4 ms·

The world has gone bonkers. This guy should have his doctor's license revoked, to avoid cases like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anneliese_Michel https://

• chmike 10y ago
  This is a very irrational and stupid stand point. This psychiatrist may have studied and described a new type of mental illness. Why would you want to censor such study and prevent this scientist to do any psychiatrist work ? For what reason ? Because the phenomenon is referred to as demonic posession and you don't BELIEVE in that ? First there is no way to prove that demonic posession doesn't exist, so your judgment is based on a pure belief. Second we must make a clear separation between the facts and their interpretation. Your reaction is obviously motivated by the reject of the interpretation. There are a priori many other possible interpretations of the facts. No one could have tested the validity of the interpretation because the existence and properties of demons is still UNKNOWN and this means there is no way we can test if anything could be a daemon manifestation or is not a daemon manifestation. What you request is censoring and by that you prone obscurantism. That is anti-scientific and it would be a regression. In face of such report or data, the only valid attitude should be to first verify as much as possible the reality of facts. we should leave on the side the interpretation of the facts in this step to avoid falling in a confirmation bias. My feeling is that referring to these facts as demonic posession was a strategic mistake of the author. But that, in itself, can't justify to ban this person of any psychiatric activity. To conclude I would say that scientific rationality and objectivity is apparently is a poor state.
  • DanBC 10y ago
    > This is a very irrational and stupid stand point. This psychiatrist may have studied and described a new type of mental illness. Why would you want to censor such study and prevent this scientist to do any psychiatrist work ? There are established processes in place to create a new psychiatric diagnosis. This doctor is ignoring those processes. And he is specifically excluding demonic possession from mental illness; that's the point of his article.
    • chmike 10y ago
      I don't see what justify the claim that he ignores the process of creating new diagnosis. You seam to ignore that the identification of new mental illness always start by one or more psychiatrists describing cases that don't fit in the existing diagnosis frames. From my current understanding, he distinguish the cases of so called "demonic possession" from mental illnessess because the patient show, apparently, so called paranormal capacity he personnally witnessed. This begs for further investigation and verification WITHOUT confirmation bias in one way or the other. The difficulty here is that demonic possession refers to cultural knowledge which could strongly influence interpretation of the facts. It is thus to be verified if such cultural influence could have tainted the study. For now calling theses cases "demonic possession" doesn't prove the existence of a bias, but I consider it a bad scientific strategy because steps should have been taken to move the question into a more neutral space of knowledge to avoid any bias in one way or the other.
      • DanBC 10y ago
        > You seam to ignore that the identification of new mental illness always start by one or more psychiatrists reporting cases which doesn't fit in existing diagnosis frames. He's not reporting these cases. He hasn't written any case studies for his proposed new illness. He hasn't written any peer-reviewed articles about his proposed new "demonic possession" illness. He has said that a small number of these people do not have a mental illness, and he's sent those people back to religious groups.
        • chmike 10y ago
          It looks indeed like that, but I don't know. I can't make an enleightened judgment on a newspaper article. Regarding peer review article, it's not always easy. Referees need a way to verify the seriousness of the study and, when possible, the validity of the result. This is not always possible. This doesn't imply the study wasn't serious or the study is invalid. Also, when the article's topic address very controversial subjects, no peer or editor may want to expose his credibility. This again doesn't tell us anything on the quality or validity of the study. In the newspaper article there is evidence of the awareness by the psychiatrist of such types of problem. As a last resort, publishing a book is the best strategy to get the info out and accessible to all. Regarding your last sentence you assume that the religious groups would harm the patient. This is yet an unproven claim. But I agree that this do happen in some case. I won't call that back into question. But currently I don't know if this was the case. I would support an investigation (without confirmation bias) that would verify how the psychiatrists ensured that the patient was in good hands in the religious group. Apparently the psychiatrist is very conscious of his mission to help people. These types of cases are apparently beyond his competence to help or heal them. He can only check if these cases fit the currently known mental desease frames. Testing medication on them as some psychiatrists might have done would be much more irresponsible then leaving them to people who are known to be able to help them (without beheading or burning them). But I agree this is a questionable point. My opinion on all that is that a scientific study is urgent, I mean real scientists.
  • Indolat 10y ago
    We have an extensive scientific picture of the world we live in, and it's verified and validated by a huge number of experiments. This picture doesn't have any place for anything supernatural. You can't fit demons into physics and biology, as you can't fit a bull into a china shop. If you want to think that demons can exist, you have to abandon science. You can't sit on two chairs. It's not about censorship, it's about ability to pass a simplest reality check. I don't want to have any doctors or engineers around me who don't pass this check.
    • chmike 10y ago
      This is a totally wrong perception of the universe we live in. The reality is that our knowledge of the universe is limited by the horizon of our perception. In the years 1400 the existence of the american continents was not yet known because it simply was beyond the horizon of our planet exploration. These are huge continents with humans living on it that we ignored they existed but they existed. Today we know that dark matter [https://home.cern/about/physics/dark-matter https://home.cern/about/physics/dark-matter] exist and that visible matter that is the only matter we studied until now accounts for only 5% of matter of the universe (current estimate). We currently don't know the nature and properties of dark matter. All we know is that it interacts with the gravitational force on visible matter and that is how we discovered its exitence. So, in theory, there is plenty of room in this unknown space that COULD support the existence of ghosts, spirits or whatever else. We do have an extensive scientific model of the world in which we live, but it is still limited. What strikes me is that so few people seam aware of the horizon of our perception. I suspect it is due to our educative program that focus on transmitting things we know to students and forget to learn about the limit of our knowledge. This gives the false impression to young students that we nearly know everything and that there are only a few small black spots left.
      • chmike 10y ago
        Downvoting is for inappropriate content relative to HackerNews standards, not if you dislike the answer.
      • Indolat 10y ago