Examination of a Motive

[Natalie Severn]

Dave,I certainly go along with the probability that there were multipathologies at work here.
Norma

[Errata]

It's kinda too bad all this happened before a DSM ws compiled. I'm pretty sure that psychiactric problems are not a static affair. There was a thing in the news a while back about autism, and how the percentages have exploded in recent years. Not the population, which would make sense, but the percentages which one would think would be stable at least. But we are diagnosing higher percentages of the population with mental illness. Which means one of three things.
1: We are good enough now to correctly diagnose people who otherwise would have slipped through the cracks.
2: We have successfully made the diagnostic criteria so vague that people are being incorrectly diagnosed quite a bit or
3: The factors that allow population growth also trigger mental illness.
Consequently, I'm not sure we should use the latest population data to look at the mentally ill in London in 1888. I think we should use the earliest. Because a: modern environmental factors could be causing the modern crazy and b: while it true that theres crazy, theres not, and theres a whole lot of grey in between, I don't think we are looking at the grey areas here. I think we are looking at someone who even today would seem normal unless an MRI or extensive bloodwork was involved.

[protohistorian]

I am no longer at University. Does anyone have a Dsm I? Dave