Witchcraft Lives
Review and Analysis of articles in Skeptic Magazine, Vol. 2 No.3, as they relate to Workers' Compensation.
by James O'Brien, M.D.
Skeptic is a quarterly publication of the Skeptics Society, an organization of scholars, scientists, historians, founded by historian Dr. Michael Shermer which claims to adopt the posture of the 17th century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, "I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them." At times, Skeptic authors probably cross that line, but usually with justification. Skeptic issues may be hard to find at most newsstands, but can be obtained by calling 818-794-3119. For all of you fans of talk radio, you might find it interesting to know that Dr. Laura Schlesinger is active within the organization.
Skeptic takes on all pseudoscientific claims, and has no discernable right-left bias. Other issues have included rebuttals of Noah's Ark sightings, cryonics, faith healers, the JFK assassination, and Holocaust denial. Volume 2, No. 3.(April 1994) is largely devoted to the issue of psychiatry as pseudoscience, with critical articles on Recovered Memory, William Reich, psychiatric diagnosis, and other topics.
The cover article on recovered memory is written by Encino psychiatrist John Hochman, whose excellent Workers' Compensation reports I have reviewed on several occasions. While acknowledging the truth of many accounts of recovered memories of abuse but acknowledging the difficulty in separating perception from reality, Hochman points out that "recovered memory therapists ignore basic psychological principles that all individuals are suggestible, and that patients in distress seeking psychotherapy are particularly likely to adopt beliefs and biases of their therapist." The ramification of this statement as applies to Workers' Compensation supervisory harassment claims is obvious and illustrates why psychological treatment is often contraindicated in such cases.
Many of you are aware of the highly publicized Ramona case, in which a Napa Valley man sued for damages caused when a therapist convinced his daughter that he sexually molested. (He collected only $500,000, and in my opinion, was robbed). Laura Pasley, the author of another article in Skeptic was the first person to win a settlement for therapy leading to false memories, although Ramona was the first to win in court. Pasley tells how her therapist "instructed me to write my mother and list every mean thing she had done to me (that is, what I believed she had done at the time)." The similarities between Pasley's accounts of therapy-inculcated anger and the symptom checklists so often found in applicant Workers' Compensation reports are disturbing.
Social psychologist Carol Tavris' article on psychiatric diagnosis exposes the cruelty and silliness of arbitrary classification of mental conditions. Right out of the gate, Tavris points out how political the concept of mental illness really is. "In the antebellum south a physician named Smauel Cartwright argued that many slaves were suffering from two forms of mental illness. One was drapetomania, diagnosed as the uncontrollable urge to escape from slavery. The other was dysathesia aethiopica, whose symptoms included destroying property on the plantation, being disobedient, talking back, or refusing to work. So doctors, of course, could assure slave owners it was not the intolerable condition of slavery that caused these 'problems' but some disease in the slaves themselves that made them seek freedom.....what I want to argue today is that drapetomania lives." And she makes that case convincingly discussing the warped group-think politics of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Psychiatry.
I tackle the silliness of DSM IV in my article "Bad Hair Days and Mental Illness"
"Myth of Mental Illness" author and psychiatric iconoclast Thomas Szasz follows with a skeptical analysis of psychiatry, and utilizes a critical approach of the field from a linguistic/logistic standpoint. "Long ago, our lawmakers agreed to let psychiatrists literalize the metaphor of mental illness." He reviews a recent mainstream article on "kleptomania as a disease" and points out, correctly, "We attribute no motive to a person with leukemia and it would be foolish to say that a certain motive led to glaucoma." "No psychiatric diagnosis is, or can be, pathology driven, instead all such diagnoses are driven by nonmedical (economic, personal, legal, political and social) factors or incentives. Accordingly psychiatric diagnoses do not point to anatomical or psychological lesions and do not suggest causal agents but allude only to human behaviors." (But of course any employer burned by a frivolous stress claim could have told you that!) I am not in total agreement with many of Szasz's ideas, and am particularly troubled by his naivete on the issues of schizophrenia and the treatment of chronic conditions, but in regard to the issues he tackles in this article, he is cogent and convincing.
Skeptic Vol. 2, No.3, is great reading for anyone disillusioned with the culture of sweater-clad Menendi as victims, Sally Jessy as therapist earth-mother, and compassion wasted on the manipulative.