Who Are You Calling Paranoid?

Submitted by tonyplant on July 8, 2006 - 15:03.

AADT has published a funny overview of the recent findings about the level of paranoia in the UK. They quote the BBC account of the statistics that paranoia is nearly as common as anxiety and depression and comment:

Their statistics paint a picture of a nation not quite teetering on the brink of tin foil hat sales and mass hysteria, but still facing an unexpectedly large problem.

I haven't read the original paper but AADT quotes:

• Over 40% of people regularly worry that negative comments are being made about them
• 27% think that people deliberately try to irritate them
• 20% worry about being observed or followed
• 10% think that someone has it in for them
• 5% worry that there is a conspiracy to harm them

I've no idea what the comparable figures are for other countries but it would be a fascinating comparison!

A while ago, Dr. Sanity’s offered a tongue-in-cheek account of command hallucinations. I rather blithely suggested that we need a Happystance to resist these strong command hallucinations and to provide us with personal and social resilience in the face of all the dire news that confronts us on a regular basis. As a consumer of media reporting, I sometimes feel that a lot of it implies that I am been governed by idiots who are incapable of concealing their disdain for me by covering up their attempts to deceive me on matters great and small. Possibly not a fair characterisation, but I'm not sure that media reporting is always a fair characterisation of the issues, people and stories.

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Psychiatrists Admit No Science And No Cures: In A 5 Minute One-Sided Video

Submitted by tonyplant on July 5, 2006 - 09:14.

A video from CCHR (co-founded by the Church of Scientology) is doing the rounds: Psychiatrists Admit No Science and No Cures. The video is 5 minutes long (an automatic defence against being nuanced), one-sided, it features Thomas Szasz, it semi-ambushes a number of American Psychiatric Association conference delegates/psychiatrists on the street who can have had little idea that the material would be used in this way.

I'm taken aback by the video. No, there is no blood test for it, but if a troubled teen self-harms many times a day, I think there is a mental-health problem. However, the video seems to be anti-psychiatry (perhaps this is not surprising, given its origins). I don't understand what is being offered as a solution. It's all well and good to advise us to say, "Gee, Doc. Where's the test for that?" upon hearing a psychiatric diagnosis for a loved one, but what is that supposed to do? Leave us refusing interventions (pharmacological or not) that might help the putative loved one? Depression does have a well-established mortality rate, doesn't it? Or is there some serious and well-researched disagreement on this point?

As for the sneering cui bono question which Szasz answers with, "The people who make the diagnosis", what? Seriously, it's the psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers etc. who benefit? Nice to see that Big Pharma is implicitly left out of the rogue's gallery for once, although I am sure that they would be in the list of secondary beneficiaries or rogues. I know very little about what the Church of Scientology recommends for diagnoses in which they don't believe, but media reports tend to contain the words vitamins and saunas. I have no idea whether they charge for these interventions, I equally have no idea whether or not they are effective although I have my doubts.

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