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this is from your article: As clinical psychologist Mary Boyle penned it, schizophrenia is a "scientific delusion” which drugs can never cure.

now you say there "are no lies in the article," and you say you haven't "tried to minimize the illness. " Yet you claim to have maintained your credibility. Yikes.

now you say there "are no lies in the article," and you say you haven't "tried to minimize the illness. " Yet you claim to have maintained your credibility. Yikes.

I would not choose the rhetoric she uses -- that of "scientific delusion" -- but this is not factually inaccurate. It is one of several ways of interpreting the fact that schizophrenia has no known biochemical basis that can be consistently identified across the diagnosis, and which rules out the effects of psychiatric medication on the brain. The evidence isn't there. I wouldn't make the leap to say schizophrenia is a scientific delusion, but neither is it a lie to say this. It's an inference that would require further evidence for her to substantiate. I would suggest, in contrast to Mary Boyle, that schizophrenia is not so much a scientific delusion as much as it is not a reliable and valid categorical description.

I would say, instead, that schizophrenia is largely composed of a wide variety of disorders with a wide variety of causes, and that accurate nosology will require a new diagnostic strategy -- most likely a dimensional approach in order to identify reliable and valid dimensions that would allow us to link those dimensions to etiological factors. Some of those symptomatic dimensions will have an organic basis. Some will be psychogenic. etc.

Yet you claim to have maintained your credibility.

One more point here -- a process comment. First of all, I held out an olive branch asking that we refrain from personal attacks and to start with a sentiment of good faith. You have not responded to that appeal, and then launched in yet again to questions about my "credibility." Credibility is ad hominem. It's irrelevant; a fallacious style of argument.

But what you were raising was not in fact an issue of credibility. You actually made a decent point, which I addressed above. What you did is raise the question of whether my argument (not my credibility) was logically consistent or coherent. But that isn't an issue of credibility. It's an issue of logical consistency or coherency. That's not fallacious, and it is a valid point. I countered by saying that, no, I was not being logically inconsistent and I made my case for coherency.

Let's try to stick to these lines of argument. They will serve the facts better if we can do that, despite ourselves. So, here is a second olive branch.