Depression

I fail to see how anything Infinite Jester said addresses what I wrote. The whole point is that the so-called symptoms are adduced as evidence of disease, which begs the question, how do we know they are symptoms absent evidence that the diagnostic category maps onto an observable pathological process? The logic underpinning the diagnosis takes for granted the very thing that remains to be proven.

It is an example of the begging the question fallacy, a species of circular reasoning whereby the attempt is made to prove a proposition (that depression is a disease), based on a premise that itself remains to be proven (that is, that the patient is suffering from symptoms of a disease), which premise, upon closer analysis, is revealed to assume the truth of the proposition the person who commits this fallacy is trying to prove.

I make no claims to originality on this point, this is a criticism regularly leveled against psychiatric diagnoses.

As for your finding my perspective irksome, well, that's your problem, not mine, so I don't know why you are telling me that.

Hey Cledwyn,

I thought I addressed what you wrote earlier, but maybe I wasn't as clear as I should have been. The problem with your argument is that you're conflating two claims:

(a) Severe, debilitating depression is an illness/disease
(b) Symptoms of depression, crying, withdrawal, lethargy, anhedonia, hopelessness, and so on, are signs of internal states that have a similar cause

It's true that the claim that severe, debilitating depression is an illness/disease is a grammatical proposition. It expresses rules for the use of words, illness/disease, and is therefore not subject to proof or disproof, confirmation or dis-confirmation. If you know what it means for something to be an illness/disease and you know what kind of condition severe, debilitating depression is, then you can make the inference that severe, debilitating depression is an illness/disease. This is also true with regards to every other illness/disease and the reason this is so is that the designation of a condition as an illness/disease does not require that you know the underlying cause of the condition. The Ancient Egyptians knew that cancer was an illness without knowing anything about how genetic mutations of the oncogenes of cells' genetic material could cause cells to replicate at hazardous rates. They knew the nature of the condition and how it affected the person's ability to function and this was, and still is, sufficient.

If you want to argue that I'm wrong, then you need to give an argument for why we need to know the exact cause of debilitating conditions to designate them as illnesses/diseases.

As for the second claim, I'm just going to consider it common-ground that you accept that the paradigmatic symptoms of depression (crying, withdrawal, lethargy, anhedonia, hopelessness, etc) tend to co-occur and have a similar cause, which involves abnormal neurological, biochemical and metabolic activity of our nervous system.

As a point of clarity though, I should add that symptoms don't have to point to an illness/disease. Smoke can be a symptom of a fire, even though a fire isn't an illness/disease (it's not even a biological event). The fact that an empirical claim supports counterfactuals is a symptom of it being a natural law, even though natural laws (i.e. the Second Law of Thermodynamics) isn't an illness/disease.

Cledwyn Bulbs wrote:I make no claims to originality on this point, this is a criticism regularly leveled against psychiatric diagnoses.

Yes, but it's based on a confusion that systems of classification are discovered and can be true or false. Once you realize that the system of classification is just providing a way of talking about psychological events, then you can move to talking about the cause, correlates and interventions for these events.

Cledwyn Bulbs wrote:As for your finding my perspective irksome, well, that's your problem, not mine, so I don't know why you are telling me that.

I didn't expect that you would care that I was irked by what you wrote, I expected that you would be interested in the reasons for why I thought your argument was irksome. Nonetheless, it hurts me to know that you don't care about my emotions.

-IJ