Sibling Bad Behavior and the Failure of Diagnostic Theory*

Both Psychiatry and psychology are sciences that codify behavior into defined themes, but in general, these definitions remain understudied and, therefore,

somewhat mysterious for many of us. This is especially true when we encounter behaviors so obtuse that decoding the behavior becomes an exercise in discovery of misdeeds, missteps and mistakes.

So I ask…..

Is Psychiatry ultimately an instrument for weakening human resilience, self-reliance and resolve?    Does it turn human beings into mechanisms of coded misbehavior, depriving their conduct of reasoning, which makes them prey to the mystics of human frailty?

 What is this tendency of psychiatric diagnosis to categorize human experience by illustrating them along a shifting diagnostic continuum?  To that end, “personality disorders” serves as the catchall phase that is further delineated with a cornucopia of terms meant to describe characteristics or warnings of diseased mental infarction.

Considering those characteristics, and the extent to which a vast portion of  the Western population exhibits day to day, many of these “personality disorders”, indicates either a mass outbreak of human nastiness and inability to deal with everyday life is occurring,  or the whole business of psychiatric diagnosis must be dubious.

This incomplete list alone informs me the characteristics that make up personality disorders appears closer to a motely collections of misfits and non conformists than to objective laboratory correlatives:

Unjustified suspicions that others are undermining, harming, exploiting or deceiving

Chronic dependency

Persistently grudge-bearing

Avoidance and denial

Detachment from social relations

Limited expression of emotion

Feelings of superiority

Distain for work and productivity

Behavior or appearance that is odd, eccentric or peculiar  “that’s every entertainment personality on the planet!”” And add some politician to this”

Lack of drive, initiative

Poor self image, Lack of self esteem

Persistent and willful irresponsibility

Indifference to risk to self or others

Total disregard for adult responsibility, a protracted adolescence

Irritability and aggressiveness…………

Also, where is the map of the mind, correlated to these pathogenic experiences and how these disorders promulgate the pathology ? The overlap between pathological conditions and those that result from anti-social, psychological factors, or from bad moral judgment, suggests that psychiatry should examine more carefully what it regards as genuine illness.  This in no way means that a manic episode is something to doubt as a presence of illness.

It is that the state of naiveté throughout social and mental services in which health providers, social services and psychiatry now operate, and likely to endure, ensures that they will often be wrong.

My conclusion – that the very act of labeling an extraordinary bad behavior with a codified disease  does more to encourage the pathology—in other words, that the human mind often responds as it is expected—and thereby the psychological fragility of human beings is increased.

As I seek to determine the causal nature of our fragility I bemoan the belief systems of psychiatric medicine that include:

the blotted belief that all human weakness should be divided into these highly selected diagnostic categories, that all human distress arises from malfunctioning serotonin metabolism- the happy hormone; and a challenge to the use of functional MRIs to interpret behavioral anomalies. 

If there is anything we know best about ourselves, our history, our predilections is a firm and unshakable belief of the psychological fragility of human beings, and no amount of categorization of the seven deadly sins can be scientifically superseded by psychiatric diagnoses.

 29 Dec 2013- not all bad behavior is rooted in mental illness. Written as part of a persistent analysis of my brothers’ ongoing behavioral   misdeeds, missteps and mistakes.