Psychiatry and Astrology

[robinturner]

Nalan and I have recently become addicted to Desperate Housewives, having caught an episode on TV then gone out and rented the first two seasons on DVD. It's rather unusual for me to get hooked on a TV series that isn't by Joss Whedon and doesn't involve monsters, spaceships or superpowers, but it's hard to resist this charming tale of ordinary suburban folk agonising over relationships and occasionally killing each other. It's like Thirty-Something meets Twin Peaks (and even has Kyle Maclachlan for good measure).

Of course people on Wisteria Lane don't get possessed by ancient evil spirits from the nearby woods, but they are pretty screwed up, which is all part of the fun of it. Nalan commented that while she was watching, she had to resist the temptation to diagnose the characters "She's obsessive. He's a sociopath. She's compensating for low self-esteem by sleeping around ... that's just the kind of crap that psychiatrists come out with. Now wait, I've got to think what that's like ... I know, star signs! It's just like my mother saying 'Ah, well you do that because you're a Virgo.'"

Any man who has been married as long as I have (or even managed to keep a girlfriend for more than six months) knows that one of the best ways to maintain peace, harmony and mutual affection is to say frequently "You know, you're absolutely right!" In this case, I was able to say it with complete sincerity. The problem with psychiatrists is that they know a bit of neurology in the same way that astrologers know a bit of astronomy. OK, to be fair, there some psychiatrists who know a hell of a lot of neurology - I've even met one - but generally anyone who knows enough about neurology to be a neurologist will be a neurologist, not a psychiatrist. I mean, why would you want to spend hours listen to people going on about their problems when you could be making pretty computer graphics of their brains?

What psychiatry and astrology also have in common is that they provide a sense of reassurance to their practitioners by categorising people. If you put a label on someone like "Capricorn with Venus triangulating Azeroth" or "obsessive-compulsive multiple chronic spoonerism", they suddenly seem easier to understand and therefore easier to deal with. Apart from anything else, you can then give them birthstones or psychoactive chemicals.

Comments

[miss-next.livejournal.com]

Neat analysis. :-)

My very dear friend martinoh once started a psychology degree. He explained, "I was interested in how people think people think."

About 30 years ago...

[ankh156.livejournal.com]

... I wrote a thesis for the Religious Studies Department in a northern redbrick university. It was called "Understanding Magic" (some philosophical issues arising from the anthropology of religion). In it, rather than trying to explain and justify no-matter-which primitive mumbo-jumbo (tempting as that might have been) I tried to undermine the univestigated surety on which much of what Popper calls 'ordinary science' (and Feyerarbend called 'naive falsificationism' - or was it verificationsim ?... no matter, it amounts to almost the same thing) is based. One of my ploys was to assert exactly what you propose in this post. I put it as : psychology seeks to crudely map human behaviour on a series models of psychological dysfunction, and thus spends most of its time categorising individual cases in terms of admixtures of such abitrarily derived syndromes. So does astrology - can anybody objectively demonstrate why one should be judged to work better than the other ? If somebody tried to argue that psychology is empirical and inductively grounded I 'proved' (easily) it was a pseudo-science at best, rather like astrology. And so forth.

[eve-prime.livejournal.com]

Off on a tangent - I heard yesterday that there's a new Joss Whedon series in the works. Let me know if you'd like a link to more information.

[solri.livejournal.com]

Nice! I started a psychology A level for a similar reason.

[solri.livejournal.com]

Just caught the news from ironed_orchid. It had me skipping up and down with glee, especially considering that it will star Eliza Dushku.

Re: About 30 years ago...

[solri.livejournal.com]

From a Popperian perspecitve, astrology is more scientific than psychiatry, since at least it produces falsifiable hypotheses. Admittedly, nearly all of them have been falsified ...

[eve-prime.livejournal.com]

Yeah. :) Here's the link I got from sevenjades, which includes the official Fox description. Intriguing!

(I like ironedorchid's name. Those books were fun.)

[hyperina.livejournal.com]

you might change your tune about psychiatry as more and more genes associated with psychiatric illnesses get identified

[(Anonymous)]

Yes, but only to some extent. Note the word "associated". What I fear is that as these genes get discovered, all we will get is more pat answers. What would reallyimpress me would be something like the treatment in Greg Bear's SF novels, where you have nanomachines swimming around your brain making sure everything's working properly.

[hyperina.livejournal.com]

I could use one of those nanomachines myself!

[arya.livejournal.com]

I discovered the show about two weeks ago myself, when the iTunes store put up a summary episode of the first three seasons, as a free download. I liked the dark humour so I watched the next couple weeks - and I got the first three seasons on DVD, too.

Mostly I like the really inappropriate humour. But I also like that, whenever two of the characters are butting heads, you can always see exactly where each of them is coming from, and you can generall figure out exactly what it is they'll have to do to make things right between each other again. The residents are all pretty much like real people (just with better punchlines) so it holds my attention better than most TV shows.

[solri.livejournal.com]

OK, I found the missing gerund - where are the others?

[solri.livejournal.com]

The "listen" problem was the missing gerund I referred to (actually a participle, not a gerund, come to think of it). I'm amazed I didn't notice the missing "are". I suppose the brain just fills in these words for me when I'm reading.

In British English, the punctuation comes before the closing quotation marks if the quotation is a complete sentence, and after them if it isn't. For example, we would write the following.

• Martha said "She's rather snide."
• Martha described her aunt as "snide".

[solri.livejournal.com]

Such sentence fragments are the bugbear of composition teachers, but they aren't necessarily ungrammatical. When I was an undergraduate, we were told that these are more correctly termed "minor sentences" (as opposed to major sentences, which have a subject and predicate). The problem with minor sentences is that if used unthinkingly, they can break up the flow of the prose. Like this. And they can sometimes cause confusion.

Soaps

[maggie-lucy.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. I wonder if it's your new T.V. corrupting you?

[cruiserlove.livejournal.com]

I'm not going to say that the ends justify the means, but I will say the means don't matter much. As long as psychologists don't actually think they know exactly what they're talking about, then it is fine with me. Astrologists however, are crazy.