Editing Delusion (section)

==Criticism==
Some psychiatrists criticize the practice of defining one and the same belief as normal in one culture and pathological in another culture for cultural [[essentialism]]. They argue that it is not justified to assume that culture can be simplified to a few traceable, distinguishable and statistically quantifiable factors and that everything outside those factors must be biological since cultural influences are mixed, including not only parents and teachers but also peers, friends, and media, and the same cultural influence can have different effects depending on earlier cultural influences. Other critical psychiatrists argue that just because a person's belief is unshaken by one influence does not prove that it would remain unshaken by another. For example, a person whose beliefs are not changed by verbal correction from a psychiatrist, which is how delusion is usually diagnosed, may still change his or her mind when observing [[empirical evidence]], only that psychiatrists rarely, if ever, present patients with such situations.<ref>{{cite book | vauthors = Double D | date = 2006 | title = Critical Psychiatry: The Limits of Madness | publisher = Springer | isbn = 978-0-230-59919-2 }}</ref><ref>{{cite book | vauthors = Davidson G, Campbell J, Shannon C, Mulholland C | title = Models of mental health | publisher = Macmillan International Higher Education | date = December 2015 | isbn = 978-1-137-36591-0 }}</ref>

Anthropologist [[David Graeber]] has criticized psychiatry's assumption that an absurd belief goes from being delusional to "being there for a reason" merely because it is shared by many people by arguing that just as genetic pathogens like viruses can take advantage of an organism without benefitting said organism, [[memetics|memetic]] phenomena can spread while being harmful to societies, implying that entire societies can become ill. David Graeber argued that if somatic medicine did not have higher scientific standards than psychiatry's way of defining delusion, pandemics like [[plague (disease)|the plague]] would have been considered to transubstantiate from an illness to "a phenomenon that benefits the people" as soon as it had spread to a sufficiently large portion of the population. It was argued by Graeber that since [[deinstitutionalisation]] made sales of [[psychiatric medication]] profitable by no longer needing to spend money on keeping the patients in mental hospitals, corrupt incentives for psychiatry to allege "needs" for treatments 
have increased (in particular with regard to medicines that are said to be needed in daily doses, not so much regarding devices that can be kept for longer periods of time) which may itself be a harmful memetic pandemic in society that leads to diagnosing and medication of criticisms of widespread beliefs that are actually absurd and harmful, making the absurd belief that is not labelled as an illness profitable anyway by attracting criticisms that are labelled as illnesses.{{Citation needed|date=June 2024}}