Divide and Profit: Extinction of the Individual

We must look to the wisdom of the past when so little can be found in our contemporary world. I'm old now; I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, supposedly a less free, more conservative time in the United States. But, I have never felt so confined, defined, categorized, unhinged from history, from common humanity, from belonging, from kindness, from the "values" of a democratic society than I do now. The individual has been erased and replaced by stock characters in a game of ‘diversity-demographics’: Divide and profit. This ongoing process of extinction of the individual is critical to those FKAA(Formerly Known As Asperger) for whom individuality and its correlates, Honesty, Justice, and Equality are essential.

The very act of 'doing away with' the Asperger's diagnosis demonstrates the willful 'doing away with' our personalities, preference and voices - we are subsumed into a 'spectrum' of socially undesirable persons, classed with psychopaths, but grudgingly said to have some usefulness to society, which is a very narrow and easily removed permission to exist.

Friedrich Nietzsche, 1844-1900
“You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.”

“It is the individual only who is timeless. Societies, cultures, and civilizations -- past and present -- are often incomprehensible to outsiders, but the individual's hungers, anxieties, dreams, and preoccupations have remained unchanged through the millennia.”

_Eric Hoffer, 1902-1983

“The larger the group, the more toxic, the more of your beauty as an individual you have to surrender for the sake of group thought. And when you suspend your individual beauty you also give up a lot of your humanity. You will do things in the name of a group that you would never do on your own. Injuring, hurting, killing, drinking are all part of it, because you've lost your identity, because you now owe your allegiance to this thing that's bigger than you are and that controls you.” _George Carlin, Last Words  

 

For those who would have Asperger children 'ape' so-called normal behavior: "Imitation cannot go above its model.”

“The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it, because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator, something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man's.” _Ralph Waldo Emerson, Divinity School Address
 

And from old school psychology and psychiatry: “Ultimately everything depends on the quality of the individual, but our fatally short-sighted age thinks only in terms of large numbers and mass organizations...” _C.G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self, 1875-1961 

“The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.” Sigmund Freud, 1846-1949

 

INTJ / Bipolar / Asperger's

Not true: The MBTI doesn't label
personality preferences as pathologies. 

I'm not the first person to notice the intriguing similarities between the Myers-Briggs INTJ personality type and Asperger 'symptoms.' The difficulty we face is that having invented Asperger's Disorder in the 1980s, those responsible for writing the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) have deleted Asperger's Disorder as a discrete condition and have moved us onto a new invention, the Autism Spectrum. 
Those of us who are Formerly Known As Asperger's (FKAA) have been killed off with mere words, erased from the DSM-5, and loaded like shades or ghosts on to the back of an overcrowded bus, while psychologists and psychiatrists figure out what to do with us. Makes them appear kind of silly, doesn't it?

I have exited the bus and will continue to examine how it is that I qualify for three different labels: INTJ, bipolar, and the currently nonexistent Asperger's Disorder - FKAA. I must have won some dysfunctional lottery!

Manipulation of the DSM-5: Robin S. Rosenberg, Clinical Psychologist

Abnormal Is the New Normal

Why will half of the U.S. population have a diagnosable mental disorder?

By Robin S. Rosenberg, a clinical psychologist in San Francisco and the author of Superhero Origins and Abnormal Psychology. Edited for length; bold my emphasis. Full article can be read in SLATE, Medical Examiner section, 4/12/13. 

In addition to classifying some medical disorders as mental disorders, the DSM also has been nibbling at the edges of “normal” by reclassifying as pathological the patterns of thoughts, feelings, or behaviors that were previously considered normal (albeit perhaps weird or odd). For instance, people who are extremely shy and concerned about how others might evaluate them, and who thus avoid certain types of activities, might be diagnosed with “avoidant personality disorder.” These same characteristics didn’t used to be considered pathological, and in some other cultures they are not considered to be so.

Another way that the increased prevalence of mental illness occurs is by lowering the threshold of what it takes to be diagnosed with a given disorder. For instance, DSM-5 will change in the criteria for “generalized anxiety disorder,” a disorder that involves excessive and persistent worrying. Whereas the criteria in DSM-IV required three out of six symptoms of worrying, only one symptom is needed in DSM-5. Similarly, whereas in DSM-IV the symptoms must have persisted for at least six months, in DSM-5 the duration has been reduced to three months.

One effect of a bigger mental illness tent is that there are fewer people standing outside the tent. Although the next edition of the DSM might not increase the overall number of disorders, if the criteria are loosened…then more people would qualify for a disorder. There are, and probably will continue to be, fewer and fewer people who will live their lives in relatively good mental health according to the DSM.

The normal trials and tribulations of life—the periods of sadness, or worry, of anxiety, or grief, of difficulty sleeping, of drinking too much caffeine or having caffeine withdrawal headaches—have been pathologized. They’ve been made into mental illnesses… providing a bigger tent for mental illness leaves us with an increasingly restricted definition of mental health and can make us all more likely to see mental illness even when it isn’t there—where there is just normal human struggle. We can become so used to seeing psychopathology that we think—erroneously—that being odd or having difficulties must be an expression of mental illness.

What is going in our culture that allows for this expanding definition of mental illness? There are many explanations. The first is related to payment for treatment. Psychological treatments and medications can be useful for a variety of problems, but for those treatments to be even partially paid for by health insurance companies, the problems must have a diagnosis. It’s not enough that there’s a problem that’s being addressed. It has to be a problem. (Of course, if you treat a problem before it becomes a mental illness, the health insurance company will have ended up saving a significant amount of money, but they don’t pay for early mental health intervention—there has to be a problem. But that’s a story beyond the scope of this article.)

Second, pharmaceutical companies search for ever-wider markets for their products. When more people are diagnosed with a given disorder (perhaps because of less stringent criteria), or a new diagnosis is created, it widens the market for their drugs. They push for “off-label” uses of their medications that in some way reduce a problem, and then they push for that “problem” to be redefined as a problem.

In fact, DSM-5 and the pharmaceutical industry have a significant number of connections: One study found that 70 percent of DSM-5 task-force members have financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry.

Anyone who maintains that the diagnosis put forth in the DSM are science-based is CRAZY...

In a crazy world, sanity must be earned.