Meaningless nonsense

There's a really odd letter in this month's The Psychiatrist. You can read it online here (if you have access), or download the PDF (without restriction).

It's odd because it seems to have no grounding in old-fashioned ideas about falsifiability; the concept proposed by Karl Popper which basically suggests that a statement can be falsified by an observation (typically experimental) that contradicts it. A classic example would be the statement "all swans are white" can be falsified by the observation of a single black swan. In many ways, it's what scientific method is based on.

You can be pretty sure that when someone starts going on about "mental - symbolic - membranes...[which] secures its architectural codes in a semantic link with external signs and objects" they are proposing things which cannot be contradicted in any meaningful way; in the same way that Freudian psychoanalysis can't be falsified. One cannot prove the non-existence of the 'Id'. Indeed, the whole 'unconscious' becomes unavailable to scientific exploration.

Further, when an author starts quoting 'studies' from 1929 which are meant to be applicable to modern understanding of mental disorder, it's highly likely that all such ideas have limited currency. If you type in 'cassirer "psychopathology of symbolic consciousness"' to Google, you get 4 hits; all of which refer to the letters in The Psychiatrist. When you remember that Google indexes billions of websites, to only get 4 hits is indicative of a somewhat limited impact of this particular work.

Finally, the author suggests that "Mental illness is the inability to (stabilize and/or) integrate own pattern of behaviour into a social framework, leading to a breakdown of (different & multiple) layers of ‘symbolic formation’". This is, of course, alien to any diagnostic classification in the last 20-30 years, which have (rightly so) separated themselves from assertions about aetiology, mainly because anyone who suggests that they know what causes (all) mental illness is probably wired to the moon...