Psychology doesn't work by just declaring someone is mentally ill because they think differently than you. I will say this flat-out - this is a dangerous ideology that led to the oppression and killing of *a lot* of people, and goes against the very core of what we have established with modern science. Homosexuals were once considered mentally ill, for example. Christians and Jews were killed for the first 300 years of Christianity's existence because they were different from the polytheistic greek/roman religion that was popular at the time. At least have the decency to recognize the damage the Enlightenment had, leading to racism via Social Darwinism, and co-opting of evolutionary theory to justify oppression.
2 years ago 路 馃憤 november
Always be skeptical of mainstream media, even those that claim to be freedom, you should always be vigilant, there may always be feces in the information 路 2 years ago
I dont quite get the point you are trying to make. Wikipedia defines a mental illness as "behavioral or mental pattern that causes significant distress or impairment of personal functioning". This means that by definition "mentally ill" has alreay some kind of normative bias (what is personal functioning) and is usually precieved negative, as illness is considered negative. Logic on the other hand just tells things like if A or B and B is false then A is true; similar for reason. Those cannot tell something like illness is "good" or "bad". Of course, the thinkers of enlightment (had to) define things like good and bad, putting it simple, but I dont see the connection. 路 2 years ago
@november Interesting point that I agree with, but I also think it's a bit more than that. For example, Durkheim proposed that depression and suicides rise when people do not have enough structure in their life. We've been seeing more individualism and less solidarity (less connections with people) rising over time. Everyone nowadays is connected at a distance - there's no real community. And Individualism is putting too much pressure on people to "find themselves," as if people aren't already themselves, and there's reduced communal inter-dependence.
In fact, this mental health crisis and feeling run down is the very topic my "Christian Spirituality and Prayer" class is about 路 2 years ago
There is certainly something to be said about how the modern "mental health crisis" is largely being caused by rampant unchecked capitalism and its effects, but psychologists as a whole are just people. Some good, some bad. 路 2 years ago
@comatoast The other thing is just because a field has bad actors, that does not mean the whole field is bad. This is an argument that gets so overused, and frankly, it's illogical. It's used by New Atheists to hate on Religion. It's used by Religious Extremists. It's used to perpetuate the very sociological and class issues that you mention by stereotyping immigrants and lower classes. It was used by Myanmar to kill Muslims. It was used to scapegoat Jews and Christians when Nero blamed a fire on them. It was used by the Arians in Christianity. It is used against LGBTQ+ people. It is used by people who reject Sociology as a field. It was used by the Holocaust. 路 2 years ago
@comatoast There's much more to psychology than psychoanalytic theory or how psychology is portrayed in the media or pop culture. We have solid evidence for much of developmental psychology, including periods for when children start to develop in different areas.
Most people who say it's a quack field have never studied it beyond a superficial knowledge, or reject its means of getting information (something that is also debated between cognitive linguists and neurological linguists, and even sociologists and anthropologists).
People can debate all day about epistemology. Those arguments are mostly useless to me. 路 2 years ago
Psycology is kind of a quack feild anyways. I mean, it only justifies its existence as a means to deter revolutionary potential away from sociological and class issues. It's just another way ideological hegemony of capital remains in power. It's also pretty much just pseudo science; Discluding nerochemistry and drugs that help people, but, on that same note that still goes back to my first point. 路 2 years ago
@november I also intended to bring up the Holocaust as well, but didn't have enough room in the post :D 路 2 years ago
@november Lol :D
Yeah, I think people take a lot of things they've been taught, and their culture, for granted. I doubt most people have actually studied the philosophies of the Enlightenment much (including myself - I only know a fraction of what I probably should learn, tbh). I'm not trying to deny all of the good the Enlightenment had, but we also have to recognize all of the negatives as well. People (including me) get so wrapped up in Logic and Reason that we forget that Reason is not the only way to know things. And this is precisely what the age of Romanticism critiqued.
That, and stereotyping religions, which is one of my biggest pet peeves. 路 2 years ago
I just spent the last five minutes trying to find the words to express why I think so many culturally-Christian atheists are Like This (speaking as a culturally-Christian atheist myself), but I can't really come up with anything satisfying. 路 2 years ago