TED Community » Laurens Rademakers

More About Me

I'm passionate about

Agriculture - both ultra low-tech and ultra high-tech; the rapid rise of Africa and its hybrid model of development; and Antarctica - where I want to build a shack one day to gaze at the stars.

An idea worth spreading

Sequester carbon in poor tropical soils, in the form of biochar, to make these soils more productive and thus prevent deforestation.

Talk to me about

I'm interested in agricultural robotics.

People don't know that I'm good at

Interpreting suspiciously vague french philosophers.

Comments

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• +2

  A reply on Talk: Jon Ronson: Strange answers to the psychopath test

  Aug 23 2012: Sure, the elimination of homosexuality as a psychiatric disorder was purely the work of the psychiatrists who had put it in there in the first place. How could we forget such a simple truth! All the campaigns by thousands of gay intellectuals during decades of course had nothing to do with that...
  
  But to answer your question, there is at best a flimsy relationship between psychiatry and neurology. A bit like astrology and astronomy. They're both dealing with stars and the cosmos.
  
  On another note, you do have a bit of the bad habit of a psychiatrist, easily identified: when someone doesn't agree with your qualifications, you call him out for having "strange beliefs". I think this shows the entire point, made by Ronson and all critics of psychiatry. So thanks for that.
• +1

  A reply on Talk: Jon Ronson: Strange answers to the psychopath test

  Aug 22 2012: By the way, remember the time when the DSM qualified homosexuality as a psychiatric disorder? Or ADHD? God knows what else we'll have to scrap from that fantasy booklet.
  
  But then, the psychiatric industry is well established and connected to great financial interests. So we'll have to take this bit by bit.
  
  But the last book anyone should trust to diagnose problems of the brain is the DSM. The case has been made a million times.
• +3

  A reply on Talk: Jon Ronson: Strange answers to the psychopath test

  Aug 22 2012: Why do you qualify dyslexia as a psychiatric disorder in the first place? How bizarre. As is well known dyslexia is a purely neurological disorder, plain and simple.
  
  I for one prefer to base any treatment of any mental problem on data from the appropriate science only. Neurology, in this case - a true science. Even if it requires us to wait a bit for that science to replace psychiatry and psychology once and for all.
• +4

  A comment on Talk: Jon Ronson: Strange answers to the psychopath test

  Aug 22 2012: The entire problem with psychology and psychiatry is that they aren't sciences in the strict sense of the word. You can quote one author and someone else can debunk his theory simply by quoting an opposite "view". In real sciences something is either true or it isn't, and there are facts to prove or disprove a hypothesis. Psychiatry conforms to none of the most simple rules of the scientific method.
  
  Hence some posts by people who take Jon Ronson's talk as if they feel personally "attacked". Also hence the ridicule for methods (like anti-psychiatry) that are just as valid as their bourgeois counterparts (classic institutionalized psychiatry) but don't pretend to be so scientific.
  
  And unlike the humanities (which don't tend to harm or pretend to "help" people), psychiatry is controversial because it is a non-science that aims to "intervene" in the mind of people.
  
  Given all this, Ronson's almost "ethnographic" analysis of the limits of psychiatry is entirely valid and interesting. The discipline of psychiatry has always been the subject of this kind of analyses, since people first started to claim it had any value. The literature scrutinizing psychiatry's problematic pretenses is vast. Scientists, historians, anthropologists, sociologists... all of them have had their say on it. And the verdict is harsh: psychiatry is a dangerous non-science that better be monitored at all times. Ronson's talk elegantly follows this tradition.

• A reply on Talk: Jon Ronson: Strange answers to the psychopath test

  Aug 22 2012: Well, anti-psychiatry's scientific basis is in fact more credible than that of bouregois psychiatry. But you do need to read Marx first, I admit. :-)

• A comment on Talk: Jon Ronson: Strange answers to the psychopath test

  Aug 18 2012: In short: bring back anti-psychiatry!
• +2

  A reply on Talk: Jon Ronson: Strange answers to the psychopath test

  Aug 18 2012: Quite frankly, I tend to side with the journalist, because he's not institutionalized in his thinking.
  
  Moreover, I think both psychology and psychiatry are not sciences, but healing techniques based in mysticism and magic (in its modern forms). They're also ideological instruments of the worst kind.
  
  Perhaps I've been reading too much about anti-psychiatry, you know, the science that popped up in the 60s and that booked interesting results. I'm also biased by what I read from Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, etc...
• +3

  A reply on Talk: Jon Ronson: Strange answers to the psychopath test

  Aug 17 2012: The statement says: "In short, we think that Ronson’s book trivializes a serious personality disorder and its measurement, which is not helpful to those who have the disorder or to their unfortunate victims."
  
  I think Ronson does exactly the opposite. By putting question marks around a pseudo-scientific instrument that has proved to be so wrong in the past, he shows extreme respect to the disorder and its victims (who include those wrongly diagnosed by the checklist).
  
  Perhaps the test will remain as controversial as the Rorschach test, with believers and non-believers. In that case, the rational man tends to side with the non-believer.
  
  I'm sure neurology will tell us much more, pretty soon, on a genuinly scientific basis.

• A comment on Talk: Jon Ronson: Strange answers to the psychopath test

  Aug 17 2012: Continuing on some discussion below.
  
  For those who are interested in alternatives to institutionalized psychiatry, allow me to refer to the world-famous experiment being conducted since a few decennia in the town of Geel, Belgium. There, "mad" people are left in a completely open environment, and households welcome them by leaving their door open all the time. Both patient and host families are transformed.
  
  Sure this stems from the sixties' field of anti-psychiatry, but Geel remains unique, in the sense that it seems to be highly effective, seriously deinstitutionalized and thoroughly "communist".
• +2

  A reply on Talk: Jon Ronson: Strange answers to the psychopath test

  Aug 17 2012: Molly, you give some good references.
  
  May I send you to some literature too? Please read Michel Foucault's "Madness and Civilization" (it tracks the history of the disciplines around madness, including of course modern day psychiatry. You will learn that these "disciplines" are really what they are: ideological formations to discipline people into a certain pattern of politically correct behavior).
  
  Please also read Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari's "Capitalisme et Schizophrénie" (both Anti-Oedipe and Mille Plateaux). In it they do a similar exercise as Foucault, but they focus it more on the workings of today's capitalism, and how it produces our minds, identity and subjectivity.
  
  Sticking to the narrow field of psychiatry is dangerous, as that pseudo-science is an institution that is way too political and has a horrible track record.