>there was an article in the paper a few years ago concerning the term
>"pschotic." The article in question took the clinical criteria for
>determining a "psychopath," and suggested that   90% of American male
>teenagers would qualify.
 
Harbouring a teenager at present, I couldn't agree more, but it's a bad
example for TR's general 'pull down they vanity' argument. The very
condition of being teenager is typically near-psychotic as measured
psychologically by adult standards. It's what being a teenager is like, as
some of us may dimly remember now.
 
Two refs along the general lines of TR's argument, however. Ian Hacking,
Rewriting the soul : multiple personality and the sciences of memory,
Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, 1995, exposes the historical
contingency of psychological diagnoses in ways that give pause for doubt
about any constancy in such matters. It's written by a philosopher who
knows his Foucault, however, and is so innocent of psychological
sensibility (except, if I may be forgiven, the photo of the author on the
dust jacket) that it leaves little chance of understanding how psychology
often 'works' even in the midst of its vicissitudes of method. I'd guess
that pyschology and the medical profession at best is often cheerfully
aware of the points that Tim Romano raises. I can't find the ref., but
there was a humdinger in the British Medical Journal of a few years ago
which indicated that schizophrenic patients in Britain and France tend to
be very different kinds of people (age, gender, symptoms, socio-economic
status) due to differences in the prevailing regimes of mental health care
in each country (Behavioural and Lacanian, respectively). Isn't the same
likely to be true of America? - though Arwin's third category of 'active'
depression seems a good one to run with once contextually historicized for
EP.
 
Richard Read
 
 
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Dr Richard Read                            Email [log in to unmask]
Senior Lecturer
School of Architecture and Fine Arts
The University of Western Australia
Nedlands WA 6009                        Tel +61 8 9380 2140
Australia                               Fax 8 9380 1082