From: Vincent Campbell (VCampbell@dmu.ac.uk)
Date: Mon 12 May 2003 - 10:35:45 GMT
Good God not more interpersonal sparring instead of reasoned discussion?
And the same culprits?
Anyway, on the issue of personality disorders, and their definitions, did
nobody spot the the obvious flaws in the first part of that definition?
Here's the line:
<An enduring pattern of inner experience and behavior that deviates from
the expectations of an individual's culture>
So you have a 'personality disorder' if you do not conform to cultural
expectations? Does Noam Chomsky have a personality disorder therefore, for
being counter to the prevalent political ideology of the US? Maybe the
claim that the likes of Einstein and Newton had Asperger's syndrome, carries
weight in such circles too? Who decides what the 'expectations' of the
culture are?
Where once people were simply locked up as subversives, or non-conformists,
and before then burned at the stake for being heretics or witches, now in
our post-freudian capitalist democracies people are labelled with
personality disorders and given prozac, ritalin or some other drug.
I quote Rosenhan & Seligman 'Abnormal Psychology' ,3rd edition, 1995, on the
definitional problem of the antisocial personality disorder:
'There is often debate about whether or not a person is actually suffering a
personality disorder, and that debate arises from the very nature of the
disorder itself. The antisocial personality disorder is a disorder of will,
and will is not an all-or-nothing matter. One does not either have or not
have will. Rather, like most other psychological functions, will exists on
a continuum: normal people have more or less of it, but those who suffer
this disorder have even less. The line that divides those who suffer
disorders from the rest of us is arbitrary.' (p.571)
I guess 'will' here is equated with willingness to conform to society, as
opposed to willingness to do what you want to do regardless of others, in
which case the deliberately anti-social would seem to have rather a lot of
'will'.
In this culture of disorders, probably half the list have oppositional
defiant disorder. (BTW if you disagree with this, then you've definitely got
it, and if you don't care either way you've probably got a dissociative
disorder instead :-).)
From someone suffering from 'interested in memetics disorder'....
Vincent
===============================================================
This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Mon 12 May 2003 - 10:50:24 GMT