Posted by Racer on January 30, 2004, at 17:43:50
In reply to Re: Is depression a disease?, posted by Ilene on January 30, 2004, at 13:02:07
I read the entire debate -- which was not easy to find, because both the doctors in the Szasz camp only put parts of it on their websites and the original transcript is buried on the NCPA website. If you read the *entire* debate, you'll find that the good points from the Szasz camp are almost entirely hidden by their vitriolic rhetoric and their refusal to debate rather than proclaim.
Seems to me, this is a question of Faith and Belief, rather than a valid debate.
For what it's worth, though, both sides raised some questions that seemed valid to me. The Szasz Section has a debatable point in questioning whether calling Clinical Depression a medical disease results in medication to the exclusion of psychotherapy. (The only one on that side I didn't consider a total and complete crank or wacko, by the way, was the guy who kept insisting that he wanted to see the pathology. I think he's misguided, but not a crank.) The other side, though, had a much stronger point in the observation that many diseases are described -- and successfully treated -- before the pathology is fully understood. (For that matter, aspirin was used for centuries before anyone figured out how it worked.)
The two main issues I had with the entire debate transcripts were these:
1. Both sides lost track of their arguments. The Yes Men allowed themselves to be dragged into the murkiness the No Guys created. The No Guys didn't so much propose premises, as willfully obscure the issues involved on both sides.
2. This debate was not really about depression as a physiological process, it was about the politics of treating mental illness. Szasz has spent decades saying that there is no such thing as mental illness, that all of those conditions described by other physicians as mental illness are actually irresponsibility and flawed character. He does have an agenda.
By the way, I would have loved to moderate a debate like that -- provided I had the leeway to stop both sides from yanking the focus away from the issue at hand. In fact, I would love to be involved with an argument of that sort, as long as I had the chance to point out EVERY logical fallacy I saw.
Thanks for linking to this. Reading the entire transcript was enlightening -- especially seeing how the Good Doctors abridged the versions they posted on sites supporting their own views.
poster:Racer
thread:306610
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20040120/msgs/307453.html