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Comment by erasemus | Hacker News Reader

I'm worried there's a taboo developing where only professionals or mentally ill people themselves are allowed to express any kind of opinion about mental illness or the mentally ill.

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I'm worried that the field of psychology is gaining a monopoly on expression of feelings. We can no longer express happiness and sadness, anxiety and frustration, without being "diagnosed" in a horoscopic manner which has little or nothing to do with science and bears a great deal of stigma.

The psychological disorders of today are the occult of yesterday. We believe that one can become possessed by depression or anxiety. Possessed by psychosis, possessed by a personality disorder, possessed by PTSD, possessed by a history of child abuse. And we have to call upon the psychologists to preform an exorcism.

You are free to reject diagnosis and medication unless you are determined a danger to yourself or others. HIPAA also gives you control over where your diagnoses travel.

Not with facebook, of course, which doesn’t qualify for hipaa protections yet.

Of course you are free to do so, but back in the days of daemon possession, most people were just as free to reject the claim that they were possessed. What mattered back then, was not the claim though, what mattered back then was that ordinary people would look at someone and think "oh he's acting weird, he must be possessed". And that "possessed person" would then be feared. It interfered with the process of empathy.

Well, HIPAA also protects you from your doctor telling your social circle. So i’m not quite clear on what the parallel to “being afraid of a possessed person” would be.

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