The Jerk Store Called

In response to a number of posts to my last post, I decided to take an idea posted by Dr. Steven Reidbord and run with it - but at his request I used a different descriptor than the one he suggested.  From my early days as a psychiatrist the general idea in our culture is that you basically listen to all of the criticism of psychiatry no matter how nonsensical it is and put up with it.  Act as though it is true.  In fact, go ahead and make public policy based on it!

One of the most frequent rationalizations for that passive behavior is that there are always some imperfections and therefore just about any criticism is justified - shut up and take it.  At some point it becomes obvious that line of logic excludes most reality.  When Dr. Reidbord requested that I not use his brilliant metaphor, the only other thing I could think of was the term "jerk".  That reminded me of the Seinfeld episode "The Comeback" and George Costanza's failed retort about the Jerk Store so I thought I would include it here.  The following post has otherwise been vetted by a philosophy professor and it looked good to him.

So here goes:

The Jerk Argument

It is a given that the the class of psychiatrists like all major subgroups of people and workers contains some jerks.  In this case a jerk can be defined as whatever a hater of psychiatry likes it to be.

Possible conclusions:

1.  All psychiatrists are jerks.

2.  Psychiatrists are inherently evil whether they are jerks or not, jerks are not really any worse.

3.  All psychiatrists should be treated like jerks whether they are jerks or not.

4.  It is possible to distinguish jerks from psychiatrists and treat each class accordingly.

5.  It is inaccurate at best to generalize to the entire class of psychiatrists what is observed in the jerks.

1-> 3 are positions of the various psychiatry bashers whether they are antipsychiatrists or not, or formal antipsychiatry philosophies or not.  That encompasses a full range of cults, lone critics with an axe to grind, academics, competing professionals, critics with a book or column to sell, and scandal mongers.  It may even contain some critics with a legitimate criticism but they end up including these additional invalid arguments in the body of their work.  These positions contain various logical fallacies and are unsupported at that level.  It is also interesting to contemplate that these initial conclusions are never applied to any other medical specialty and ideally are not applied to any group of people.  Think about substituting any other societal group in those sentences as see what you come up with.  Since they are illogical arguments the only possible conclusion is that psychiatrists as a group are clearly discriminated against and the basis for that discrimination is irrational.

Jerk logic also has implications for the way that the government and healthcare organizations treat psychiatrists.  The government and managed care attitude toward psychiatrists is probably most accurately captured in 3.   Every regulation and interaction with a managed care company reinforces that idea.  It could also be argued that the managed care industry is in the business of converting psychiatrists into jerks.  That is true if they are employed by the managed care companies directly or indirectly working on the "medication management" assembly line.

My positions are best represented by 4 and 5.  That is the evidence I focus on in this blog.  I have debated with myself about whether I should fight the bashers head on, but they generally not really interested in debating logic, scientific evidence, or any evidence contrary to their argument.  Per my previous post they are engaged in sophistry and will post endless fallacious arguments and say that ain't so.  So fighting them by definition is futile and they can aggregate to any number of psychiatry bashing sites on the Internet where they can revel in their rhetoric.

So if the basis of your psychiatry bashing lies in arguments 1 - > 3.

The jerk store called and  ...........

George Dawson, MD, DFAPA

Supplementary 1:  As I was preparing this post I noticed this post popped up on the Shrink Rap blog entitled Are Psychiatrists Evil? and that dovetails nicely with my small study in rhetoric.  There are several previous posts here that examine this rhetoric in different ways like The Myth of the Psychiatrist as Bogeyman  and Why Do They Hate Us?

Supplementary 2:  Per this previous post - the  antipsychiatry philosophies follow per the reference below.  It is also a good example of a potential critic with something useful to say but using invalid arguments of the form given in the body of the above post.  A standard tactic is falsely claiming that psychiatrists hold a certain position and then attacking that position as though it is true.

Fulford KWM, Thornton T, Graham G.  Oxford Textbook of Philosophy and Psychiatry.  Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006: 17.

"Some of the main models advanced by antipsychiatrists, mainly in the 1960s and 1970s, can be summarized thus:

1.  The psychological model...
2.  The labeling model...
3.  Hidden meaning models...
4.  Unconscious mind models...
5.  Political control models..." <-Foucault is located here. (p. 17)

Supplementary 3:  Of course it is always important to recognize the bullshitters - Is Bullshit A Better Term Than Antipsychiatry?