What Is the Premises and Conclusion in the Statement?

Question by : what is the premises and conclusion in the statement?
Many mental health practitioners are promoting the notion that alcohol abuse, drug abuse, over-eating, gambling, anorexia, bulimia and smoking are diseases. By using the disease model, its proponents believe that people are more apt to seek help because having an “illness” is more acceptable than having psychological or behavior disorder. I am reminded of the effects of saying that people with emotional difficulties were “sick,” and suffering from a “disease.” Psychology and psychiatry moved a long way forward when we listened to Thomas Szasz declare that mental illness was a myth, to Karl Menninger discussing degrees of personality organization, and to Benjamin Rush when he spoke of problems in living. Now it appears we are moving backwards. What will be the next “disease” to appear in the news media?

Best answer:

Answer by Ardi Pithecus
Premiss: A proposition, or one of several propositions, from which an inference is drawn, or the sentence expressing such a proposition. http://www.ditext.com/runes/p.html

Take your first sentence as an example. It is not a proposition. It is a (hopefully) factual statement of journalism. Premisses are shorter, such as “Socrates is a man.” It is then followed by another premise, such as “Men are mortal”, or, as the definition states, an inference such as “If Socrates is a man, he should generally look like other men.”

You sound as if you are writing opinion pieces for your Journalism 101 courses, not deductive (or inductive) logic. Premises and conclusions deal with deductions and inductions. You don’t make either of those. To say, “Now it appears we are moving backwards,” is merely an opinion, not a conclusion that necessarily follows from what came before.

That is a condition of a conclusion: it must follow necessarily, by the rules of logic, from the premises. You are not using logic; you are using journalism.

Answer by Stephen
Look at it another way.
* Can you catch alcohol abuse, drug abuse, bulimia or gambling?
* Can you be born, as a child, as an alcoholic, a bulimic, a drug abuser or a gambler?
* Can you have injections or operations to fix these problems?
* Does someone who smokes a cigarette for the first time have a disease?
* If I go out for a meal tonight and over eat, what disease will I have?

Think about it. They are more like habits. Technically they are bad strategies, they are things that we DO, not something that we HAVE.

Working in the mental health sector myself, I see way too many psychiatrists keen to diagnose people with an generic term, and mistreat them accordingly.

An example of this is a former client was unhappy with the death of a family member. The client initially was referred to a doctor, then a psychiatrist who then went on to state she had clinical depression….
You should have seen the stuff he was going to prescribe the client with and stick in their body to make the client “normal & happy”.

Luckily the client came to see me, we did a few hours grievance counselling and the client was back on their feet. So much for clinical depression…

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