
If we recognize every single person is an integrated biological whole with a brain that uniquely coordinates his or her sensory, motor, and nervous systems then we will realize all human behaviors serve and support the brain’s requirements and directives. There can be no such thing as behavioral disorders with this paradigm. Behaviors do not occur for no reason. Behaviors do not occur due to disordered reasons. Behaviors do not occur because someone is disordered. Behaviors occur for very specific and important reasons relating to the capacities and capabilities of the person’s brain who is exhibiting the behaviors.
All behaviors serve important purposes to the people exhibiting them. Behaviors are not random identifiable constructs that can be singled out and judged for how they do or do not make sense to an observer any more than one’s breathing rhythm can be judged ordered or disordered by an observer. Mental capacities and behaviors integrate to allow a person to sense, orient, think, conclude, and form predictive decisions for what to do next. One’s thinking processes cannot be disordered or ill. The term mental illness makes no more sense than the term behavioral or personality disorder.
Even when a person has a brain injury they will still think and behave according to how their injured brain is able to coordinate and integrate their sensory, motor, and nervous systems with the injury in place. The brain injured person doesn’t turn ‘disordered’ due to his brain injury. The brain injured person will think differently and his behaviors will reflect the changes in how he is able to sense, orient, think, form conclusions, and make predictive decisions for what to do next. The brain injured person will be making predictive decisions and behaving according to how he is able to based on how he is able to understand information and manage the outcomes of his decisions. The brain injured person will never make predictive decisions based on how a psychiatrist has randomly decided he should any more than a child labeled with autism will.
Every single person in the world is making sense of the world in ways that make sense to them. Nobody’s thinking is disordered from his or her perspective. In fact, the children who are diagnosed with autism and considered to be behaviorally, socially, and cognitively disordered exist along side this odd definition every day. Every day we can observe these so-called ‘disordered’ children making perfect sense to themselves as they go about their days, but psychiatrists and psychologists look them and their parents in the eye and say, nope, you make no sense to us so you are disordered. And then the parents hope for and look for cures.
What if we described people by how they think and behave instead of how we think they should think and behave according to how we make sense of the world? Due to the nature of the work, all psychiatrists and psychologists are verbal, conceptual, and social thinkers. They sense, think, and move quite differently than the children they have identified as having autism. Psychologists and psychiatrists have defined disordered thinking against how they are able to think and make sense of the world. This is because they do not have a paradigm for or a theory of personality. They are using themselves as a benchmark for normal instead of a working theory of personality.
Here’s a humane example of how we could be describing children who have been told their existence consists of behavioral, social, and cognitive symptoms.
Some children process information slowly and often prefer to engage one sense at a time while observing their environment and managing themselves in it. If the environment has many sights and sounds occurring all at once, some children will experience extreme anxiety because the sensory overload will cause them to lose their ability to make predictive decisions for what to do next. Some children will consistently seek out quiet, uncluttered, and small spaces within which to play and work. Some children are skilled at figuring out patterns and how things work systemically. They prefer to interpret their environments by orienting to the patterns and systems around them instead of trying to figure out how to read people’s facial gestures or listen to their words. Some children connect to other people quite successfully and MEANINGFULLY in non-verbal ways. Some children think in images and never or only sometimes think in words. Some children don’t pay attention to words because they words don’t hold much meaning for them. Some children pay close attention to patterns, systems, and structures in their environment to orient themselves in it.
Any child who is prevented from orienting themselves in their environment according to how they are able to understand information and manage their sensory-motor capacities will suffer extreme anxiety. Environments that do not accommodate how a child can sense, think, and move will make the child appear disordered, but it is the environment that is disordered, not the child. We need to fix how we interpret our children, not our children.
No more bleach enemas. Let’s change the paradigm of psychiatry and psychology so parents are not led to believe they need to cure their children of inborn behavioral, cognitive, and/or social disorders. The field of psychiatry and psychology is disordered, not the children it is diagnosing.
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