Psychiatry is a pseudoscience (a collection of posts from Reddit)
u/backtothecum_fr
Lmao therapeutics arose in conjunction with the proliferation of mass societies following the Second Industrial Revolution, that fact alone should speak for itself.
Itâs all bullshit, where schools donât work to domesticate you to society, psychologists and psychiatrists do.
u/bokuno_yaoianani, 2021/11/11
Medical science, including psychiatry, works just like the rest of science.
Psychiatry works very differently from any other medical science.
Letâs please not act like psychiatry is not fundamentally different in how it operates.
Lung cancer is not diagnosed by simply asking subjective questions but with scans.
In medicine, there is a technical difference between what are called symptoms and signs; symptoms are subjective, lay things with no technical definition that can be measured subjectively by the patient such as âcoughingâ or âstomache acheâ; signs are objective biological things such as âwhite blood cell count is bellow âŚâ or or âstomach acidic levels are âŚâ or âtemperature is âŚââin medicine symptoms are asked purely to know what signs to look for, but signs are what ultimately make the diagnosis, not symptoms.
Psychiatry has no signs; itâs all symptoms; diagnoses are purely made based on symptoms.
Furthermore there is no known psychiatric condition that has a cure; there is only treatment which purely consists of managing symptomsâeven other things such as HIV which have no known cure, the treatment does not consist of managing symptoms but of attacking the cause which is well understood, even though no actual cure has yet been found, only treatments that can alleviate and keep the condition down.
Making observations and statistical correlations using the best available means of the time to create a useful working model.
Absolutely not, in all other forms of medicine conditions have single identifiable causes; they are not simply a loose collection of possibly correlated symptoms; they are identified by their singular event that causes itâthis is why in normal medicine two diseases which have superficially similar symptoms such as the many different forms of growth disorders are classified as widely different disorders with different treatments because they have different causes.
Psychiatry operates on such a completely different plane and methodology to all other medicine that itâs disingenuous to even group them together [âŚ]
Psychiatry at this point is basically like treating a cold with chicken soup because at one point by accident individuals started to notice that it worked without having any real understanding of microbes or what causes the cold, opposed to treating it by diagnosing that it is the cold and the specific strain opposed to treating it the same as any other condition which causes caughing, and giving a medicine specifically effective against that strain.
[deleted]
Thatâs just a band aid to restore some normality to persons life while there is long process of therapy. When therapy starts working people can adjust their SSRI (and other antidepressant) dosages and become drug free in time. This works but only if you are willing to put lot of work, time and unfortunately money into the process.
That sounds like more distance between psychiatric theories and falsifiability. If someone can turn around after a failed treatment and say âthe patient didnât put in the workâ (particularly without any empirical notion of what âthe workâ was, like youâd find at a physical therapistâs), thereâs nothing that could make them face up to a failed treatment paradigm.
u/Doc_hoom, 2022/09/27
Iâm a psych trainee so I hope my long response isnât too triggering to any GPs here!
Tldr, this isnât that controversial even among psychiatrists. Some of these criticisms relate to all of medicine and stem from capitalism not psychiatry. The scientific model isnât perfect and even clear cut medical diagnoses use arbitrary cut offs. Psychiatry has the impossible task of defining the undefinable and trying to promote wellness in an unwell society where itâs hard enough to survive, let alone live a happy and fulfilling life.
[âŚ]
Psychiatry is similar in that youâre attempting to treat the psychological pain of the human condition. Here the noxious stimuli are primarily poverty, trauma, and the need to exist in an economic system that prioritises profit at the cost of human suffering. [âŚ]
Itâs true the DSM is influenced by big pharma and people associated with the industry are actively involved in the process of developing the manual. Itâs also defined by the changing socially accepted norms within the US. The ICD is a little better but still far from perfect. Sexual attraction to the same gender was defined as a mental illness not too long ago and so was being trans (now the focus is on the distress of living with gender dysphoria). Hysteria was a fictional diagnosis used to subject women to various degrading âtreatmentsâ for slightly deviating from expected gender roles. The aetiology of personality disorders were also controversial and specific disorders donât exist in the new ICD-11.
[âŚ]
Antidepressants (specifically SSRIs) are probably some of the least effective biological treatments available in psychiatry. This is partly because of flaws in the serotonin model of depression, but also because itâs becoming increasingly common to have low-mood in the late-capitalist dystopian hellscape we live in. Most people spend the majority of their life working to survive and performing repetitive unfulfilling labour that contributes little to society. Why would a person feel happy when they have so little time, energy, and money to pursue the things that give life meaning? Why wouldnât someone feel hopeless or anxious faced with the impending climate catastrophe that will lead to widespread suffering?
A self-rating scale canât distinguish between low-mood in shit life syndrome and what weâd think of as clinical depression from an organic cause. You canât design a good research study when you canât standardise your pre-treatment groups or reliably assess their response to an intervention. Itâs unrealistic to expect a psychiatrist to have a simple chemical solution to the various domains of human suffering.
[âŚ]
Not all mental illness has a clear biological cause so they wonât all have biological treatments. The welfare state has been slashed and psychological and social services have all seen their funding cut. Weâll continue to see developments in the treatments psychiatry can offer so if you find it interesting Iâd recommend pursuing it. Most psychiatrists Iâve met have a nuanced understanding of the field and are honest about its historical and current issues. Although, I still maintain that psychiatryâs failings arenât unique and are insignificant compared to the failings of capitalism and society. Itâs our economic system which determines the material conditions that set the foundations for mental health â When that foundation is so rotten it becomes hard to build anything on top of it.
[deleted], 2019/01/24
This really depends on how you define science. Itâs an attempt to be scientific about things we barely understand, if at all. To the extent that xenobiology is a science, so is psychiatry, and that comes from somebody who plans on doing it for a living.
The problem with psychiatry and the other social sciences is that if you hold them to the same strict rigors of other fields, weâd never get anywhere. The issues itâs trying to address are so far from any real scientific understanding that the field would barely budge over a century if we tried to study it like chemistry. There are waaaaaay too many variables that isolating even one of them is virtually impossible in any set of conditions.
Iâd describe it as âthe best science we can do with virtually nothing to work withâ. For the most part, weâre trying. Itâs more of an application of science than a science itself. Thereâs a guy who comes in saying he feels sad. For a litany of reasons, that doesnât really mean anything I can define mathematically, but I do know that we can at least try to help these people the best we can with what little we have to work with.
u/AArgot
Given that psychiatry doesnât even attempt to start with a correct analysis of the human animal, it has no chance of being a science. For example, it doesnât admit that the âselfâ as naively conceived is a delusion. Many people can see through this, but apparently itâs irrelevant to psychiatry because itâs normal for most people to suffer this delusion.
There is also âfree willâ, souls, belief in gods, belief that humans are special in âtranscendentalâ ways â none of which count as delusions. And then we have civilization itself, which I find to be deeply dysfunctional, and yet this is the ânormalâ environment into which psychiatry hopes to settle us with chemical assistance.
Consciousness is a property of the Universe â not a property of a self or âyouâ. See how many psychiatrists understand the significance of this. And I donât mean this in a ânew ageâ sense. Where else does consciousness come from except reality?
I think the field is doomed eventually. A mixture of neuroscience, neurotech, AI analysis, far better drug culture, and a âsecond enlightenmentâ will hopefully retire the discipline eventually.
That said, if you wish to really help people then I respect that.
[âŚ]
And regardless, psychiatry serves the self model. For example, it doesnât tell people to engage in mindfulness meditation for years to try to break the self delusion. It doesnât recommend that we start teaching children mindfulness meditation so they can see through the delusion. For the field to reject the delusion â by some consensus process I assume â and then help people sustain the delusion is a curious application of science.
Buddhists understood that the conception of the self largely contributes to suffering, but psychiatry doesnât apply these ancient observations while apparently agreeing with them.
This status of psychiatry strikes me as incoherent.
[âŚ]
I further claim that psychiatry is trying to get people to fit into societies that it literally does not understand given the variability of our evolutionary proclivities functioning within largely synthetic environments, and the fact our âmore naturalâ states are also not understood â so there is no basis of comparison.
I think modern civilization is âinsaneâ at the collective level, but psychiatry must integrate us into the collective without understanding it.
This is not scientific.
u/lowlandslinda
Itâs the part where psychiatrists start labelling people âdisorderedâ that is not falsifiable and untestable.
Many of these people is just nature trying a different strategy at survival (people with autism, psychopaths, etc).
The best example is probably homosexuality, which psychiatry considered a disorder for the longest time, obviously influenced by their own socioreligious experience rather than the scientific method. And then did not classify it is as a disorder, but ALSO and AGAIN because of their socioreligious experience.
There is no method by which you can test whether a human is âdisorderedâ or just an outlier.
u/kloneree, 2023/07/03
Personally my issues with psychiatrists is many are paid to push drugs. Iâve had in my chart for a while now the meds Iâm addicted too, and when your psychiatrist keeps trying to push them on you all while having a little calander from the company other desk, you start to wonder why youâd trust someone like that. I have no problems taking meds and working with a professional, but In my experience they have become nothing but peddlers for big pharma. [âŚ]
u/existentialgoof, 2023/07/03
If you cannot identify an organic cause for mental distress through objective testing and reliably differentiate this from cases where distress might be a natural reaction to external circumstances, then what grounds do you have for claiming it to be a medical condition?
If you went into the doctor complaining of a sore leg, and instead of running any objective tests to determine exactly why your leg was sore, you were diagnosed with âsore leg syndromeâ, then what exactly is the point of that consultation?
Such a consultation would not be able to say why your leg was sore, and therefore would not be able to say whether it was your diet that was causing the pain, whether your work station wasnât adapted for your bodyâs needs, whether youâd fractured a bone, etc.
Studies have consistently shown that antidepressants have an effect that is not clinically significant, and pharmaceutical companies have been allowed to get away with burying studies that fail to show any efficacy for their drugs: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/antidepressants-do-they-work-or-dont-they/[đĄ]
It also isnât known, for whatever minimal positive effect that they might have, why exactly it is that they work. Just because they may improve someoneâs mental distress doesnât mean that they were curing a disease, any more than taking other psychoactive substances which enhance oneâs mood are curing a disease caused by the deficiency of whatever those substances give us.
Disorders are not included within the DSM based on any objective evidence, and are always a reflection of the normative biases of the society. For example, homosexuality was in the DSM until the 1970s, but neither its inclusion nor its removal were based on any kind of objective evidence. Other examples throughout history include women being involuntarily committed to insane asylums at the behest of their husbands, after defying gender norms by behaving in an overly assertive manner and refusing to submit to their husbandâs will: https://time.com/6074783/psychiatry-history-women-mental-health/[đĄ]
The same could be said to be true of contemporary diagnoses of depression and anxiety. No objective test is conducted to differentiate between ânaturalâ sadness and âclinical depressionâ. Rather, consultations are conducted using subjective assessments of mood, and having a score beyond an arbitrary (changing with every new iteration of the DSM) means that you are classified as mentally ill. Reducing a personâs distress down to their own brain means that it is easy to depoliticise the causes of the distress, which might be things like an increasingly atomised society, poor work-life balance, and so on.
If psychiatry is a legitimate science; then why is it not expected to operate using the scientific method, as employed in all other disciplines of science? Why have its diagnoses been demonstrated to be scientifically meaningless? https://news.liverpool.ac.uk/2019/07/08/study-finds-psychiatric-diagnosis-to-be-scientifically-meaningless/[đĄ]
And why is it so susceptible to being influenced by societal norms?
u/jtb1987, 2023/08/25
[âŚ]
DSM V is scientifically meaningless: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/07/190708131152.htm[đĄ]
SSRIs are not clinically significantly different than placebos: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4172306/[đĄ]
No evidence to support the âChemical imbalanceâ theory: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-022-01661-0[đĄ]