EDIT: Let’s cool it with the downvotes, dudes. We’re not out to cut funding to your black hole detection chamber or revoke the degrees of chiropractors just because a couple of us don’t believe in it, okay? Chill out, participate with the prompt and continue with having a nice day. I’m sure almost everybody has something to add.
You know I felt this way for years. I felt that way through psychopharmacology in pharmacy school, and I felt that way during our psychiatry and behavior lectures in medical school. I felt like psychiatry was minimizing behavior to these boxes was far too reductionist. Then I spent a month in an inpatient psychiatry facility as a third year medical student.
While I completely agree that each individual is unique and people are more than their diagnosis, you’d be absolutely shocked by just how similar patients’ overall stories, maladaptive coping mechanisms, and behaviors are within the same psychiatric illness. I can spot mania from a doorway, and it takes less than five minutes to have a high suspicion for borderline personality disorder. These classifications aren’t some arbitrary grouping of symptoms: they’re an attempt to create standard criteria for a relatively well preserved set of phenotypic behaviors. The hard part is understanding pathology vs culturally appropriate behavior in cultures you don’t belong, and differentiating within illness spectra (Bipolar I vs II; schizophrenia vs bipolar disorder with psychotic features vs schizoaffective)
You’re part of the problem.
Thank you for your insightful and well-researched response. I’ll remember that as I continue to provide high-quality evidence based care to all of my psychiatric patients in the future while you bitch about stuff on the internet.
That stuff you and your buddies wrote together to justify your income isn’t really evidence. Maybe you even believe it is. Everything you ever thought you know is just stuff others told you and you believed it based on their presentation.
No, in fact I believe very heavily in evaluating primary literature to re-evaluate decades-old dogma within medicine. I regularly disagree with my professors when they present outdated information in lecture. I have no income right now, and I have forgone substantial amounts of income by pursuing medical school instead of continuing to practice pharmacy. I’m not in this for the money.
If you would be so kind, I would love to know what evidence you present in contrary to the decades of peer-reviewed cohort, case-control, and RCT data which validate psychiatry as an effective field for managing psychiatric illness. I’d be happy to discuss any scientific data you have that I haven’t seen, and would be happy to change my opinion if it is data-driven.
I can appreciate your skepticism towards medicine and psychiatry, but if you can’t defend your position with anything but accusations and conspiracy, then I don’t think we have much else to discuss.
Funny how you bring up conspiracy given how psychiatry is widely used as a tool to discredit. You all keep control of public image by posing yourselves as authority and your opposition as mentally ill. You’re literally doing it right now.
I’m trying to understand the underlying presuppositions which lead you to this opinion.
Are you convinced psychiatric medicine:
Ever been forced to take a drug that made you unable to finish reading a sentence because the local government didn’t like how you’re rude to a teacher?
Nope, but that sounds like psychiatric malfeasance.
I’m sure nobody denies there are bad psychiatrists, but what you’re saying sounds more like an argument for better practice’s in psychiatry (which happen constantly), as opposed to the claim you had initially, which was about psychiatrists over diagnosing people with a mental illness.
On a related note: The frequency of ADHD diagnoses has risen drastically over the last few decades.
Someone may interpret this to mean psychiatrists are over diagnosing.
Another interpretation is more people are becoming ADHD.
But the medical consensus is that the public understanding of what ADHD is has improved. It is no longer understood as “little boys with too much energy”, and so, more people seek help.
It’s shameful that misdiagnoses happen, and I’m sorry that happened to you.
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I have a feeling you’re in dire need of their expertise.
Ad hominem.
Just keep control of image. You are authority and your opposition is mentally ill.