Psychiatry

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If there are any partial truths to the original statement, then would it still be obviously false? Responding to a unilateral statement with another unilateral statement seems to devalue your argument on the irrationality and ignorance of generalizing.

Psychiatry's biggest fault at this time is that quantitative and qualitative observable variables are seriously limited due to the inability to directly observe the varying dis/functioning brain, varying experiences and varying environment of the subjects. In other words, there are so many variables that it's very difficult to pinpoint the exact cause of a condition and how to effectively treat it. Another huge fault is that each and every psychiatrist have varying levels of observation and methodology skills. So the probability of difference of opinions are very high.

It seems to me that Asperger's should be taken away from psychiatry and the medical industry. It makes sence given the abysmal job they have done on it. Seriously, hate to upset the social order, but why should a group of failures be called the "experts"? Do gay's need an experts diagnosis to tell them their gay? I guess they must have when homosexual was in the DSM.

Anyway three words for all the misdiagnosis prior to Asperger's being recognised and missed diagnosis since:

CLASS ACTION LAWSUIT

All I know is that psychiatry allows me to function in this world. Good psychiatry IS based on sound science. Obviously individual doctors may not practice correctly, but that does not change the fundamental facts of the field.

psychiatry and councelling helped me lead a normal life, and develop and learn about myself and others.

I can never understand all these scare stories people have about ebil psychiatrists who experiment on your poor brains.

What are you guys, Scientologists?

These people are here to Help others. If they're as tyrannical and cruel as half the people here make out, then I expect they won't keep their jobs for long.

Addendum: I think a lot of the psychiatry haters don't realise or seem to understand that science is a PROCESS OF UNDERSTANDING.

The probability of malpractice/abuse/exploit is higher than normal compared to other scientific areas. Probably due to the field practice being a very stochastic process and it's main catalyst being capitalism.

Wouldn't it be erroneous to define psychiatry as sound science when the methodologies used are varied within the field and the results are not as solid compared to other sciences?

Pyschiatrists cannot all be judged as the same,just as Auties/Aspies can't.
am have always had great input off LD pyschiatrists [part of the learning disability team/social services],current pyschiatrist is very understanding and every service user am know who sees her-like her a lot.

I enjoyed that.

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As I always say, psychos and psychics look at the behavior of objects and how they relate to other objects in the dimensions that they inhabit--this is science.

They'll eventually find the little objects inside the big objects, and how they interact with each other to find a more specific cause, but it's still doing the same thing as above, and that's how objects interact with others and itself in our four dimensions.

How a T-cell interacts with a virus isn't fundamentally any different than how a person with Autism interacts with an "NT" when seen from this perspective.

[edit] Laing and "anti-psychiatry"
Laing is regarded as an important figure in the anti-psychiatry movement, along with David Cooper, though he never denied the value of treating mental distress. He wanted to challenge the core values of a psychiatry which considers mental illness as primarily a biological phenomenon, of no social, intellectual or political significance.

Laing was a critic of psychiatric diagnosis, arguing that diagnosis of a mental disorder contradicted accepted medical procedure: diagnosis was made on the basis of behavior or conduct, and examination and ancillary tests that traditionally precede diagnosis of viable pathologies like broken bones or pneumonia occurred after (if at all) the diagnosis of mental disorder. Hence, according to Laing, psychiatry was founded on a false epistemology: illness diagnosed by conduct but treated biologically.

The fact that medical doctors had annexed mental disorders did not mean they were practicing medicine; hence, the popular term "medical model of mental illness" is oxymoronic, since, according to Laing, diagnosis of mental illness did not follow the traditional medical model. The notion that biological psychiatry is a real science or a genuine branch of medicine has been challenged by other critics as well.
Thought this might add to the debate rd laing was an important thinker.

A simple question: if a psychiatric theory is wrong, there is any way to prove that the theory is wrong?

An example: there is (at least) 4 different criteria for the diagnosis. There is any possible expriment that can be made to see who of the 4 criteria is the better? If the answer is "no", these mean that psychiatric diagnosis are based in circular reasoning.

I enjoyed that.

That's so funny! And so smart because it hints at how we can get fooled by pseudo-science mimicing the language of real science.

One reason psychiatry is not sciece - and ideally can never be science - is due to the serious restrictions on what experiments can be conducted on human beings. You can not slice and dice living humans brains or subject humans to unpleasant conditions to test your theories. I say 'ideally' because of the possibility of the nightmare dystopia where this is actually allowed.

Last edited by ManErg on 20 May 2009, 4:22 pm, edited 1 time in total.

This is a hard question to answer without writing a 10 page essay, but i'll try and keep it as simple as possible. Hopefully by the end, you'll realise that the answer to your question is "NO" but you'll also realise that this doesn't suggest psychiatry isn't a science.

You need to understand the nature of diagnosis criteria and mental health issues, I'll use schizophrenia as an example. There are hundreds of proteins required for dopamine pathways and receptors to function properlly. Any mutation to the gene's that code for these proteins can lead to schizophrenia, some mutations will only lead to schizophrenia if they are present with other specific mutations. NDMA is another neurotransmitter implicated with schizophrenia. Some cases of schizophrenia could be due to a mixed cause of a NDMA and Dopamine receptor disfunction. Technically schziophrenia isn't a singular disease at all, it's a blanket term for a group of disesaes with similar side-effects.

Put simply when you are diagnosed with a mental health condition with a set of diagnostic criteria, you aren't being diagnosed as having a singular condition, you are being placed into a group of conditions. Why are they doing this to us? because put simply, their knowledge at this present time is lacking. Science is a process, they're learning new things daily and with each day our treatment of mental health disorders will improve. There have been many mistakes in the past, because our knowledge back then was even worse than it is today.

Another problem, is at the present time we don't have cost or time effective technology to accurately assess the underling cause of an individuals problems. We also don't have a complete exhaustive list of underlying causes.

One of two things can happen, we can decide that everyone without a known underlying cause for their mental health issues isn't worth our time despite any disabilities they have. Or we can decide that our knowledge isn't complete, everyone with a problem deserves medical help and we can use "diagnostic criteria" to try and catch as many people who need help as possible.

If you're still with me after reading all of that, you'll realise that it isn't possible to "test" which criteria is better. The only part of the criteria that really matters is the part that states you have an impairment in important area's of functioning.

Lastly, read this and this. Transgenic and knockout mice are used frequently to assess how gene's affect behaviour.

You may like this, too. Apparently a lot of psychologists are suffering from NERDS: Never Ending Re-inventing of Diagnosis Syndrome!
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/eletters/327/7414/515#36322

Brilliant.

I think that would go even better/make even more sense on the "Doctors Overlooking" etc thread than the one about Obsessive Herodoxy which you just linked to on that!

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quote="ManErg"]Apparently a lot of psychologists are suffering from NERDS: Never Ending Re-inventing of Diagnosis Syndrome!
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/eletters/327/7414/515#36322[/quote]

Love it!