/lit/ - Literature

>>13131333
I actually studied this for my postgrad work at the kcl institute of psychiatry. I really really feel it was written in good faith and is a genuine attempt to understand real phenomena in a medical context. I don't buy the 60s anti-psychiatry extremism a la szasz + Foucault, nor the cynical 'big pharma' paranoia. Mental disorders are real and are not cultural inventions in a significant sense. HOWEVER the medical DSM approach is clearly not the full picture; psychiatric medication is not curative and is only symptomatic relief at best. The continued revision of the DSM is most optimistically seen as a struggle towards higher and higher resolution images of reality. For example, somebody could exhibit the same symptoms over the last 50 years, and first be diagnosed with 'manic depression', then restyled as 'bi-polar disorder', then rediagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder (restyled as 'Emotionally Unstable PD'), then rediagnosed as 'Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder'. This should be seen as the product of a series of mini paradigm shifts, it is NOT arbitrary, each re-phrasing gets closer to the reality of the individual's pathology, each diagnosis becomes more accurate. And so the understanding of this person's support network becomes deeper and more effective. There is too much cynicism surrounding psychology and psychiatry, just because it doesn't already have simple answers to extremely complex phenomena. Those are just my two cents.

To me, my will (in the sense of the supposed autonomy of the individual) isn't free as it is just an expression or manifestation of the freedom of the Will [In Artie's sense]. To tie my position together, the Will goes on eternally manifesting all possibilities. Each instance of the universe arising represents one realisation of one possibility (there are as many universes coming one after another- with all other ones potentially happening simultaneously alongside ours- as their are possibilities). The notion of individual free will we have is just the Will's way of realising a possibility.

You are bound to act out the possibilities of the universe you occupy but there are as many universes happening sequentially as their are different possibilities. "Chance": i exist in all the universes its possible for me to exist in and in many different ways- as many different ways as its possible for me to exist-, but this specific me will come around again and recur infinite times- as will all the instances of me (but "i" only ever experience this possibility), i suppose its could be looked at as chance or arbitrary that we have this specific experience.