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    The Lumber Room: Mental Illness in the House of Medicine (2016 second edition)
    The Lumber Room: Mental Illness in the House of Medicine (2016 second edition)
    The Lumber Room: Mental Illness in the House of Medicine (2016 second edition)
    Ebook74 pages1 hour

    The Lumber Room: Mental Illness in the House of Medicine (2016 second edition)

    By D.S. Arrowsmith

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    About this ebook

    The Lumber Room: Mental Illness in the House of Medicine (second edition published in 2016) is a lively, literate examination of handbooks written to help doctors distinguish mental illness from physical illness. Evidence from the history of illness and of medicine is presented, including a glance at the evolution of the psychiatrists' bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), and references to epilepsy, lycanthropy, syphilis, cancer, the Capgras delusion, malaria, Alzheimer's disease, porphyria, multiple sclerosis, psychoanalysis, E.M. Forster, Samuel Johnson and Louis Pasteur. The author suggests that the editors of the next edition of the DSM consider renaming it the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic Manual, since the statistical part of the book was eliminated in 1980, and the editors declared the term mental disorder unsuitable in 1994.

    In the first two thirds of the essay, a critical look at these handbooks shows trends in psychiatry from the nineteenth century to today and touches on the many afflictions whose victims have been erroneously assigned to psychiatry instead of to other medical specialties. In the conclusion, the idea of a "God of the gaps" is introduced, that is, a deity whose bailiwick is everything that can't be explained by science: a poor argument for the existence of God because those gaps tend to get filled in. What these books show is a psychotherapist of the gaps, ready with psychological explanations and remedies until medicine advances and what was once, say, confusional psychosis or schizophrenia is found to be encephalitis or a brain tumor. The conclusion suggests that, with progress in medicine, difficult, unruly mental illnesses vanish and re-emerge as quantifiable, often curable physical illnesses.

    "Lumber" is used here in the British sense meaning useless odds and ends. A house’s lumber room is where one stores those items that don’t belong anywhere else.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherD.S. Arrowsmith
    Release dateMay 21, 2011
    ISBN9780983671510
    The Lumber Room: Mental Illness in the House of Medicine (2016 second edition)
    Author

    D.S. Arrowsmith

    D.S. Arrowsmith is a graduate of Barnard College and the Columbia University School of Library Service. She lives in New York City with her husband and thousands of books. Email her at apunctatum@gmail.com.

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      Book preview

      The Lumber Room - D.S. Arrowsmith

      About this book

      The Lumber Room: Mental Illness in the House of Medicine is a lively, literate examination of handbooks written to help doctors distinguish mental illness from physical illness. Evidence from the history of illness and of medicine is presented, including a glance at the evolution of the psychiatrists' bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), and references to epilepsy, lycanthropy, syphilis, cancer, the Capgras delusion, malaria, Alzheimer's disease, porphyria, multiple sclerosis, psychoanalysis, E.M. Forster, Samuel Johnson and Louis Pasteur. The author suggests that the editors of the next edition of the DSM consider renaming it the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic Manual, since the statistical part of the book was eliminated in 1980, and the editors declared the term mental disorder unsuitable in 1994.

      In the first two thirds of the essay, a critical look at these handbooks shows trends in psychiatry from the nineteenth century to today and touches on the many afflictions whose victims have been erroneously assigned to psychiatry instead of to other medical specialties. In the conclusion, the idea of a God of the gaps is introduced, that is, a deity whose bailiwick is everything that can't be explained by science: a poor argument for the existence of God because those gaps tend to get filled in. What these books show is a psychotherapist of the gaps, ready with psychological explanations and remedies until medicine advances and what was once, say, confusional psychosis or schizophrenia is found to be encephalitis or a brain tumor. The conclusion suggests that, with progress in medicine, difficult, unruly mental illnesses vanish and re-emerge as quantifiable, often curable physical illnesses.

      Lumber is used here in the British sense meaning useless odds and ends. A house’s lumber room is where one stores those items that don’t belong anywhere else.

      The Lumber Room

      Mental Illness in the House of Medicine

      by D.S. Arrowsmith

      The Lumber Room: Mental Illness in the House of Medicine

      Second edition

      Copyright 2016 D.S. Arrowsmith

      All rights reserved.

      Phrenology cover art copyright Imagezoo

      Cover designed by Joan Mellon

      SMASHWORDS EDITION

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      The Lumber Room: Mental Illness in the House of Medicine

      Books reviewed in this essay

      Notes

      About the author

      Science is the topography of ignorance.

      Oliver Wendell Holmes

      ONE CAN READ shelves of books about mental illness without stumbling across a definition, so perhaps we can back in to an understanding of the term by observing what it is not. Those bemoaning the stigma of mental illness typically contrast it with physical illness, by which is meant what we usually just call illness. In medical discourse, it is not necessary to assert that illness is physical: this only occurs when mental illness is under discussion. Mental illness, then, is not a subset of illness, but a separate species.

      The presence of psychiatric symptoms is not enough to establish that the patient has mental illness, that is, all persons with mental illness have psychiatric symptoms, but not all persons with psychiatric symptoms have mental illness. The psychiatric symptoms referred to include mania, hallucinations, depression, apathy, delusions, paranoia and so on. Medical conditions can give rise to all of these. In a 1964 article in the official journal of the American Psychiatric Association, a writer critical of psychoanalysis adduced the following note from a case history: Mr. X [is] . . . a narcissistic, passive-dependent individual unable to accept his sexual role due to involvement with a hated mother figure, then observed: Shortly after this report was written the patient died of a fast-growing brain tumor. Now it is only fair to recognize that a person could both have a brain tumor and be unable to accept his sexual role, etc., but most would agree that brain tumor trumps passive-dependent sexual indecisiveness. Who's the narcissist: Mr. X or the doctor who troubled Mr. X's final days of consciousness with attacks on his character?

      Diagnostic imaging has progressed since 1964, and one hopes that today a patient with psychiatric symptoms due to brain tumor is less likely to be labeled mentally ill. Who is likely to be so labeled? NAMI, a nonprofit support and advocacy organization, proclaims its interest in serving those affected by "severe mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder,

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