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How To Be Treated For A Mental Illness You Don’t Have

The Strategy of Bait & Switch

Maywood
7 min readSep 9, 2018
The Imaginary Invalid (by Honoré Daumier 1857)

The Problem With Possible Therapies and Treatments

Take the following everyday situation. Someone suffering from anxiety or any negative feeling — disordered thoughts, stress, depression, etc. — makes an appointment to get help from a doctor, psychiatrist, psychologist, or otherwise. The person complains of a symptom that interferes with their life, makes it false, if not impossible. Since there is no necessary condition for a mental symptom to be produced by a physical cause — a chemical imbalance, lesion in the brain, etc. — a mental health expert can only offer a possible therapy and treatment¹. To implement a possible treatment, it has become standard to actually create an artificial condition for an illness to occur or not, then attempt to treat the consequences of this artificially induced norm — not the actual mental symptom in reality².

For example, 40 years ago the hypothesis was made that a lack of serotonin corresponds to a depression and that one can artificially introduce a higher level of serotonin with the prescription of pills — Zoloft, Prozac, Paxil, etc. — to fix this imbalance. Once this artificial condition of a higher serotonin level is created, the treatment consists of managing the reaction of the…

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Maywood
Maywood

Written by Maywood

Researcher in le temps perdu: sex, race, ethics, the clinic, logic, and mathematics. Founder and analyst at PLACE www.topoi.net

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