The real world of compulsive hoarders (2013)

We would know enough, except people tend to reject the philosophers and prophets who impart ancient knowledge in ways too mysterious to accept as truth.

There are two aspects to this that I find interesting, one is that disorders are described in terms of traits when they are predominantly a matter of degree, and the other is that the modern world enables these disorders to amplify to such a degree by blocking out nature, or the natural order of things, and also by producing so many durable items.

> Psychology is kind of a mess.

I rather quote from the jargon file (http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/weaknesses.html):

"Many hackers have noticed that mainstream culture has shown a tendency to pathologize and medicalize normal variations in personality, especially those variations that make life more complicated for authority figures and conformists. Thus, hackers aware of the issue tend to be among those questioning whether ADD and AS actually exist; and if so whether they are really ‘diseases’ rather than extremes of a normal genetic variation like having freckles or being able to taste DPT. In either case, they have a sneaking tendency to wonder if these syndromes are over-diagnosed and over-treated. After all, people in authority will always be inconvenienced by schoolchildren or workers or citizens who are prickly, intelligent individualists — thus, any social system that depends on authority relationships will tend to helpfully ostracize and therapize and drug such ‘abnormal’ people until they are properly docile and stupid and ‘well-socialized’.

So hackers tend to believe they have good reason for skepticism about clinical explanations of the hacker personality."

We want psychology/iatry to sort out the normal from the abnormal, but that doesn’t work: normal and abnormal are fundamentally social. This is a version of the is-ought problem.

In my experience (both as a walk-in consumer-patient and with friends who happen to be shrinks) psychiatry is at its best when it focus on functionality — can this person brush his teeth; can he walk among crowds (and not lose his virtue); can he hold a job, a relationship. Most gratifying for a psychiatrist in private practice (I’m told) is to watch someone go from Mozart-and-the-whale nuts to having a good career, marriage and kids.

Of course, in institutional settings people want to cure madness like one cures pneumonia. That’s fundamentally dehumanizing, though.