What is the point of taking modern psychiatry seriously?

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Exactly.

Is the OP making a distinction between psychology and psychiatry? A Psychiatrist is a medical doctor and a psychologist is not. Are we talking about the value of pill dispensing or therapy? Often someone will see a psychologist who will make a recommendation re: meds to a psychiatrist. I've never had a psychiatrist spend more than 15 minutes discussing my issues. I agree that delving into past traumas are of little value. I've spent years trying to figure it out. If you do figure it out the assumption is that the revelation will magically release you from your pain. But that doesn't work. You have to relearn how to be. This reminds me of something I read in an adult child of alcoholic parents book. My parents were not alcoholics but a lot of the same dysfunctions were present. It is this: The tools you use to survive a dysfunctional childhood will not help you in adulthood. You have to learn a different way to function.

strange I never had tools to survive a dysfunctional childhood there was verbal abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse and my father was a alcoholic there was domestic voilence i always thought that this was normal and happens in all the household..
I had limited access to outside world since there was no social life till i was in college i just felt that everything happening in my house was normal it was when my life stopped working, when i kept losing my job, when i kept losing my friend i realised that my life is not working at all.

So what exactly you mean by saying that tools we used as child will not work in adulthood???
Of course now i have learned to compartmentalize my life, strategies and people in it.

I can just see how this can happen, I don't claim to speak for everyone. An example might be someone who grew up learning to lie in order to cover up for their abusive parent. Someone might isolate to avoid interactions with people so they wouldn't see what was going on in their home. My point is, from my own experience, it does no good for some professional to tell me how I ought to function. How I function is too deeply ingrained. I think it's possible to reprogram yourself though, although I've never had the benefit of that kind of therapy.

You do realize that phrenology brought about the idea that the brain has specialized regions of function? And psychiatry is a work in progress. Yes, there are many flaws in neuropsych research and medication treatment at the moment, but that is what neuroscience is trying to fix. We just know so little about the brain compared to all of the other organs in the body, and this is why psychiatry is still largely trial-and-error.

It exists for a reason.

I do think we need people who can treat the more "colorful" or potentially dangerous members of our society and do what they can to give them better lives, this also goes along with all the social services we have.

That said, I believe there are only a few different kinds of crazy and that most of what is in the DSM are variations of normal behavior that don't need to be diagnosed.

It's nice to know that there is a group of people who share your traits no matter what your diagnosis and that there are treatment methods, but the number of "mental illnesses" that now exist because of this is a damn shame.

I agree that much of it will cease to exist within my lifetime. I utilize the helpful things that are offered and dismiss what I think is BS.

I don't know what state the psychiatry profession is in these days. Its benefit to the human race has always been questionable and I'm sure it's done a lot of damage to some people. It been used as a political tool, and it has wrongly medicalised people.

On the other hand, if people feel they have harmful mental symptoms that they wish to alleviate, it seems wrong to leave them alone with their problems. I don't see any reason why people shouldn't have access to psychology and the chance to apply it to their symptoms. It seems likely to me that such people would benefit from talking with somebody with some ability to help guide them through the process of working out the nature of the symptoms and the options for relief in the light of what is known about human psychology and (perhaps) pharmacology.

I suppose the problem is that nobody is yet particularly good at providing such a service. Understanding is still rather limited, and although enough is known to give the analyst powers of manipulation, I think a lot of the trouble comes from those who simply don't know enough but won't acknowledge that they don't. We tend to be paid for results, not for throwing up our hands and saying "I can't fix this one." So it's often a case of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing. If you're lucky, you'll turn out to have a palpable, well-documented psychiatric condition with a relatively simple cure. Otherwise, your shrik will probably be as much in the dark as you are about why you are unhappy.

I guess we should all have trusted, supportive friends (or health professionals, if they make that grade) who we can talk our emotional problems over with, and get advice and validation. It's often difficult to solve your own problems all by yourself, especially interpersonal problems. I don't think there's much medically wrong with most people, on the emotional level. We just need to notice where our adjustments to the world are holding us back. We need to know our strengths and weaknesses. I think one useful simplification for working with emotional problems is that most of them are associated with a conflict in the mind - wanting two things when we can only have one. Once the conflict is uncovered, we may find it easier to see what we need to do about it. And just finding out about your strengths and weaknesses can lead to useful changes in lifestyle.