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Query: UMLS:C0025362 (mental retardation)
 15,878 document(s) hit in 31,850,051 MEDLINE articles (0.00 seconds)

The psychiatric community seems determined to ground its medical legitimacy on principles that confuse diagnoses with disease. If mental illnesses are diseases of the CNS, they are diseases of the brain, not the mind. If mental illnesses are the names of (mis)behaviour, they are forms of behaviour, not diseases. Psychiatric metaphors have the same role in medicine as religious metaphors have in theology. Religion is, among other things, the institutionalised denial of a finite life. Psychiatry is, among other things, the institutionalised denial of the tragic nature of life: individuals who want to reject the reality of free will and responsibility can medicalise life, and entrust its management to health professionals. Psychiatrists have succeeded in persuading the scientific community, the courts, the media, and the general public that the conditions they call mental disorders are diseases, that is, phenomena independent of motivation or will. The more firmly psychiatrically based ideas take hold of the collective American mind, the more foolishness and injustice they generate. Long ago, the law makers agreed to let psychiatrists literalise the metaphor of mental illnesses. Thus, the Americans With Disabilities Act (AWDA), scheduled to be fully implemented by July 1992, covers claustrophobia, personality problems, and mental retardation, though unlike DSM-III-R it excludes kleptomania, pyromania, compulsive gambling, and transvestism. The literal language of psychiatry allows motivated actions to be called 'disease'. Other examples of behaviour for which psychiatrists have disease names, and which AWDA implicitly accepts as genuine diseases, include dysmorphophobia, multiple personality disorder, frotteurism, hypoactive sexual desire disorder, and fractitious disorder with physical symptoms.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
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PMID:Diagnoses are not diseases. 142 20

The multimedia and virtual reality projects performed at our laboratory during the last ten years can be grouped into the following groups: 1) tutorial and entertainment programs for handicapped children, 2) rehabilitation programs for stroke patients and patients with phobias. We have developed multimedia software for handicapped children with various impairments: partial vision, hearing difficulties, locomotive difficulties, mental retardation, dyslexia etc. In the present paper we show the advantages of using multimedia software to develop mental skills in handicapped people and deal with the special needs of handicapped children. For the rehabilitation of stroke patients we have developed a computer-controlled method, which enables - contrary to methods used internationally - not only the establishment of a diagnosis, but also measurement of therapy effectiveness: 1) it enables us to produce a database of patients, which contains not only their personal data but also test results, their drawings and audio recordings, 2) it is in itself an intensive therapeutic test and contains tutorial programs. We are currently collecting test results. We have also developed some virtual worlds for treating phobias: a virtual balcony and a ten-story building with an external glass elevator as well as an internal glass elevator in the virtual Atrium Hyatt hotel. We have developed a virtual environment for treating claustrophobia too: a closed lift and a room where the walls can move. For specific phobias (fear of travelling) we have modelled the underground railway system in Budapest. For autistic children, we have developed virtual shopping software too. In this paper we present the advantages of virtual reality in the investigation, evaluation and treatment of perception, behaviour and neuropsychological disorders.
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PMID:Developing multimedia software and virtual reality worlds and their use in rehabilitation and psychology. 1571 16