Never Mind

Louis Wynne, PhD
May 2010

Let us begin with a thought-experiment. Suppose that you are sitting in your living room with someone whom you know very well—a close friend or a relative. Now let us suppose that in mid-conversation your friend excuses him or herself, gets up, and goes into the kitchen to get another glass of wine or beer. During the minute or two that he or she is out of your sight something happens that you are not aware of. It is the culmination of a project to substitute a robot for your friend by a group of invisible scientists from a planet in the Pleiades that we will call Nebach.

This robot is very high-tech; not only does it look exactly like your friend, sound like him or her, feel like him or her, but on the inside it is identical to him or her: there are no batteries, chips, transistors, or wires. The technology achieved by the Nebachians has permitted them to develop a biological robot not a mere electro-mechanical one. That is, its inner workings—neurochemical, genetic, etc.—are identical to your friend’s inner workings.

The robot now comes back into your living room with his or her wine or beer and the conversation resumes without a pause or a stumble. Now, here’s the question: How long do you think it would take you to figure out that this creature is really not your friend but an identical copy? Is there anything missing from this copy that would be the clue for you?

I suggest that your answer would be that what is missing from the robot are your friend’s soul, mind, habits of thinking and speaking, his or her yearnings, intentions, feelings, and dreams all of which make up the essence of your friend’s unique humanity. The question now becomes: How could you know that these—let us call them mental aspects—are not present in the Nebachian robotic copy of your friend? (I should acknowledge at this point that this is not exactly a new question: a similar argument, although for the “opposite” purpose, has been attributed to Gottfried Leibniz.) I argue that, regardless of the techniques you might employ: brain imaging, chemical analyses, etc., you could never know that the robot is a copy.

Let me press the question a little further and ask: Why is it important to you that your robot-friend have these mental aspects? Remember that neither the robot’s statements, conduct, nor preferences will be any different from your friend’s. The robot will, for example, still prefer Merlot over Pinot Noir, or lager over pale ale, despite your chiding.

Your first line of defense is likely to be that the robot would not be human, and that it is precisely these so-called mental aspects which make all of us human. My response to you would be that you are indulging in wildly inferential thinking in defense of your belief that you are not the only self-aware being on this planet. In other words, you are assuming that because you believe you have thoughts, urges, intentions, and fears that everyone else does, too. Philosophers have called this the argument by analogy and they have suggested that it is a weak argument. I agree.

I suggest that you don’t have thoughts and intentions either. These and the rest of the chimera and ephemera of the mental realm are no more than words we have incorporated into our language over centuries to describe various aspects of our so-called conscious experience. They are constructs, inferences, and no more real than unicorns or goblins. Stated differently, when it comes to describing what we call experience we are all enmeshed in a colossal semantic fallacy.

What is our incentive for continuing this charade? I suggest that we use these constructs to help ourselves understand and feel comfortable with our conduct. When it comes to other people’s conduct we might examine their history and current dilemmas for that understanding, although we will see in a moment that we tend not to do that. When it comes to ourselves, however, we appear to be adamant in not looking at how each of our histories has contributed to our current difficulties (nor do we scrutinize ourselves or others when things are going well!); and we employ the concept of mind (to use Ryle’s term) as one contrivance by which to accomplish this. That is to say we, especially we as Americans, seem to have an aversion to history and we prefer to commit a semantic fallacy by reifying the construct called mind.

My colleague and friend Thomas Szasz, MD, has noted that in the French, German, and Hungarian languages no noun exists for mind. Likewise, upon checking in the University of Chicago Spanish Dictionary, there is no noun for mind there either. To “make up one’s mind” in Spanish is simply decidirse; and to “speak one’s mind freely” is hablar con toda franquenza. No inference regarding a thing called mind is contained in these two or in any other of the examples given in this dictionary. The relevance of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is clear: language dominates our view of the world.

We especially prefer the mental realm as an explanation of the conduct of others. In past decades we might have asked, when confronted with someone’s distressing conduct, What kind of upbringing did this person have? Today we are much more likely to ask, What is this person’s diagnosis? That is, we appeal to a mental construct shrouded in the quasi-medical terminology of mental illness. In so doing we conveniently overlook that even a real medical diagnosis is not necessarily an explanation. Saying that someone has pneumonia does not in itself tell us anything about how the person’s symptoms came about. For that we must look at the disease’s etiology, that is, its history.

Labels suggesting the existence of mental entities are not credible explanations of actions—either our own or anyone else’s. Even a cursory examination reveals an accounting for conduct in terms of bi-polar disorder, ADHD, or schizophrenia to be circular: the existence of the disorder is inferred from the person’s conduct (the “symptom”) alone, and then the hypothesized disorder is used to account for the conduct. This is so much easier than examining the person’s history!

Lest you think that this discussion has been an idle exercise by a philosopher-psychologist whose only alternative on a blustery Sunday afternoon was to watch the TV production of Turandot, let me now come to the point. Thomas Szasz has argued that the unwanted and frequently bizarre actions we characterize as mental illness are not the symptoms of true disease. He says that mental illness is a metaphor and his many books and articles describe the criteria necessary to call an ailment or an affliction a disease.

I agree with Dr. Szasz although my assault on what he has for the past 50 years called the “myth of mental illness” differs from his in two ways. First, I argue that the concept of mental illness is not a necessary one. We already know the factors involved in producing the unwanted behaviors that are conventionally thought of as the symptoms of so-called mental illness. My book, Healing the Hurting Soul: A Survival Manual for the Black Sheep in Every Family examines those factors in detail. William of Ockham would suggest that, since we know the antecedents of unwanted conduct, further investigation becomes extraneous and confused by the creation of a fictitious entity to “explain” it. We don’t need to explain unwanted conduct beyond describing its antecedents.

Second, I argue that the very concept of mind and all those “things” deemed to exist in the mental realm: ideas, thoughts, wants, urges, fears, beliefs, and mental illnesses themselves are verbal contrivances. Furthermore, they are verbal contrivances that we need in order to support our preconceived view of humans as having free will.

During the 1960s and 1970s when large computers were making their debut, science fiction writers suggested wryly—and students of artificial intelligence somewhat more seriously—that the time would eventually come when networks of computers would approximate the complexity of the human brain and thereby develop consciousness or awareness of themselves thus having abilities to act on their own. This has not happened, and I argue that it cannot happen. It cannot happen because intelligence is a function of neuro-chemical complexity only in the most obvious sense. Conjectured imbalances in serotonin, dopamine, black bile, yellow bile, blood, or phlegm have nothing to do with the unwanted conduct supposedly symptomatic of mental illness. Unwanted conduct is a function of trauma and of each family’s tacit rules regarding how such trauma are to be dealt with.

The mind is an inference, a reification, an explanatory fiction. It is of use only to help those of us lacking the courage to inventory our histories and acknowledge that we are, to use Bernard Shaw’s word, only dupes or, in Shakespeare’s phrase, poor players strutting and fretting our way upon the stage soon to be heard no more. Finally, there is no such thing as mental illness because there is no such thing as mind.

© Louis Wynne 2010

Never Mind

Louis Wynne, PhD
May 2010

Let us begin with a thought-experiment. Suppose that you are sitting in your living room with someone whom you know very well—a close friend or a relative. Now let us suppose that in mid-conversation your friend excuses him or herself, gets up, and goes into the kitchen to get another glass of wine or beer. During the minute or two that he or she is out of your sight something happens that you are not aware of. It is the culmination of a project to substitute a robot for your friend by a group of invisible scientists from a planet in the Pleiades that we will call Nebach.

This robot is very high-tech; not only does it look exactly like your friend, sound like him or her, feel like him or her, but on the inside it is identical to him or her: there are no batteries, chips, transistors, or wires. The technology achieved by the Nebachians has permitted them to develop a biological robot not a mere electro-mechanical one. That is, its inner workings—neurochemical, genetic, etc.—are identical to your friend’s inner workings.

The robot now comes back into your living room with his or her wine or beer and the conversation resumes without a pause or a stumble. Now, here’s the question: How long do you think it would take you to figure out that this creature is really not your friend but an identical copy? Is there anything missing from this copy that would be the clue for you?

I suggest that your answer would be that what is missing from the robot are your friend’s soul, mind, habits of thinking and speaking, his or her yearnings, intentions, feelings, and dreams all of which make up the essence of your friend’s unique humanity. The question now becomes: How could you know that these—let us call them mental aspects—are not present in the Nebachian robotic copy of your friend? (I should acknowledge at this point that this is not exactly a new question: a similar argument, although for the “opposite” purpose, has been attributed to Gottfried Leibniz.) I argue that, regardless of the techniques you might employ: brain imaging, chemical analyses, etc., you could never know that the robot is a copy.

Let me press the question a little further and ask: Why is it important to you that your robot-friend have these mental aspects? Remember that neither the robot’s statements, conduct, nor preferences will be any different from your friend’s. The robot will, for example, still prefer Merlot over Pinot Noir, or lager over pale ale, despite your chiding.

Your first line of defense is likely to be that the robot would not be human, and that it is precisely these so-called mental aspects which make all of us human. My response to you would be that you are indulging in wildly inferential thinking in defense of your belief that you are not the only self-aware being on this planet. In other words, you are assuming that because you believe you have thoughts, urges, intentions, and fears that everyone else does, too. Philosophers have called this the argument by analogy and they have suggested that it is a weak argument. I agree.

I suggest that you don’t have thoughts and intentions either. These and the rest of the chimera and ephemera of the mental realm are no more than words we have incorporated into our language over centuries to describe various aspects of our so-called conscious experience. They are constructs, inferences, and no more real than unicorns or goblins. Stated differently, when it comes to describing what we call experience we are all enmeshed in a colossal semantic fallacy.

What is our incentive for continuing this charade? I suggest that we use these constructs to help ourselves understand and feel comfortable with our conduct. When it comes to other people’s conduct we might examine their history and current dilemmas for that understanding, although we will see in a moment that we tend not to do that. When it comes to ourselves, however, we appear to be adamant in not looking at how each of our histories has contributed to our current difficulties (nor do we scrutinize ourselves or others when things are going well!); and we employ the concept of mind (to use Ryle’s term) as one contrivance by which to accomplish this. That is to say we, especially we as Americans, seem to have an aversion to history and we prefer to commit a semantic fallacy by reifying the construct called mind.

My colleague and friend Thomas Szasz, MD, has noted that in the French, German, and Hungarian languages no noun exists for mind. Likewise, upon checking in the University of Chicago Spanish Dictionary, there is no noun for mind there either. To “make up one’s mind” in Spanish is simply decidirse; and to “speak one’s mind freely” is hablar con toda franquenza. No inference regarding a thing called mind is contained in these two or in any other of the examples given in this dictionary. The relevance of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is clear: language dominates our view of the world.

We especially prefer the mental realm as an explanation of the conduct of others. In past decades we might have asked, when confronted with someone’s distressing conduct, What kind of upbringing did this person have? Today we are much more likely to ask, What is this person’s diagnosis? That is, we appeal to a mental construct shrouded in the quasi-medical terminology of mental illness. In so doing we conveniently overlook that even a real medical diagnosis is not necessarily an explanation. Saying that someone has pneumonia does not in itself tell us anything about how the person’s symptoms came about. For that we must look at the disease’s etiology, that is, its history.

Labels suggesting the existence of mental entities are not credible explanations of actions—either our own or anyone else’s. Even a cursory examination reveals an accounting for conduct in terms of bi-polar disorder, ADHD, or schizophrenia to be circular: the existence of the disorder is inferred from the person’s conduct (the “symptom”) alone, and then the hypothesized disorder is used to account for the conduct. This is so much easier than examining the person’s history!

Lest you think that this discussion has been an idle exercise by a philosopher-psychologist whose only alternative on a blustery Sunday afternoon was to watch the TV production of Turandot, let me now come to the point. Thomas Szasz has argued that the unwanted and frequently bizarre actions we characterize as mental illness are not the symptoms of true disease. He says that mental illness is a metaphor and his many books and articles describe the criteria necessary to call an ailment or an affliction a disease.

I agree with Dr. Szasz although my assault on what he has for the past 50 years called the “myth of mental illness” differs from his in two ways. First, I argue that the concept of mental illness is not a necessary one. We already know the factors involved in producing the unwanted behaviors that are conventionally thought of as the symptoms of so-called mental illness. My book, Healing the Hurting Soul: A Survival Manual for the Black Sheep in Every Family examines those factors in detail. William of Ockham would suggest that, since we know the antecedents of unwanted conduct, further investigation becomes extraneous and confused by the creation of a fictitious entity to “explain” it. We don’t need to explain unwanted conduct beyond describing its antecedents.

Second, I argue that the very concept of mind and all those “things” deemed to exist in the mental realm: ideas, thoughts, wants, urges, fears, beliefs, and mental illnesses themselves are verbal contrivances. Furthermore, they are verbal contrivances that we need in order to support our preconceived view of humans as having free will.

During the 1960s and 1970s when large computers were making their debut, science fiction writers suggested wryly—and students of artificial intelligence somewhat more seriously—that the time would eventually come when networks of computers would approximate the complexity of the human brain and thereby develop consciousness or awareness of themselves thus having abilities to act on their own. This has not happened, and I argue that it cannot happen. It cannot happen because intelligence is a function of neuro-chemical complexity only in the most obvious sense. Conjectured imbalances in serotonin, dopamine, black bile, yellow bile, blood, or phlegm have nothing to do with the unwanted conduct supposedly symptomatic of mental illness. Unwanted conduct is a function of trauma and of each family’s tacit rules regarding how such trauma are to be dealt with.

The mind is an inference, a reification, an explanatory fiction. It is of use only to help those of us lacking the courage to inventory our histories and acknowledge that we are, to use Bernard Shaw’s word, only dupes or, in Shakespeare’s phrase, poor players strutting and fretting our way upon the stage soon to be heard no more. Finally, there is no such thing as mental illness because there is no such thing as mind.

© Louis Wynne 2010

The US Mortality Data for 1908 show that these diseases were America’s top-ranked killers:

Typhoid fever, measles, scarlet fever, whooping cough, diphtheria, and tuberculosis

The top-ranked kilers of Americans in 2004 were:

Heart disease, cancer, stroke, chronic lower respiratory diseases, accidents, and diabetes

It is important to understand how these two groups of diseases differ from each other: the first group is made up entirely of infectious diseases; the second group is composed entirely of diseases brought on by lifestyle: diet, smoking, lack of exercise, etc.

 Now, what has this got to do with TeenScreen?  (to be continued)

It is a fair bet that Pristiq has not been tested “head-to-head” against other antidepressants manufactured by other drug companies. We can also be sure that the FDA approved Pristiq based on a length of treatment far shorter than it will actually be prescribed for. Remember that the FDA approved Prozac on the basis of only 6 weeks’ testing. (The logic was, I believe, that, if any adverse “side-effects” were going to show up, they’d show up sooner rather than later!)

It is probably also a safe bet that the experimental design was tampered with to exclude “non-responders,” and that physicians were paid handsomely for recruiting patients into the pre-approval studies. 

One might say that any and all psychiatric medicating of anyone, including children, is excessive. But to take this position is to miss the essential point: the unwanted behavior of children (and teens and adults) has nothing to do with illness of any kind. Whether medications ”work” (or do not work), or whether they are being used excessively, diverts our attention from the more important question: What is there in the context within which the child is living his/her life that might account for the distressing behavior?

The re-contextualizing of their child’s behavior is something that families shy away from. It is potentially embarrassing, and a person (like myself) who raises the issue is often accused of blaming or stigmatizing family menbers, or dredging up the past. 

True! I’m guilty! Not of blaming or dredging up the past, but of pleading with families to see how their own unwitting and unintentional actions have contributed to what is in reality a family problem, not an illness that their child has.

It is clear to me that the producers of Frontline are not yet ready to grapple with that issue.

Now well into mid-life, the professor is portrayed as triumphant though haunted by the ever-present threat that these symptoms will probably return. There is, of course, at the end of the short article, a gratuitous sidebar telling the reader that “schizophrenia can be treated with drugs like risperidone” (generic name of Risperdal, one of the atypical antipsychotics).

 This statement is blatantly untrue. The evidence that Risperdal (or Zyprexa, or Seroquel, or Abilify, or Giodon) can in any way ameliorate the bizarre and distressing conduct of the so-called mentally ill is dubious at best: the research upon which such statements are founded is corrupted from the outset by meddling with the data as it is collected by researchers in the pay of pharmaceutical companies. In addition, the research designs are so flawed that any first-year graduate student in experimental psychology could list their weaknesses.

But more to the point: what is important about this article is not what it includes but what it leaves out. And what it leaves out is crucial! With the exception of the brief reference to the professor’s father being an attorney, nothing, repeat nothing, is said about the professor’s family of origin! Not her siblings, their gender, her place in the birth order, whether she came along at an inconvenient time in her parents’ lives, what her parents’ expectations (implicit or expressed) were for her, the trauma that may have occurred in her parents’ generation (or her own), the family rules for dealing with that trauma, how the professor (as a child and teen-ager) attempted to negotiate conflicts over her future with her parents, etc., etc.

Without this knowledge which, I contend, is deliberately overlooked, we can never get a grasp of the precursors of her bizarre behavior. We are left with psychiatry’s self-serving assertions that the professor’s bizarre behavior is somehow symptomatic of a “disease.” This is patent nonsense! It is a delusion which is foisted on unsuspecting Americans because it is profitable for both psychiatrists and their pharmaceutical patrons.