Justin Garson @justin_garson Twitter profile

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Justin Garson

1 month

For Aeon, I wrote about targeted individuals, “paranoia,” and the failure of medical psychiatry to help those most in need. I also consider what should come next. Deeply grateful to those who shared their stories with me @aeonmag

How the psychiatric narrative hinders those who hear voices | Aeon Essays

For those who hear voices, the ‘broken brain’ explanation is harmful. Psychiatry must embrace new meaning-making frameworks

aeon.co

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

2 years

Anyone who’s spent time on a psych ward “gets” the basic mechanics: you’re forced to comply with low-level, frustrated, and often sadistic staff. Reasonable outbursts against your treatment are seen as signs of pathology, and used as grounds for drugging and more confinement 1/5

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

2 years

If that happens too often you're put in long-term ward. Ultimately, you realize that survival on a psych ward isn’t about “getting better”. It’s about learning how to comply with the demands of perfect idiots. (My dad had the same kind of experience in public mental hospital 5/5)

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

2 years

Here’s an example from my experience in an adolescent psych ward. Patient 1 is sharing about a friend who committed suicide. Patient 2, who had the same friend, gives her a hug. A staff member says they broke the ‘no touching’ rule, and they can’t leave ward for 3 days. 2/5

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

2 years

Patient 1, enraged, screams at staff member, is restrained and put in isolation. Patient 2, enraged, is also restrained and put in isolation. Two more patients put in isolation, general agitation ensues. One patient in isolation harms himself to express his anger 3/5

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

2 years

The next day the staff member decides he will not punish them. But if you are put in isolation, that’s taken as a sign of a serious mental health problem, meaning the doctor will likely tack on another two weeks to the total duration of your stay. 4/5

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

2 years

When philosophers say “I don’t do metaphysics” what they mean is “I inherited someone else’s metaphysics and I don’t want to think about it.”

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

2 months

I think psychiatry robs us of our humanness. Depression, anxiety, panic, even psychosis, aren’t diseases, but very human responses to the problems of life. The answer isn’t more pills but targeting the social forces that make our lives so shit.

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

1 year

Wonderful, groundbreaking research, led by my friend Hans Schroder, shows that framing depression as purposeful, not pathological, has better therapeutic outcomes. Continuing to promote the dysfunction/disease/chemical imbalance paradigm is becoming a serious moral problem.

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

2 months

Antidepressants are literally robbing our generation of one of the few great things life has to offer. People should be more angry about that. Like out in the streets angry.

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

2 years

Here's the real damage done by the serotonin hypothesis. It's not so much to people with depression - many benefit from SSRIs. I was on Prozac as a teen and it helped me out. The damage was how it shaped public imagination about mental illness (1/6)

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

2 years

@MichaelALewis10 I’m glad you had that experience. I wonder how much anything ever changes in a system where you have a small group of people who have pretty much absolute power over another group of people, and almost no accountability.

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

2 years

A hypothesis: as more people start to see mental disorders as coherent responses to life experiences, rather than brain dysfunctions, that’s going to have a destabilizing effect on psychiatry. I might be wrong about that. Time will tell.

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

5 months

I think depression is sometimes just a great ‘no’ to the conditions of life. And the worst thing you can do is try to convince someone that something’s wrong with their brain instead of acknowledging that the world/their situation/etc is fucked and they are correctly seeing that.

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

1 year

@BrandyLJensen The thing I always come back to is: people don’t write stuff like this because they think it’s true. They write it because it’s a novel ‘take’ in an increasingly crowded market.

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

2 years

This was hard to write. I wrote for Aeon on seeing mental illness as purposeful, not pathological, and about the experiences with my dad that led to this shift. I’m grateful to Christian Jarrett @psych_writer for careful editing. Comments open

Evidence grows that mental illness is more than dysfunction | Aeon Essays

Evidence is growing that mental illness is more than dysfunction, with enormous implications for treatment

aeon.co

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

1 year

@meanunclejack Went to Uganda this summer and really miss spending the first 10 min of any interaction celebrating each other and asking about the family

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

2 years

I’ve been writing about philosophy & madness but hesitant to talk about my own history with psychiatry. But not talking promotes the idea that madness and “mental illness” is shameful or impolite to discuss. So here’s my story 1/7

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

8 months

At root, what I dislike most about psychiatry is this: you have a person (the psychiatrist) who comes along and, in effect, says to another (the patient): “my grasp of reality is superior to yours.” No justification, no explanation. As a philosopher, I find this intolerable.

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

2 years

A career in academia: fluctuating almost daily between near-manic excitement about a new project and its potential impact, and the overwhelming feeling that your work is unoriginal, uninspired, fruitless and wasteful.

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

2 years

Setting the record straight. The difference between continental and analytic philosophy is that it makes sense to get high and read continental philosophy (Foucault, Cixous…). But nobody gets high and reads, say, Kripke.

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

2 years

There’s nothing wrong with scientists changing their minds. That’s how science works. There is something wrong with dumping billions of dollars into a false belief system and creating a warped idea of how madness happens. That damage will take a lot of time to undo (6/6)

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

1 month

The reason I detest psychiatry is that its main function is to take real problems that people have with society, with how they are expected to act and live, and frame them as diseases to be treated. It invalidates people to protect the social status quo.

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

2 years

I’ve spent years trying to abolish my anxiety. The only thing I never tried is to befriend it. Goodbye pills

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

27 days

I was hospitalized for six weeks for depression and not *once* was my depression treated as a signal that something in my life was seriously wrong. When it wasn’t seen as a brain defect, it was seen as an irrational phase of adolescence. And this is still the norm for psychiatry.

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

1 year

A friend of mine told me that one of his first academic talks was severely criticized by a senior academic, and that night he went back to his hotel and considered killing himself. And I wondered how many people this happens to.

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

3 months

I don’t think having a medical degree gets you one step closer to understanding mental health & illness. It just generates the appearance of authority, the reassuring illusion that someone in the room knows what’s wrong.

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

2 years

My main goal in academia is to fight the dominance of the biomedical model of psychiatry through philosophical exploration of alternate paradigms, writing about psychiatry’s history & getting the word out about newer approaches 7/7

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

1 year

I interviewed an extraordinary psychiatrist who practiced asylum medicine before antipsychotics. In 1950 he opposed putting schizophrenic patients into insulin comas, as it was useless and often deadly. His colleagues called him ‘reckless’ and ‘irresponsible’ for criticizing it.

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

5 months

I went to a talk earlier this week by two psychiatrists who joked that, if they told patients all the risks of SSRIs and how they scarcely outperform placebo, nobody would take them. My sense is this is pretty much an open secret among professionals.

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

15 days

It just seems obvious that 90% of mental health problems are a collective form of protest against the conditions of life. I’m not just talking about depression and anxiety, I mean psychosis, so-called “personality disorders,” all of it.

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

1 year

I love psychiatric ads from back in the day. They were just so honest. No “chemical imbalance” BS. Just “you’re trapped, life sucks, take this pill” (1967)

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

1 year

@mazzypopstar Hang the DJ. No question for me

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

2 years

I wrote for @PsychToday on evidence that ADHD is designed, not disordered. ADHD traits are overrepresented in nomadic and migrating populations, which suggests cognitive benefits in environments that reward exploration, novelty-seeking, and movement

Did ADHD Evolve to Help Us?

Evidence mounts that ADHD isn’t a brain deficit, but an evolved cognitive style with its own strengths.

www.psychologytoday.com

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

2 years

When I was 1, my parents changed my name from “Paul” to “Justin”. Even today it strikes me as one of the strangest things I’ve ever heard. Has this happened to anyone else?

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

2 years

I just read an overview of evolutionary aspects of schizophrenia. The author refused to discuss childhood adversity for fear of blaming parents. They spoke only of genes, infection, urban living...I worry that fear of blame, while important and serious, now impedes research.

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

2 years

When it comes to the failed serotonin hypothesis of depression, people are looking for someone to blame. Who let it take over our thinking? I want to suggest something radically different. The problem isn't in the first place a specific person or group. It's an ideology (1/11)

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

29 days

I think it’s fascinating that depression is literally just your brain’s way of telling you to get out of a bad situation, and we treat it like this demon from hell. How many people have been hurt by being told “oh, you have this terrible disease”?

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

2 years

Book that was so disturbing you couldn’t finish it? (Naming and Necessity doesn’t count)

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

2 years

I don’t mean to be controversial, but sometimes I think being a philosopher is the best job on the planet. My job is literally to think about stuff, and sometimes tell other people what I’m thinking about. I feel grateful every day I get to do this.

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

17 days

I suppose my ‘thing’ comes down to this: I don’t think mental disorders are like little diseases, to be labeled and drugged. I think they’re coherent responses to the trials of life, or just different, and equally valid, modes of existence, with their own strengths and pitfalls.

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

2 years

Very powerful book by a psychiatrist and evolutionary theorist. Thesis: a small proportion of people are “designed” to interact with the spirit world - to be shamans. In small communities this can be an invaluable social role in providing direction and unity in trying times 1/2

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

2 years

It fostered the idea that forms of madness are just questions of “too much/too little” of brain chemical X, and that there’d be a simple chemical fix. For folks who didn’t grow up in the 80s, it’s impossible to overestimate the way that these ideas channeled research (3/6)

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

2 years

@gurevitchesque I’m glad the story ended well. But for every person like that who had friends and relatives to hold staff accountable, there must be dozens of people who have no one to help.

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

2 years

I sometimes wonder if our preoccupation with mental health is making us worse. It’s just one more thing to be anxious about, to spend money on, to fail at.

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

1 year

Genuinely confused about why this post enraged so many people

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

1 year

I wrote for The Philosophers’ Magazine on the emerging gap between philosophy of psychiatry and philosophy of madness: one reflects on the norms and assumptions of a medical specialty; the other uses madness as a window onto reality

What Is the Philosophy of Madness? - The Philosophers' Magazine

Justin Garson on the philosophy of madness, and the importance of listening to what madness is trying to say.

philosophersmag.com

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

2 years

Many of us stopped seeing therapists. Even now, I have 3 different psychotropic prescriptions & haven’t talked to a therapist for 10 years. Many who went to med school in the 80s were indoctrinated into the chemical imbalance theory. All that mattered was your brain chemistry 4/6

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

2 years

It’s kind of like the human genome project. Throughout the 90s we were told that once we sequence the human genome, precision medicine for nearly every conceivable disease was right around the corner. Of course, that promise never materialized (5/6)

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

2 years

I’m a big fan of reading the work of people you seriously disagree with. If they’re right, it’s a good occasion to modify your views; if they’re wrong, you’re able to see more clearly where they’ve strayed from the truth.

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

2 years

In the 80s, the serotonin hypothesis, along with the (equally simplistic) dopamine hypothesis of schizophrenia, fostered in the public imagination a certain idea about which sorts of therapies would work, and which sorts of therapies we should throw our money toward (2/6)

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

1 year

I’m 50 today

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

28 days

I often feel that psychiatry is in the middle ages and we’ll look back at it like “what the fuck were we thinking?” Like the idea that depression is a disease to be treated, not your brain trying to communicate essential truths to you, will strike future generations as primitive.

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

2 years

Sometimes people say “how would you know anything about psychiatry, anyway?” The idea that I’d have to be on the psychiatrist side of the relationship to “know anything about psychiatry” is part of the problem I’m fighting against.

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

2 years

I mean, I like reading Foucault…but does anyone else feel like he just makes shit up as he goes along?

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

2 months

I wonder if the social panic over suicide makes people worse off. I think there’s something very human about contemplating suicide and it doesn’t always mean you need to be locked up or stuffed with antidepressants or forced into therapy (all things that happened to me btw)

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

1 year

Sometimes my work puts me in touch with exceptional individuals. One of those, whom I had the pleasure of interviewing this week, is neuroscientist/psychiatrist Solomon Snyder. One of his colleagues described him to me as a "f*cking genius" and I was not disappointed 1/6

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

1 year

Seems not everyone understands the term “philosopher” is correctly applied to anyone who teaches and/or writes philosophy for a living. It’s kind of like “carpenter,” “musician,” or “lawyer.” It’s not narcissistic to call yourself a philosopher if you are, in fact, a philosopher.

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

2 years

@LauraDelano Interesting. I suppose I was pretty easy-going, and good at following orders, too. I made it up the “ranks” pretty quickly and got to enjoy privileges like going outside for lunch.

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

6 months

Shocked and saddened to hear Dan Dennett died. He was one of the kindest, most generous, and genuinely inquisitive philosophers I’ve known. There was nothing of pretense in him, and he was always genuinely eager to talk about interesting ideas. There was nobody like him.

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

7 months

Whenever I ask mental health professionals, what’s the number one way to help people with “psychosis” or other serious, distressing mental health crises, the answer is always the same: Community. Relationship. Listening. Being there. How have we forgotten such a simple truth?

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

1 month

The way some psychiatrists talk about patients here, it’s like they don’t think their patients are fully human. They may have *compassion* for them, but it’s the compassion you’d have for a wounded animal, not a person who is equal to you.

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

1 year

One reason I like internal family systems is that it’s not about trying to ‘change’ yourself, but giving the various parts of yourself the space to be. What if my anxiety or fear isn’t a symptom of a disordered mind, but a part of my being that demands to be heard?

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

2 years

My entire emotional life is colored by the vague belief that I don’t have a right to exist. It affects my posture, my intonation, my writing. If it were possible to excise that belief the way you’d excise a tumor, life would be far different.

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

2 years

It’s hard to call for a paradigm shift away from the disease model of mental illness without saying what we should shift *towards.* So, in a few words…what’s your alternative?

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

2 months

One of the most harmful aspects of the idea that “psychiatry is a branch of medicine” is you feel like you need a degree in order to be a supportive ear for someone, to hear them out, to offer encouragement or advice. Psychiatry corrodes an essential element of human relatedness.

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

22 days

The awfulness of medicalizing depression comes down to this: it utterly fails to grapple with the question of whether it’s your environment that’s demoralizing and degrading and dehumanizing.

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

2 years

“It is time to offer service users a genuine informed choice about whether to take on a psychiatric label…it is no longer…justifiable for professionals to insist on psychiatric diagnosis as the only way of describing people’s distress” Lucy Johnstone 🤯 👍🏻 💯 @ClinpsychLucy

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

2 years

Any philosophers ever look at your writing output and think, “why am I doing this? I mean, what actually is the point?” If so, do you have an answer for that yet?

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

9 months

Powerful @Psychtoday piece by @readreadj : “Today, when we experience severe levels of distress and grief…we deserve better than scientifically meaningless, medical-sounding labels that wrongly imply there is something biologically defective about us.”

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

2 years

As some of you know, I recently decided to stop taking anxiety meds and learn to befriend my anxiety. Yesterday I had a small victory. I felt overwhelmed with anxiety connected to a situation my kid was in. Instead of trying to ignore it, or worse case, pop a Xanax…(1/3)

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

2 years

History of science is dangerous business. You can’t read for too long about the succession of brilliant, well-confirmed theories that turned out to be completely false - or fringe theories that turned out wildly successful - before casting a wary eye on all human knowledge.

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

1 year

@RealEmirHan Too easy. ‘Ready or Not’ (2019)

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

1 year

I hate anxiety. I’ve tried everything: therapy, self-help, pills, even befriending it. Now I’m done. Anxiety, we are foes. I will crush you.

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

2 years

I recently quit 3 anxiety related medications. For me, it was absolutely the right choice. A few weeks in *it* returned: a vague sense of apprehension, even dread, settled over parts of my life. Certain people and situations assumed a menacing tone they hadn't before 1/7

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

2 months

I’m writing a book about how we came to think of psychiatry as a legitimate branch of medicine, because I think by exposing its pretensions to be “real medical science,” we can topple its authority and mobilize alternative forms of healing.

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

2 years

The key conceptual problem of psychiatry is, as I see it, the basis of its authority to classify, diagnose, restrain, and manage the mad. Yet I believe that recent historical and economic factors have obscured the very meaning of the question.

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

4 months

When I was growing up, when a psychiatrist said “you have this mental illness,” we were like “f*ck off, you’re not a real doctor.” Now it’s like “oh my God thank you so much, now everything makes perfect sense.” What happened?

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

3 months

People often feel relieved & comforted by a psychiatric diagnosis, but I think it’s, by and large, a false comfort: the comfort of thinking one’s problems have been explained or illuminated, rather than just redescribed in medical jargon.

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

1 year

That psychiatrists are getting furious, once more, at @JoannaMoncrieff for actively exploring ways to help people live well off antipsychotic drugs – given the awful toll they can take on one’s body and mind – just illustrates how small-minded and corrupt the profession can be.

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

1 year

Finally reading, at a student’s insistence, Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism. One of his ideas is “gestural anti-capitalism”: the way capitalism tends to incorporate (i.e. profit from) anti-capitalist critique. I think a whole book could be written on “gestural anti-psychiatry.”

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

1 year

Finally got to ask Dennett the question philosophers have wrestled with for decades: if I had the bat-like power of echolocation, would I still be human?

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

2 years

I asked #ChatGPT to explain Derrida’s concept of différance to me as if I were a 10-year-old child. I’m impressed and, to be honest, a little frightened. Be sure to read all 3 (1/3)

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10 months

I wonder what happens when a whole society is led to believe that their emotions are problematic, disconnected from reality, and, quite possibly, symptoms of a brain dysfunction. It would be a society that’s paralyzed; a society that lives in an infantile state.

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

1 year

Watched No Country for Old Men again and always stunned by this line: “If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?”

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

1 month

The most harmful aspect of psychiatry is not its worldview – that human problems are ‘medical conditions’ – but its authority. The problem is we’ve invested this one narrow perspective on human experience with the boundless authority that we have. *That* is what must be attacked.

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

10 months

Whenever psychiatrists complain here about “antipsychiatrists” I just replace the phrase mentally with “harmed service users” and everything clicks into place.

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

11 days

What I hate about psychiatry is how it destroys the transformative possibilities inherent in “mental illness”. Depression, delusions, voices, impulsiveness, cannot be seen as calls to transform society, self and world, but “symptoms” to be “treated”. Pure evil

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

9 months

Excellent paper by @JTAuthor arguing most cases of depression are functional responses to circumstances, not dysfunctions - as most cases of pain are functional responses to bodily harm. This is crucial for healing, as it points us outward, toward the world and how we view it.

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

2 years

Philosophers, esp. philosophers of science, often feel insecure next to scientists. There’s a sense of “what can I contribute to this conversation? Scientists are doing the real work.” One response is to make philosophy look more like science. I think there’s a different way 1/3

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Justin Garson

@justin_garson

2 years

As philosophers of science, we really relinquished our duties under Trump. In our rush to insist that “science is real” and we should “trust scientists,” we forgot that part of our whole job is showing how science emerges from a blend of facts, values, and hidden paradigms.

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1 year

I’ve talked to a lot of people who think framing depression (alcoholism, etc.) as a disease is *good* because it gets you away from seeing it as a character flaw/moral problem. And that always struck me as a terrible, terrible dichotomy.

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