I had a teacher in High School who was a genius. He wanted us to think independently. One time he assigned a homework to the class where each of us had to study a mental illness of our choice. Mine was narcissism. And we had to go to a psychologist or psychiatrist, pretend that we have the disease and the task was to be convincing enough to get diagnosis.
More than 80% of students passed. We were all officialy crazy now, lol.
Now, try pulling it off with pneumonia or flu.
That's the problem with psychology or psychiatry. They can pretend all day long they are real sciences, but I'm sorry as long as a band of kids can pull off stuff like this it's not science. It's a complete and total joke.
Parent who have no time for their kids medicating them, so they can rest after work. Teachers who can't handle the class, so any kid who isn't complete vegetable must have ADHD, ODD, or whatever. Joke, joke, joke, joke.
You possibly didn't fool them - they may have suspected you were faking the symptoms, but when a patient shows up to a psychologist/psychiatrist on their own volition it suggests they're in distress. It could be considered malpractice to turn someone away who's seeking treatment.
A friend of mine spent two weeks in a hospital psych ward (in Sydney), and requested his records after he was discharged. It was surprising how much detail the doctors noted in the records, and how often they (correctly) picked up on avoidance and lying (yet they didn't give this impression in person). Based on this experience, it's possible the psychs your class visited gave you the diagnosis you wanted, but privately noted something very different you weren't aware of.
There has been a lot of progress in objective diagnostic tools recently - e.g there's a clinic in Sydney that diagnoses ADHD using EEGs, and selects medication based on response to the med (also measured using an EEG). And I read a paper last year that described a machine learning model trained on MRI images that could diagnose some of the organic psych diseases (bipolar, schizophrenia, depression etc.) with very high accuracy (70s/80s from memory), and distinguish between the diseases in borderline cases.
Psychiatry won't rely on symptoms alone forever, and don't think psychiatrists aren't already aware of the problems. But every psychiatrist who looked after my friend used whatever tools they had at the time to try and help. It's far from perfect, but they did their best and they really did help. And I'm really glad they did because he's finally a genuinely happy person.
> And we had to go to a psychologist or psychiatrist, pretend that we have the disease and the task was to be convincing enough to get diagnosis.
That sounds like very interesting homework, and the results were certainly informative. Such experiments are not without risk though. IIRC there was a researcher that conducted a similar experiment -- got some volunteers with no history of mental illness go into some psychiatric institutions and fake some symptoms. The majority of them were able to get admitted with just that. The problem was getting them out afterwards. Apparently some institutions were reactant to discharge the "patients" even after they have been informed of the experiment. (I can't recall the name of the researcher unfortunately, but this experiment is described in Jon Ronson's "The Psychopath Test"). Once you're labeled as "crazy", proving that you're not can be difficult, even if your behavior does not differ from that of "normal" people.
> That's the problem with psychology or psychiatry [...] It's a complete and total joke.
Please don't group psychology and psychiatry together. The former is a legitimate field of study (whether psychology technically qualifies as a "science" is debatable), the latter, is, as you say, largely a joke (at least, in the US). Please also note that the appalling state of psychiatry today should not be taken to mean that all mental disorders are bull -- there definitely are very serious mental disorders, and people do need to seek help if they are suffering from them.
EDIT: Found the book.
The researcher was talking about is David Rosenham:
Also, I was wrong when I said that the hospitals were told about the experiment -- it was a condition of the experiment that the patients needed to get out "on their own", though they didn't exhibit any of the symptoms after the initial interview, and were acting completely "normal" during their stay.
"This depiction of events ... and my reported reactions to them ... are complete fabrications. The same can be said of many of his other reports of our conversations. I can’t help but wonder if some of Ronson’s accounts of his experiences with others in his book are equally fictionalized."
> "The Psychopath Test" doesn't represent psychology.
I'm not claiming that it does. I only mentioned it because that's where I first read about the Rosenhan experiment. That experiment is not fictionalized (see the Wikipedia link), regardless of whether or not the rest of the book is.
EDIT: Thanks for the link to Hare's commentary; I haven't read that before.
Poland is where I went to High School. No such a thing as medical history accessible to everyone. Yes, the doctor I went to, will have the paperwork. But she doesn't need to share it with anyone else. Unless someone will ask her specifically for my case. Which won't happen unless I tell someone I went to her for a diagnosis. There is no central "repo" for the paperwork, if you will. You may keep records for your own use, but then of course you wouldn't include stuff like that.
I was 17. Went there with a friend. He was pretending to be depressed. As far as I remember she asked him to go for more evaluation at a hospital. Remember laughing on our way back that he was way too good at it.
Other types of homework we had from this teacher - he taught us History - were also interesting. For example we had to go to Aushwitz Museum and not going was automatic not passing to another class. He claimed "unless you see it you won't understand it". So we had all to go. Whether we liked it or not. Another day there was an anniversary of this event:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacification_of_Wujek
We had to go and pay respects at the actual site. It was quite moving.
The teacher was ww2 veteran, hardcore anti-communist. How they allowed him to teach history in communistic poland is a mystery to me. He was great. You asked any one of us what our top 3 favorite subjects were and I'm pretty sure most of us would say History.
He did the thing with psychiatrist/psychologist because he was placed by them in mental institution in early 1950s. Many anti-communists were killed or jailed in Poland in 1945-1953. But also many were diagnosed with schizofrenia and forcefully medicated and hospitalized for years. I think that was some type of twisted revenge he was taking on them.
I have a friend who goes to i think 3 different doctors pretending to have various mental illness to get a variety of prescription pills he then sells with a huge markup.
More than 80% of students passed. We were all officialy crazy now, lol.
Now, try pulling it off with pneumonia or flu.
That's the problem with psychology or psychiatry. They can pretend all day long they are real sciences, but I'm sorry as long as a band of kids can pull off stuff like this it's not science. It's a complete and total joke.
Parent who have no time for their kids medicating them, so they can rest after work. Teachers who can't handle the class, so any kid who isn't complete vegetable must have ADHD, ODD, or whatever. Joke, joke, joke, joke.