Talk:Anti-psychiatry/Archive 4

message: I radically changed the section “Challenges and alternatives to psychiatric theory”, which I renamed “Main criticisms”.
Please be patient while I write an explanation for such changes.  Cesar Tort 01:24 (UTC)  20 March 2006.
:The eliminated paragraphs were extremely long-winded.  Even though my native language is Spanish (so please correct my syntactic inaccuracies!) I can detect overwriting in English, as is the case of the deleted paragraphs.
:I believe “critics” sounds much better than “anti-psychiatrists”, though I left some of the latter expression.
:I inserted references to Breggin and Valenstein which I previously referred to in one of my answers to Dcfleck above, when I outlined the “five parallel critiques”.
:The “hyperfocus” paragraph, about which Rockpocket complained above, I deleted entirely: it is beside the point.  
:With regard to anorexia, trauma-oriented professionals who would never recommend to lobotomize anorexic girls don’t go as far as to suggest that anorexia “is a legitimate lifestyle”.  That claim seemed so ridiculous that I deleted the whole paragraph.
:I also deleted referents to web pages about the recent Tom Cruise affair with psychiatry.  It is improper for a scholarly article to rely on tabloid notes.
:I also deleted big chunks of the “Pseudoscience” section and cited the important notion of hard sciences instead.  The deleted paragraphs were, in my opinion, perfect examples of long-winded prose.  The purpose of a Wikipedia article I guess is to put it in top shape rhetorically.  The long-winded deleted paragraphs have no place in a concise article.  Cesar Tort 02:45 (UTC)  20 March 2006.
:: I have no real specific problems with any of those (and your English is, for the most part, exemplary). I take you point about using "critics" instead of "anti-psychiatrists". However, i think we have to strike a balance as this page is supposed to be about an anti-psychiatry movement after all and not just general criticism of psychiatry. For example, i have some criticisms of psychiatry myself, but they do not make me part of an anti-psychiatrist movement. Moreover, in places you quote "prominant psychiatrists" as being proponents of anti-psychiatry beliefs. This reads to me like a complete paradox, how can someone claim to be both when they are opposites? I really think we need to qualify - somewhere - strict boundaries of what the movement encompasses. Otherwise i'm left wondering why we don't have anti-medicine, anti-dentistry or anti-genetics articles, as i can find critics of all of those.
:::It is difficult to resolve this issue unless we say over and over again that bio-shrinks are some kind of guys and non bio-shrinks a very different kind of guys (by “bio” I mean those who approve drugs, ECT and lobotomy).  Cesar Tort (UTC)  20 March 2006.
:: On a more minor point, I also notice that you moved the sentence about the biochemical imbalances being an effect and not a cause, back to the genetics section from the biochemical section. I don't really mind where it goes (and understand, of course, how genes regulate biochemistry) but i would have thought since there is a section about biochemistry specifically - it would be better off there. Generally, nice work though. Rockpocket
:::You can move it back.  Since I’m new to Wikipedia I got very confused when a change of yours merged with mine a few hours ago while I didn’t had saved my changes.  Perhaps I did a wrong cut and paste?  Cesar Tort (UTC)  20 March 2006.
:: Thinking about it a little further, perhaps to make it clearer we could put something in the intro along the lines of 
:::"Despite its name, the movement is widely seen as promoting a type of psychiatry itself, albeit one that is in stark contrast to current mainstream thinking. Thus many so-called "anti-psychiatrists", including psychiatrists with non-mainstream beliefs, are keen to dissociate themselves from the term and the perjorative associations it has attracted." 
::::Yes, this paragraph may throw light in a rather confusing subject.  Do you know that the most famous critics of psychiatry are psychiatrists themselves (Szasz, the late Laing and Breggin)?  Also, the main proponent of the “trauma model” today is a psychiatrist: Colin Ross (Lidz and Arieti, the other trauma proponents, were psychiatrists too)  Cesar Tort (UTC)  20 March 2006.
::::: Great. I'll merge this in (with the sources from the critical psychiatry network page). That adresses a lot of my issues with this page and, i think, will help resolve a lot of potential disagreements down the line. Rockpocket 20:21, 20 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I'd be much happier with this sort of explanation upfront. It also allows us to claim psychiatrists can be anti-psychiatrists without totally confusing the reader. Thoughts? Rockpocket
Keep going, soon you'll be able to explain that the only people who seem to have any issue with an exclusively medical approach to problematic mental distress and function are a few hippies in Outer Mongolia. Franzio 09:37, 21 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Radical changes 

message: I have just completed the radical cull.  We now have a rough draft of the entirely re-written article. Cesar Tort 21 March 2006, 04:23 (UTC)
: Nice work, Cesar. Now it is coming together, i took the opportunity to dewikify a lot of duplicate links and removed some duplicate information (like the "chemical straightjacket" allegations for example). I also changed quite lot of the electroshock section around. It read very much like a POV damnation of ECT, so i added some sources of the alternate opinion for balance. 
: If no-one has any objection, i will remove the POV and citation tags at the top of the page tomorrow - as i personally don't think they need to be there anymore. Rockpocket 07:08, 21 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: How does it weaken the article when the exact same information is repeated further down? That makes no sense. I changed it to side effects as, by definition, an adverse effect of a drug that is not part of relieving the disease is a "side effect". However, i agree that "adverse effects" is a better term in this case. Here is an idea - why don't you actually make that change yourself rather than criticising others for not coming up with the phrase like you did? Rockpocket 18:17, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

text: Its easy to criticise, isn't it? But if you had actually contributed to this effort rather than restrict your insight to criticism of others, the article might have addressed those concerns. I really think you are missing the fundamental point of Wikipedia: it is not mine or Cesar's obligation to address your criticisms - that is your problem. If you can improve it - do so. Time and time again i have encouraged you to get involved and time and time again you respond with criticism but no action. Rockpocket 18:17, 21 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Job done 

message: Well I guess this is it?
Rockpocket, Franzio and Dcfleck: it has been a pleasure and a great experience to work with you.  Yes: I write in a Solzhenitsyn-type style but I perfectly understand that encyclopedia language must be neutral, and I will be very neutral when doing the minor changes I suggested above.  
I do believe that the article will be of great help to those who are confused about a perplexing subject.  It took me five years of my life in Manchester, Texas and Mexico to understand psychiatry.  Though our re-written article is properly simple, the subject is enormously complex and requires very rare intellectual and emotional abilities to fully grasp what is it all about.
By the way Dcfleck, I read the book review of Bentall’s “Madness and human nature” you called Rockpocket’s attention to.  It looks interesting and you can see there that we who oppose psychiatry do it for good reasons.  If you want to do some reading about the subject I would also recommend Robert Whitaker’s “Mad in America” or John Modrow’s “How to become a schizophrenic”.
Perhaps it is time for POV tags removal?
Thanks again for letting me to fully cooperate with you and I hope we will met again in Wikipedia.  Cesar Tort  21 March 2006, 22:44 (UTC)
:: I'll remove the tags. Best wishes, Cesar. It has been enjoyable and enlightening interacting with you. Rockpocket 23:14, 21 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  A pleasure 

message: I tried to improve some referents and also deleted the phrase that compared ADHD with homophobia.  The debate between gay activists and the mental health reporter of the deleted referent  is too controversial for the Anti-psychiatry article and not really germane to the ADHD issue. César Tort 00:35, 26 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Improved referents  

message: Some external links at the end of the article are not “Organizations” (e.g., AntiPsychiatry.org is only Doug Smith’s personal web page, which I translated to Spanish by the way) so I removed them.  I also removed the site of Fuller Torrey: psychiatry’s foremost watchdog!, some sites that were heavy to download and the Freud sites unrelated to antipsychiatry.  Cesar Tort 02:06, 27 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I also eliminated the first short phrase about psychoanalysis since it is different from psychiatry (and psychoanalysis is discussed later in the text). Cesar Tort 19:01, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

text: And removed three articles of the “Articles” section in External Links since the long antipsychiatry list of articles in the first website is more than enough (and, incidentally, I got a virus while trying to download an article in the last —now removed!— web site).  Cesar Tort 02:16, 31 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Removals