Conversation

About a quarter of the conditions in the DSM-IV seem to be charismatic conditions. Like charismatic megafauna. The stuff that people like to self diagnose and other-diagnose both close-up and at a distance. And construct pop narratives around.
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There doesn’t seem to be meaningful “treatment” for most charismatic conditions in their non-extreme forms. Which makes me wonder whether they should be labeled conditions at all or treated as personality types. Maybe any personality type carried to an extreme is a condition.
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Replying to
This is a version of the arguments proposed by RD Laing, Foucault & the old left “anti-psychiatry” movement. They added that the pathologization of these traits was (nothing but) a repressive effort to impose bourgeois behavioral & cognitive norms on all, masquerading as science.
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Yeah I’m familiar with that reading but I think I give the profession the benefit of doubt overall as genuinely describing and treating real conditions. Charisma is an additional reading rather than a substitute reading for me.