The new issue of Lingua Franca has several rewarding articles. First is a portrait of E. Fuller Torrey, an inspiring psychiatrist who has long argued that psychiatry should either just treat the most severe of brain disorders or give up its pretensions to being part of medical science. His mix of common sense and controversy has mostly been applied to schizophrenia (patients with which form the core of my professional activities as well); his 1983 book Surviving Schizophrenia is unexcelled as a guide for sufferers and their families. (In the same year, Torrey was demoted from his post at St. Elizabeth’s, the federal maximum-security psychiatric institution in Washington, DC, for publishing his findings that the hospital had colluded with Ezra Pound by declaring him insane to protect him from prosecution for treason during WWII.)
One thread of Torrey’s attention has been to the possibility that viral infection can cause schizophrenia. There has been a long, scientifically inconclusive, love affair with this theory in psychiatry, part of the agonizing search to explain such a mysterious, incurable and devastating condition. [My take on this is that the problem with explanations of schizophrenia is that it is probably a heterogeneous, “wastebasket” diagnosis for a number of different neurobiological conditions. For this reason, the effect size of any etiological theory that is researched is likely to be “washed out” by noise.]
Some of the provocative evidence includes data on the worldwide distribution of the disease; a seasonal pattern to schizophrenic births; and the discredit to the usual hereditary explanations done by the disease’s persistence in the face of its obvious adverse impact on reproductive fitness. Torrey has been fascinated by the possibility that toxoplasmosis, transmitted from housecats, could be an important key to this conundrum. Several studies under his aegis have shown that cat ownership (and, in the most recent study, specific serological evidence of toxoplasmosis exposure) is significantly more common among the parents of children who become schizophrenic, and it can be argued that there was an increase in the frequency of the illness at around the same time in the late 19th C. when cat ownership became popular.
“I’ve given talks on the cat stuff
and people’s response is almost universal: ‘I’m not surprised—I’ve
known my cat is schizophrenic for years!'” He chuckles. “One talk I
gave at a department of psychiatry, a fellow came up to me and said, ‘I
don’t want you to repeat this, but the former chairman of our
department of psychiatry was convinced that his cat was hallucinating,
so he gave him liquid Thorazine and it really seemed to help.'” Torrey
looks at me and smiles. “People find cats strange, so they don’t find
this idea so odd.”
Then there’s an interesting portrait of Richard Rorty, controversial, ambitious and erudite philosopher who arguably has best captured the era’s challenge to the concepts of truth and objectivity and who some describe as the closest thing we’ve got on this side of the Atlantic to a public, postmodern French intellectual. His work is a particular source of anxiety to conservative critics who feel it undermines the foundations of the public’s moral interity.
Like his idol John Dewey, whom he credits with breaking
through “the crust of philosophical convention,” he has pursued
twin careers as disciplinary bad boy and high-minded public
philosopher. He has set out to deflate the aspirations of his
profession—he rejects the idea of truth as an accurate reflection of
the world—while placing his own unorthodox philosophical views at
the center of an ambitious vision of social and historical hope. In
recent writings especially, he champions an unlikely brand of
“postmodern bourgeois liberalism” that has largely infuriated
postmodernists and liberals alike.
Finally, Jim Holt considers the Multiple Universes Hypothesis.
