Read on Twitter
Imagine someone is found dead by the railway tracks. At the inquest, the forensic pathologist reports death was the result of non-penetrating trauma that caused multiple fractures & severe internal haemorrhaging. Someone retorts: 'You idiot. He was obviously killed by a train.'
Another person notes the nearby broken fence & lack of signage & says: 'No, he was killed by poor health & safety provision.' Another notes the presence of alcohol in his blood & snaps that he clearly died because he was drunk.
All of them are coming at the tragedy - something they all agree is a tragedy - from different angles, & describing different aspects of it. Yet they see each others' perspectives as threats, rather than important additional pieces of the puzzle.
This is the level of a lot of the popular discourse I've encountered over the past year, online & in popular books & the press, about mental health. Treating different disciplines & methodologies as opposing ideological blocs, rather than complementary approaches.
Within the field, almost no one builds fences like this. Because it's nonsensical. They have specialisations, sure, & models tend to explain one aspect of a condition like anxiety better than other aspects, but no one's claiming other approaches are invalid or supplanted.
But I guess if you've got a book to flog, you sound authoritative if you confidently rubbish others in the field. Framing them as ideological enemies, you can cast yourself as a maverick bravely speaking truth to power, at least to people unfamiliar with the field.
Lots of people write & share nuanced, multicausal perspectives on mental health. But they tend to get less traction because they don't make a general audience go: 'aha. *That's* interesting.' We don't suddenly feel like we 'get' it in some simple, global way.
I'm not advocating for complete paradigmatic relativism either. (partly because saying things like 'paradigmatic relativism' makes you sound like a wanker) Obviously some models are wrong. Well, according to Box all models are wrong, but some are much wronger than others.
