Phobias In DSM Are Psuedoscience

Con has asked me to provide evidence of a claim of a mental disorder that is not based on the scientific method. The term mental disorder implies cause and effect. The name of the disorder implies a specific mental state will be the cause of behavior that causes one to function poorly in life. The specific mental state is the cause and the poor behavior is the effect. Irrational fear causes poor behavior. Rational fear does not cause poor behavior. Rational fear requires a situation where a person is in significant danger of being harmed. Science can prove fear exists in the person. Science can prove the situation is dangerous. Science can prove the objective situation caused the subjective state (rational fear). Irrational fear requires a situation where a person is not in significant danger. Science can prove fear exists in this person. Science can prove the situation has no danger. Science cannot prove the objective situation caused the subjective state(irrational fear). Science cannot prove this and therefore it is nonsense to define disorders on things that do not cause mental illness. I will attempt to extrapolate this onto a specific example: Acrophobia. Acrophobia is a term used to describe a mental disorder. It is the extreme or irrational fear of heights. A rational fear of heights can be proven using the scientific method. Heights that can kill can be proven. Fear of those heights in a human can be proven. The cause of the fear can be proven by science; the person who senses the situation through vision and uses spatial sense and basic understanding of physics to understand the danger. An irrational fear of heights cannot be proven. Fear in the person can be proven. A situation that has little or no elevation can be proven. But, science cannot prove a situation of low elevation causes fear in the person. What science can prove is that a person has irrational thinking that causes irrational fear. But, arbitrary objects and situations that do not cause fear have nothing to do with the cause of the irrational thinking or fear. They are arbitrarily associated, not causally associated. Irrational fear cannot exist without irrational thinking. Irrational fear is caused not because of a safe objective situation, but instead by irrational thinking. Taxifying mental disorders on things that cannot cause mental disorder is nonsense and unscientific. Science call things what they are. Considering proper stipulation, that brings me to my next point. My statement, 'that which causes the disorder is the disorder', in the context of the rest of argument implies that one should name the disorder based on the cause, not on things that cannot be proven to be the cause. Con makes use a comparison to attempt to say my logic does not follow. He says, what I'm saying is the same to say is: "high cholesterol is a heart attack". He misrepresents the logic of my main argument. It is not what I am saying. I"ll explain. If you have cholesterol levels that are high enough to cause a 'heart attack'(which slow or block blood flow to hear), it could be said the disorder is high cholesterol. That disorder is called Hypercholesterolemia, which is the presence of high levels of cholesterol in the blood. My argument is what causes fear, not what fear causes. So this comparison may look valid on the surface, but isolating the components and considering their relative meaning show that it"s not what I"m saying. Calling things what they are is what I"m arguing versus calling them what they are not. The scientific method is restricted to the affirmative and does not try to prove things that do not exist or cannot be proven to be part of a cause and effect chain. Bells don"t cause a dog to salivate, and low elevations don"t cause irrational fear. Pavlov didn"t prove bells cause a dog to salivate. He proved one could be conditioned to be reminded of the presence of something when it"s not there. If the dog escaped, and instead of hunting for food ran to the church, it may threaten his life. This could be called a canine mental disorder. Do we call it belliphilia? Or, irrational thinking, since the real thing causing the disorder is irrational thinking. Bells do not cause food to appear. Bells do not cause the disorder. Irrational thinking does.