> Your kook-like obsession ...
1. Do you have any idea how this language makes you -- and all psychologists -- look?
2. According to the NIMH and the usual rules of scientific evidence, the burden is on psychology, not its critics, to prove that mental illnesses are real, a problem that isn't helped at all by the practice of creating and destroying mental illnesses using votes instead of research.
Psychologists could easily reverse the recent NIMH ruling that the DSM is to be dropped as pseudoscience (http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/the-rats-of-n-i-m-h) -- they could produce scientific evidence that the mental illnesses listed there are real. But, notwithstanding this tangible injury to their livelihoods, they cannot do that. And neither than you.
> People who are sometimes hospitalised can be treated -safely and effectively- with some forms of talking therapies.
Yes, which calls into question the reality of mental illnesses. Prove this wrong using evidence -- name a real illness, from the world of medicine, an illness with a known cause, that can be talked out of existence.
In other words, meet your scientific burden of evidence.
> That does not mean their illness is not real and it is fucking offensive to suggest otherwise.
Spoken like a true psychologist: everything is an emotional issue, there are no topics that can be discussed dispassionately -- a requirement for science. And, like a religious believer, what is "real" can be asserted without evidence.
> ... refusing to accept the possibility that mental illness exists is indistinguishabke from bigotry in this post.
Let's analyze this claim. Science, and scientists, proceed using the null-hypothesis precept (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_hypothesis), the precept that a claim is assumed to be false until evidence supports it. The recent NIMH ruling agrees completely with this foundational precept, and that the scientific burden of evidence rightly rests with psychology to prove its claims.
According to you, and based on your posted statement quoted above, this means that scientists are bigots.
Scientists aren't in the habit of "refusing to accept the possibility" of anything, but they refuse to accept ideas having no evidence. You think this makes them bigots. You're both wrong and science-illiterate.
Finally, if mental illnesses can be accepted as real without evidence, then Beth Rutherford's claim to have been raped by her father, and forced to abort with a coat-hanger, must also be accepted as real without evidence. But when she made her claim, Beth Rutherford was a virgin -- in reality.
http://arachnoid.com/trouble_with_psychology