Ann Bauer has not had good luck in her life, but she seems to have a tough core, a commitment to truthfulness and rationality that will see her through.
One of the plagues of the last 70 years or so has been the assumption that the predictive value of hard sciences such as physics translates directly into areas like sociology and psychology. Hence, excessive reverence paid to Experts.
Another plague is older than the last 70 years: it's very hard for us to face the ugly truth that some ills don't have a clear cure. In our terror we latch onto a magic ritual and pretend it's effective, even to the point of persecuting anyone who won't go along. "If you don't help us throw the virgin into the volcano, you're murdering the village!" If the ritual has to be discredited, airbrushed out of history, and replaced with a new one every so often, too bad.
Some cures work; I don't advocate mindless fatalism. I just want us to keep our eyes open and our brains engaged. I want us to show both courage and intellectual consistency. Cures don't work because we want them to, and they don't not work because we don't like the people who advocate them. They work if they work. If they really work, people will be convinced soon enough.
The story and tragedy are not atypical, and I have known a couple of dozen of these cases. Psychiatry did not know quite what to do and was guessing, and did often combine this with arrogance.
But she makes no sense in a couple of sections here. She says "It’s also possible that his brain was fragile and the drugs that were loaded into it (over time, his doctor added Risperdal and a little Depakote) melted his circuitry, causing decompensation." What the hell does that even mean? How is a brain "fragile" WRT to whether a medication works or not. What is "melting his circuitry?" Risperdal is one of the gentlest antipsychotics out there, and Depakote is a mood stabiliser, a "little" of which is used as an augmentation strategy quite frequently, precisely because it is a low-impact intervention.
While it often feels to parents like they aren't being listened to, that she seemed to encounter nothing but blaming unsympathetic people for decades suggests...it wasn't always them that were the problem. This is all filtered through her eyes. Just because she is suffering doesn't mean she is accurate here. She portrays herself as "questioning," but that doesn't sound like what her attitude is here. It sounds accusing to me. Likely some of her targets deserve it.
And now she brings this story to Covid responses, somehow equating what "they" have always done to her about her son is related to what "they" are saying now. She cherry picks what "they" have said about covid, as if the entire weight of the government was behind all of these inconsistencies every time. It's easy to find a sympathetic audience for that now, but that increases here credibility not at all.
The Bettelheim story is shameful and sad, BTW, but his theories were already being rejected by psychiatrists in the 1980s. That some psychologists or other counselors persisted in that is not unheard of, as once one had been trained, there's no sending you back to relearn what was stupid, just like most professions.
Of course she draws a lesson from her shameful treatment by the medical profession and the current shameful behavior of experts willing to make arrogant and shifting pronouncements, then blaming their patients for not carrying out their orders carefully enough--which they claimed surely was the reason for the continuing deaths, not that the experts should have admitted early on that some aspects of this pandemic were beyond the power of their pronouncements to prevent. That's really the whole point of her essay.
AVI, I understand your concern for accuracy there, but it changes not at all her conclusion, logically. They were wrong- very wrong- and went along with it and feared to challenge the 'orthodoxy'.
It's reminiscent in many ways to the rise in popularity of lobotomies, and the horrors that were committed in the name of 'science' and 'progress!'.
7 comments:
That is a truly horrifying story. Tablet does us all a service by carrying such a provocative piece.
One of the plagues of the last 70 years or so has been the assumption that the predictive value of hard sciences such as physics translates directly into areas like sociology and psychology. Hence, excessive reverence paid to Experts.
Another plague is older than the last 70 years: it's very hard for us to face the ugly truth that some ills don't have a clear cure. In our terror we latch onto a magic ritual and pretend it's effective, even to the point of persecuting anyone who won't go along. "If you don't help us throw the virgin into the volcano, you're murdering the village!" If the ritual has to be discredited, airbrushed out of history, and replaced with a new one every so often, too bad.
Some cures work; I don't advocate mindless fatalism. I just want us to keep our eyes open and our brains engaged. I want us to show both courage and intellectual consistency. Cures don't work because we want them to, and they don't not work because we don't like the people who advocate them. They work if they work. If they really work, people will be convinced soon enough.
The story and tragedy are not atypical, and I have known a couple of dozen of these cases. Psychiatry did not know quite what to do and was guessing, and did often combine this with arrogance.
But she makes no sense in a couple of sections here. She says "It’s also possible that his brain was fragile and the drugs that were loaded into it (over time, his doctor added Risperdal and a little Depakote) melted his circuitry, causing decompensation." What the hell does that even mean? How is a brain "fragile" WRT to whether a medication works or not. What is "melting his circuitry?" Risperdal is one of the gentlest antipsychotics out there, and Depakote is a mood stabiliser, a "little" of which is used as an augmentation strategy quite frequently, precisely because it is a low-impact intervention.
While it often feels to parents like they aren't being listened to, that she seemed to encounter nothing but blaming unsympathetic people for decades suggests...it wasn't always them that were the problem. This is all filtered through her eyes. Just because she is suffering doesn't mean she is accurate here. She portrays herself as "questioning," but that doesn't sound like what her attitude is here. It sounds accusing to me. Likely some of her targets deserve it.
And now she brings this story to Covid responses, somehow equating what "they" have always done to her about her son is related to what "they" are saying now. She cherry picks what "they" have said about covid, as if the entire weight of the government was behind all of these inconsistencies every time. It's easy to find a sympathetic audience for that now, but that increases here credibility not at all.
The Bettelheim story is shameful and sad, BTW, but his theories were already being rejected by psychiatrists in the 1980s. That some psychologists or other counselors persisted in that is not unheard of, as once one had been trained, there's no sending you back to relearn what was stupid, just like most professions.
Of course she draws a lesson from her shameful treatment by the medical profession and the current shameful behavior of experts willing to make arrogant and shifting pronouncements, then blaming their patients for not carrying out their orders carefully enough--which they claimed surely was the reason for the continuing deaths, not that the experts should have admitted early on that some aspects of this pandemic were beyond the power of their pronouncements to prevent. That's really the whole point of her essay.
AVI, I understand your concern for accuracy there, but it changes not at all her conclusion, logically. They were wrong- very wrong- and went along with it and feared to challenge the 'orthodoxy'.
It's reminiscent in many ways to the rise in popularity of lobotomies, and the horrors that were committed in the name of 'science' and 'progress!'.
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