Good-faith discussions about serious political or ideological differences are rare these days. The infiltration of a radical grievance morality (Critical Social Justice) into almost every structure of Western society, has rendered critical engagement on pertinent issues all but impossible. The mental health field at large has been turned into subversive identity practice aimed grievance enhancement and social revolution, and not to gain necessary insight into one’s maladaptive engagement with life.
We therefore find it interesting when parties at opposite ends of psychological and political philosophies engage each other on key differences. Earlier in 2024, independent researcher, Dr J. D. Haltigan and psychiatrist, Dr Awais Aftab discussed their different orientations towards mental health, psychology and psychiatry. While many have noticed the seismic shift in how mental health-related issues are approached these days, compared to a decade ago, this discussion highlighted some salient philosophical differences at the heart of these shifts:
Aftab: “In my opinion, what is distinctive about ‘critical psychiatry’ in this specific sense is a general commitment to a cluster of philosophical and scientific positions about the nature and treatment of psychopathology: an understanding of “illness” in biological terms such that mental illnesses are excluded from the category, comparativist critiques of psychiatry that view general medicine to be categorically distinct from psychiatry, a commitment to essentialism in classification (such that psychiatric classifications fail to meet the standard), a rejection of the medical model as inapplicable to psychiatric problems, a rejection of the existence of brain mechanisms of psychopathology, and ‘drug-centered’ psychopharmacology.”
“Mad studies is an academic undertaking that uses the ‘lived experience’ of madness as a starting point for scholarly inquiry and activism rather than the traditional medical perspective on mental illness or the traditional psychological perspective on psychopathology. It has roots in the psychiatric survivor and service user movement, so existing scholarship is dominated by voices who’ve had negative experience of medical and psychiatric care, and who have found non-medical approaches (such as the Hearing Voices Movement) to be more valuable than traditional medical approaches.”
Haltigan: “I am not arguing here that lived experience cannot be informative, but it should be formalized—to the extent possible—around common patterns and universal laws of cause-effect with robust predictive validity for specific mental health outcomes. Otherwise, the risk is that science simply becomes story-telling. Personal idiographic narratives that, while compelling on their own terms—eliciting affect, sympathy, concern—are limitless and are intractable when it comes to mental health social policy that should be both efficient and practically implementable at scale.”
“My chief concern here is with ‘philosophers of science’ who often introduce and advocate for these sorts of activist-based scholarship strands of work relative to empirical quantitative researchers who set out to study psychological disorder, specifically (the) neurodevelopmental disorder(s). The two seem at odds when a movement at the outset is an ideological political project, not a scientific one. This is the same issue with ‘gender ideology’ and its associated signature elements including the normalized use of pronouns, including ‘they/them’ which are at cross-purposes with our empirical understanding of the binary nature of sex.”
This is a very engaging exchange, and it includes topics such as the neurodiversity movement, mental illness classification, destigmatisation and harm reduction projects, individually-located vs. socially-located psychopathology, transgenderism and homosexuality. This discussion goes into the basics of what we consider healthy and unhealthy to individuals and society.
The full engagement, with very informative hyperlinks, can be read here. We also recommend the rest of JD Haltigan’s Substack to our readers.
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