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Comment by noosphr | Hacker News Reader

Remember that in the US slaves wanting freedom was a mental disorder that made it past peer review: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drapetomania

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Reading your linked article, it's clear that this was viewed as absolute quackery even back then, and is about as conflict-of-interesty as you can get: commissioned by Louisiana at the height of the Civil War, and proposed by a doctor who served in the Confederate Army [1]. His suggested treatment for Drapetomania was "whipping the devil out of them".

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_A._Cartwright

This was proposed a decade before the war started and was reprinted widely in the Southern States. That the North found it ridiculous is a bit like saying that because the Chinese Academy of Sciences says there is no such thing as autism then it's obviously viewed as quackery in the West too.

Are you able to tell us a bit more about the Chinese Academy of Sciences saying there is no such thing as autism? I was curious but cannot find anything about this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autism_in_China

There's none lol. I may have participated in studies as a researcher partially funded by Chinese academy of sciences because we had Chinese collaboration, and some studies involved autism biomarker research.

Slaves wanting freedom is a mental disorder if it is maladaptive, debilitating, and infeasible in their circumstance, no? Being crazy doesn't mean you're wrong, it could mean you are right in a world where you must be wrong to survive.

“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”

I member! Remember when dissatisfied women needing an orgasm was a mental disorder?

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3480686/

> Fate, which takes away healthy, free, young people, never pardoned me once. It has let me live all this time, quite lucid, but closed up in here ... since I was ten years old .... eighty years in psychiatric hospital for a headache

Take modern medicine with a grain of salt.

What is your point?

Surely you’re not trying to draw some conclusion between an entire countries modern day medical field and a theory a person proposed in the 1800s, right?

Hi, not the parent poster here. I believe the argument being made is that diagnostic criteria, and diagnoses themselves, can be shaped by cultural norms. As the Overton window shifts, so do the thoughts and behaviors that we deem pathological.

> Surely you’re not trying to draw some conclusion between an entire countries modern day medical field and a theory a person proposed in the 1800s, right?

That would depend on whether anything has changed since the 1800s. But that's very clearly not so -- consider that recovered memory therapy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recovered-memory_therapy), based on as much science as drapetomania, was practiced in the 1990s, and still has adherents today.

Also, for human psychology to be regarded as a medical field, it would have to be based in science. But human psychology studies the mind, therefore by definition it's not based in science.

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