Friday, Jul 25, 2008
Are cutting-edge schizophrenia treatments just old news? Plus: News flash -- online pornographers are "shady" characters; misguided fighters in the Battle of Seattle.
Dec 7, 1999 |
The outer
limits of schizophrenia treatment
BY DAWN MACKEEN
(12/01/99)
Sadly, much of this news on schizophrenia takes on unsuccessful old ideas. Notions of "prepsychotic" conditions are decades old. Psychoanalytic personality theorists identified a number of such conditions, but were dogged with the same problem of false positives that characterizes recent efforts. Similarly, researchers have been looking for ways to identify differences between schizophrenics, non-schizophrenics and people "in between" on visual/perceptual tasks (with limited success) for decades.
By the way, schizophrenia is not identified by "psychological tests," but by clinical interviews. Psychological tests are designed to be more accurate and efficient than clinical means such as interviews.
-- Richard A. Jenkins
The questions about requiring children to take medications before they develop schizophrenia are important. The negative spin that Dawn MacKeen gives to schizophrenia, however, helps explain why many people with schizophrenia commit suicide. The tone of her article is one of helplessness and hopelessness.
MacKeen states, "The prognosis isn't good. Only one in five recovers." Long-term follow-up studies published in the psychiatric literature, however, consistently show that from one-half to two-thirds of even the most severely affected people -- those treated in traditional ways -- later achieve competent functioning without needing medication or therapy. Further, many people not only fully recover from schizophrenia, they experience favorable changes in personality and psychological growth. The famous psychiatrist Karl Menninger described this outcome as becoming "weller than well." MacKeen also neglects to report that psychiatrists who view the phenomena called "schizophrenia" as a spiritual crisis and use non-traditional treatment methods, have achieved recovery rates of up to 85 percent without using medications.
-- Al Siebert
Painting insanity
black
BY ANNIE MURPHY PAUL
(12/01/99)
Race is a social construct, not a biological fact. Blacks get overdiagnosed with schizophrenia for reasons that have to do with racism, classism, poverty and the bias of the treater. There is nothing in the genome of the black person than renders them more vulnerable. The genes that account for skin color are six out of 50,000 pairs in the human genome -- too few to have any wide-ranging impact.
The authors of articles on schizophrenia who avoid publishing data that point to race are being racist. What they are saying is, "I have not been able to find another variable that accounts for the difference between blacks and whites, so there must be something about blacks that accounts for the difference." The fact of the matter is that they have not figured out which of millions of variables account for the result they have found. Race is an easy explanation. What is hard is plodding through thousands of variables.
-- Curtis Adams, M.D.
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