Smithsonian Magazine: For Some Women With Serious Physical Ailments, Mental Illness Has Become a Scapegoat Diagnosis

I think we have to take it a step further and challenge the concept of somatic symptom disorders itself.

 

I don't know who could do that, but I'd really be interested in studies of this "it's easier" and what it means. Because it has so many possible meanings.

Does it mean technically easy? Ethically? Morally? Professionally? Emotionally? Concerning paperwork? What colleagues and employers think of it? How well they sleep about it at night? All of those? And do physicians not get that it's disgustingly immoral? Amoral at best?

No doubt about that. It serves mainly as a "get out of work" card. Which, like above, is disgustingly immoral.

Good to see physicians say it plainly. Those are not vestiges. They are not like the husks of downed craft, they are like live ammunition left around and which do regularly, in fact standardly, explode people. It's truly absurd that professionals are aware of this, and yet do nothing. It's like being fully aware that in normal operations for some job, let's say garbage collection, people just randomly get picked up and crushed to death, and no one seems to care. Or something equivalent. It just... gets no reaction.

There is clearly a much deeper, and very disturbing, factor here. As the paper says, related to socialization, to indoctrination that makes, there's a theme here, disgustingly immoral behavior be framed as perfectly normal. Things that a child easily know is wrong.

There are root causes here. No one works on root causes. Almost no one is interested, even when they know some of the consequences. It's so bizarre. The whole point of the job is to help people, and there are entire parts of that job that basically crush people to death. So damn weird.

 

The point of the medical profession has historically been to profit from the sick certainly not to help people That is not to say many individuals do go into the medical world with good intentions .I expect that many become very disillusioned when faced with systems that put budgeting decisions first .