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|  | | Antiscience and Pseudoscience in Psychiatry
Nonempircal methods are used in well-intended psychiatry to declare outlier scores in any measurable mental category to be indicators of disease. The nearly universal view of psychiatry as having scientific legitimacy leads to an abuse of psychiatry to harm, rather than help people who become victims of these nonempirical declarations, including in conservatorships for the elderly, involuntary holds and treatment, and use of forensic psychiatry in the courts, where victims of crime are further financially or psychologically victimized, by use of junk science in defenses, which may eliminate the victim's possibility for financial recovery in the criminal restitution process, or for some sense of closure for a tragic loss caused by the perpetrator.
div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt">Such is the case in forcibly taking over the assets and liberties of the elderly in conservatorships or forced institutionalization/incarceration in assisted living complexes. In such cases, often there is a take-over their liberties, including their personal freedom, financial freedom, and even their minds. Often, this leads to involuntary psychotropic medications, or of effectively involuntary medication, since consent cannot be truly given when medical advice is based on bad statistics and poorly understood wider effects of such medications on mood, thought | | | | The System is Nearer
This work responds to Ray Kurzweil's "The Singularity is Near" by arguing that long before any technological singularity, there will be other events that make considerations of such a singularity event essentially irrelevant.
Whether of not anticipations of inevitabile gross unpredicability and replacement of Homo sapiens as the dominant species, at or near a technological singularity, are accurate, they are irrelevant. That is because long before any such singularity event, there will be a dehumanizing domination by a truly alien entity or entities, a System, featuring qualities properly called "mental" by any standards, such as having intentionality, or of being best categorized as mental in terms of economy of description, just as mental terminology of cognativists referring to mental events, allows |
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