Re: extropians-digest V7 #127

From: Sylvia Morscher (max@sentex.net)
Date: Wed May 15 2002 - 09:57:20 MDT


>
> ------------------------------
>
> Date: Mon, 13 May 2002 01:08:48 +0200
> From: Amara Graps <amara@amara.com>
> Subject: re: Freedom and Infanticide
>
> Lee Corbin:
> >Her alleged sanity has nothing to do with it. We are far
> >to quick to label as "insane" that behavior which we don't
> >condone or don't understand. Did you ever read "The Myth of
> >Mental Illness" by Dr. Szasz?
>
>
> Yes, and I was so disgusted (*), that I put it in the trash. I like
> Szasz's writings very much, with the exception of _that_ book.
>
> Amara
>
> (*) He claims that schizophrenia is not a true disease. The one million+
> afflicted people have a 'fake disease'. For it to be real, he says, 'it
> must be capable of being approached, measured, or tested in a
> scientific fashion'. The evidence that schizophrenia is a brain
> disease is overwhelming, and this illness _is_ regularly approached,
> measured, or tested in a scientific fashion.

hlo,
i am schizophrenic. i've been in the peculiar position of being totally
psychotic while resorting to Szasz's writings to confirm to myself that my
delusions were ture (including the belief that my firend was actually 12
people who all looked alike due to having been surgically midified).

i'm relatively "normal" (symptom-free) while on drugs, although some
neuraleptics i have taken in the past have had horrible side-effects so i
am very suspicious when people want to make laws to force menatlly ill
people to take "their" drugs, even though an artifact of the illness is
often the refusal to believe one is ill.

many people can have very odd resons for clinging to delusional thinking,
and not all of these are entirely due to schizophrenia.

in one small way i still like some of what Szasz says; now that i am
medicated and relativly mentally healthy, sometimes people will want to
ascribe creative or unusual thoughts or ideas i may have to my illness
rather than to my individuality, thereby disempowering me. i do not like
this, but the better i get at navigating social situations with my new
health and self esteem, the more able i am to be "myslef" without needing
the approval of others. (i'm only talking about small innocous things like
painting paintings that are not landscapes or flowers.)

------------------------------
> > Date: Sun, 12 May 2002 19:14:52 -0700 (PDT)
> From: YP Fun <ypprotection@yahoo.com>
> Subject: re: Freedom and Infanticide
>
>
> Schizophrenia exists. I have witnessed:
>
> (+ drugs)
> crazy person ==========> normal person
>
>

it is nice to hear someone say this. my therapists have advised me to not
mention to people that i am schizophrenic, since this will often cause
people to be biased against me. i blab about it all the time though,
since i feel like there is some similarity between being schizophrenic and
belonging to other categories that are presently generally socially
unacceptable merely becuase people are not used to them and do not
understand them.

> YP
>
> =====
> Please Copy... Ideas deserve to be free.
> - ------------------------------------------------------------
> We must respect truth and logic, no matter what they unveil.
>



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:14:06 MST