Psychiatry condemned for over-reaching

Science and its associated intellectual pursuits have long been of interest to me because of the certainty that practitioners claim and the public mostly accept about “discoveries”.  Previous posts here and here have highlighted the dangers of unchallenged acceptance of what that may turn out to be an honest misreading of evidence, perhaps a limited account of the facts, even outrageous self-promotion.  The point is, investigate all that is in the natural world, try to find ways to cure diseases of the body and the mind, but recognise the breadth and depth of the human person.

Anthony Daniels, who writes as Theodore
Dalrymple. Photo Source: Wikipedia

This time my attention turns to the medical science of psychiatry. A new book has generated pathways to information about trends in this form of health care, and these are worth taking to explore how confident we can be at the pronouncements of those prominent in the field. The book is Admirable Evasions: How psychology undermines morality, by British journalist, doctor and psychiatrist, Anthony Daniels, who writes under the name Theodore Dalrymple. The title alludes to Edmund’s lament in King Lear: “ . . . an admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star.” The theme of the book is that psychiatry responds to, in fact fosters, the belief whereby people “find it easy to blame their actions on material forces in the way earlier generations blamed them on astrological forces”.
In other words, dissatisfaction with any manner of things in our life, the melancholy which may come upon us in the midst of a fruitful life, are forms of the unhappiness known through the ages, and should be faced up to as part of the demands of being a responsible person with a moral dimension. That unhappiness should not be labelled as depression, and its relief not sought on a psychiatrist's couch or by consuming drugs under the assumption that a faulty brain or its chemicals are the cause.
Condemnation - not too harsh a term -  of the present day practice of psychiatry arises, too, in an article in the New York Review of Books,  which sympathetically reports  that the authors of books under review offer “powerful indictments of the way psychiatry is now practiced. They document the ‘frenzy’ of diagnosis, the overuse of drugs with sometimes devastating side effects, and widespread conflicts of interest.” On top of that is that the benefits of the “best practice” treatment through the prescribing of psychoactive drugs, cannot be proved to be greater than the harm produced in the person seeking help.
Just as Freud has been shown to be wrong, as have behaviourists of the ilk of B F Skinner, Dalrymple vents his “own frustration with the intellectual over-reach and ‘damn lies’ told by the world of psychology”. His main point is that great literature has more to say about the suffering of the human mind and heart and soul than does the study of the brain, worthwhile though that is.  The reviewer stresses this point:

In searching the works of Shakespeare, Auden, Burgess, Blake and others, for signs of condition and predilection that psychology now calls its own, [Dalrymple] argues that the knowledge of melancholy or a dysmorphia of character can be no more informed by it than our great literary canon. Does Dr Johnson’s Rasselas,  he asks, not capture the ‘tragic dimension of human existence’ more so than modern neuroscience? 

To which the reviewer responds emphatically: “Quite!’, adding, “I have learned more about myself from Larkin, Orwell, Burke and Virgil for the simple reason that they promote self-examination, as opposed to self-obsession. A claim that psychology, our author agrees, can’t make for itself.”

Science is not all it seems

Keeping the pronouncements and declarations of scientists in real-world perspective has been one of the aims of this blog. But in these columns A problem of science  was preceded by Dali and the beauty of science. So the need to keep the scientific endeavour on track has been posed as a challenge but science  has not been mocked.

The danger of pride within the scientific community is one element that gives rise to concern; another is the scourge of a highly competitive atmosphere enveloping practitioners, whether in academia or industry. Therefore is is worth noting a piece run in The Times in December 2015. It was picked up and carried in The Australian of December 18, 2015, under the headline The science of hyperbole is now exponential. In full, that piece states:

Some researchers might call it the most outrageous affront to their profession since the trial of Galileo. That is where the problem lies.The world of science appears to have a growing addiction to hyperbole, according to an analysis of article summaries published over the past four decades. Scientists at the University of Utrecht in The Netherlands found the proportion of abstracts using 25 adjectives such as "groundbreaking", "amazing" and "spectacular" has risen almost eight-fold since the mid-1970s. 

Today's abstracts are nearly 40 times as likely to mention the word "novel" as they were in 1974. "By extrapolating...over the past 40 years to the future, we predict the word `novel` will appear in every record by the year 2123," the academics say in the British Medical Journal. It is not clear whether this surge is more of a result of competition for funding or of a ratcheting-up of hype scientists need to go through to get their papers in journals.

While books published today are marginally more likely to use one of the 25 positive adjectives than they were 40 years ago, the rise of verbal embroidery in scientific papers has been, well, staggeringly exponential. "Scientists may assume that results and their implications have to be exaggerated and overstated to get published," the authors write.

This Planet Is N0T Full

A couple with one son in Ho Chi Minh City.
Photo Nghia Pham/ Thanh Nien

A lot of people are scared that the growing world population is about to overwhelm us. These people are typically of two kinds: the first are older people of the Population Bomb era (published in 1968), and typically in developed countries; the second group are those in developing countries where the population is still growing and who see the difficulties of poor countries trying to accommodate millions moving from farms to cities.

From the views expressed in both parts of the world it is clear that there is widespread ignorance about what world and local statistics are showing us about what is really happening with regards population. It may seem amazing to many that in a highly populated (and still growing) country like Vietnam, government officials are calling on couples to have more children because the birth rate in major cities is as low as 1.3 children per woman, far below the  2.1 replacement rate, and they fear adverse economic consequences in the decades ahead.
Similarly, in Bangladesh, which has repeatedly been used as an example of a population basket case, the total fertility rate is near the simple replacement level, but lower in better-off areas. The drop in births has come despite big gaps in the use of contraception, especially with low use among the higher-income groups.

A rigorous view of how the world’s population, food supplies, and quality of life stack up is given in a book edited by Ian Goldin of Oxford University called Is The Planet Full? The collegial assessment by the scholars included in that text is that the expected peak population of about 10 billion people should be able to “equitably exist on a finite planet”. There are conditions to this optimism, however, conditions that have been the focus of those who have engaged on the world debate in previous decades to oppose the panic-stricken calls of “abort (or contracept) the savages”!
Those who have tried to defend human dignity have argued in the same way that Goldin and his colleagues do when they conclude that, given the finite planet, there must be a  deliberate redistribution of resources. Further, optimism is possible “only if our exploitative relationships between population, consumption and the environment are simultaneously addressed”, as Rebecca Jarvis observes in a London School of Economics Review of Books blog. 

God is God - I'm not!

Incorporating a religious, especially a Christian, dimension in our life is of immense value. Taking on board the spirit of the Bible, and that of Jesus, sets us free of all the distortions in our view of what is true and good and noble, and enables us to make decisions that, in reality, make our life satisfying. Here is a valuable insight into this predicament that confronts the well-being of Western society in particular:

Society, more and more, gives us license to be grandiose, to set ourselves up as the center and proudly announce that

publicly. Not only are we allowed today to get too big for our britches, we aren’t culturally admired unless we do assert ourselves in that way. And that’s a formula for jealousy, bitterness, and violence. Grandiosity and restlessness need healthy guidance both from the culture and from religion.

Today, we generally do not see that guidance. We are dangerously weak in inculcating into the consciousness of society, especially into the consciousness of the young, a number of vital human and religious truths: To God alone belongs the glory! In this life ultimately all symphonies remain unfinished. You are not the center of the earth. There is real sin! Selfishness is not a virtue! Humility is a virtue! You will only find life by giving it away! Other lives are as real as your own!

We have failed our youth by giving them unrealistic expectations, even as we are depriving them of the tools with which to handle those expectations.

[]  See also The Mess of the Post-Christian Age

A problem with science

       Detail from Salvador Dali's      
 Enigma Without End

An up-and-coming German philosopher has some critical words about the way  many in his own field and in the scientific world think about what we can know as real. Markus Gabriel, a professor of philosophy and chair of epistemology at the University of Bonn, Germany, highlights what has been been described as "the cavernous gap separating sophisticated professionals from healthy common sense".  The English translation of his book, Why the World Does Not Exist, has just been published by Polity Press.

In a review, New York academic Richard Wolin points out that Gabriel identifies particular branches of study as "inherently flawed, because their scientism — the conviction that science alone represents the royal road to truth — leaves no room for phenomena like poetry, reverie, or human intimacy, experiences that prove refractory to laws of causal determination".

"More seriously, the epistemological dogmatism of such approaches risks codifying a new species of metaphysical intolerance, since they condescendingly stigmatize competing claims as "unscientific." As Gabriel pointedly remarked in a 2014 article in Die Zeit: "At an earlier point, God and fate were invoked in order to deprive us of our freedom; today, it is ‘nature,’ ‘the universe,’ ‘the brain,’ ‘the egoistic gene’ or ‘evolution.’"

While the ordinary person welcomes Gabriel's highlighting of the intolerance of scientism, his inclusion of imagined creatures like elves or the unicorn as having the same ranking as the concrete reality around us posits little obvious change from "the ludicrousness of the cul-de-sac in which much of academic philosophy finds itself today", as Wolin puts it.
[] See also: The scourge of lying and cheating in science

Justification for Catholics and Protestants

Though the issue at the root of the Reformation was the ultimate authority in the Christian Church, whether scripture or the office of the pope as the locus of tradition, which is the content of belief in God and His church, the heart of the theological conflict was justification. The Protestants denied the value of good works in the matter of salvation, linking eternity with God after death solely to the will of God, or predestination. The Catholic response at the Council of Trent (1545-1563) was like this, as one historian describes it:

[All people] … stood condemned because of Original Sin and were saved only by the sacrifice of Christ. They had to respond freely to the offer of salvation, but the response was made possible only by “predisposing grace” that was offered to all, without any merit on their part, since God desired that all should be saved. Once accepted, such grace rendered human works meritorious in God’s sight, so that, contrary to the Lutherans, justification was not merely “imputed” to [the individual] by a merciful God, but [all people] were actually made righteous by Christ’s sacrifice.
[Everyone] could overcome sin, because concupiscence, though an ineradicable part of human nature, was merely a disposition to sin, not sin itself. As often as [people] fell, they could be raised up again, especially through the sacrament of penance, because even mortal sin caused the loss only of grace, not of faith.
Although faith was received as a gift, by cooperating with grace and performing good works, believers could grow in hope and charity and be made capable of obeying the Law. But they should also not have ‘vain confidence” that they would never lose the gift of salvation, as the Protestant doctrine of predestination implied, since, because of their free will, [all people] could either grow in righteousness or lose grace through their own fault.

James Hitchcock, 2012, History of the Catholic Church, Ignatius Press, San Francisco

Lutheran Bishop Christian Krause and Cardinal Edward Cassidy sign The Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification on October 31, 1999, in Augsburg, Germany

After a long period of study and dialogue, the Lutheran World Federation and a pontifical body of the Catholic Church in 1999 presented The Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, which carried these statements: 

40.The understanding of the doctrine of justification set forth in this Declaration shows that a consensus in basic truths of the doctrine of justification exists between Lutherans and Catholics. In light of this consensus the remaining differences of language, theological elaboration, and emphasis in the understanding of justification described in paras. 18 to 39 are acceptable. Therefore the Lutheran and the Catholic explications of justification are in their difference open to one another and do not destroy the consensus regarding the basic truths.
41.Thus the doctrinal condemnations of the 16th century, in so far as they relate to the doctrine of justification, appear in a new light: The teaching of the Lutheran churches presented in this Declaration does not fall under the condemnations from the Council of Trent. The condemnations in the Lutheran Confessions do not apply to the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church presented in this Declaration.

Though the Lutheran World Federation did not accept the declaration without some adverse votes, the World Methodist Council unanimously adopted the document in 2006. On the Catholic side, the response had a wary tone. As the Catholic negotiating party, the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity had accepted the value of the consensus achieved, but the official Catholic position was that the areas of agreement were not "such as would eliminate every difference between Catholics and Lutherans in the understanding of justification". The Catholic response expressed the hope that dialogue would continue.

Predestination properly understood

http://pushpublishing.co.uk/predestination-whats-fuss/

Though the issue at the root of the Reformation was the ultimate authority in the Christian Church, that is, scripture or the office of the pope as the final arbiter of  the content of belief in God and His church (tradition), the heart of the theological conflict was justification and with it predestination. The Protestants denied the value of good works in the matter of salvation, linking our eternity with God after death solely to the will of God.  You were saved or you weren't! The Catholic response at the Council of Trent (1545-1563) is interpreted here by James Hitchcock (2012):

[Trent declared that all people] … stood condemned because of Original Sin and were saved only by the sacrifice of Christ. They had to respond freely to the offer of salvation, but the response was made possible only by “predisposing grace” that was offered to all, without any merit on their part, since God desired that all should be saved. Once accepted, such grace rendered human works meritorious in God’s sight, so that, contrary to the Lutherans, justification was not merely “imputed” to [the individual] by a merciful God, but [all people] were actually made righteous by Christ’s sacrifice.

[Everyone] could overcome sin, because concupiscence, though an ineradicable part of human nature, was merely a disposition to sin, not sin itself. As often as [people] fell, they could be raised up again, especially through the sacrament of penance, because even mortal sin caused the loss only of grace, not of faith.

Although faith was received as a gift, by cooperating with grace and performing good works, believers could grow in hope and charity and be made capable of obeying the Law. But they should also not have ‘vain confidence” that they would never lose the gift of salvation, as the Protestant doctrine of predestination implied, since, because of their free will, [all people] could either grow in righteousness or lose grace through their own fault.

James Hitchcock, 2012, History of the Catholic Church, Ignatius Press, San Francisco