Lili's endlessly repeated thought of the day

Would Mark Wood still be alive today if he had been given a diagnosis that is scientifically valid and linked to effective treatment? Anorexia, anxiety disorder or some poorly-understood sensory condition, secondary to whatever genetic or developmental syndrome he actually had, perhaps? People are dying as a sacrifice to the bullshit idea that labels like autism, OCD and Asperger syndrome are real medical conditions. They aren't, they are nothing more than elaborate descriptions of particular patterns of behaviour, and they are not linked to any scientifically valid explanation, treatment, prognosis or general notion of how to think about or react to these patterns of behaviour. These labels, as are most psychiatric and behavioural labels, are pseudoscience that serves the function of giving the patient and the researcher access to funding or services, and also serve the function of generally establishing the false belief that the forces of science have been brought to bear upon human problems. It's such a pity about the way things work in the real world.

Sure enough, it was wrong morally and logically for Atos to have judged this man to be fit for work, but the guts of the problem is the failure of the medical profession to provide a proper, full and evidence-based explanation and description of why this man was not fit to work, along with an effective remedy for the situation. I find it ironic that the doctor in this press story is made to look like the hero, when in fact he is the person in this story who is closest to the catastrophic failure in this sorry story.