Originally Posted by
sean
Doctors can pinpoint whether or not a child is going to have certain mental diseases extremely early in the birthing process.
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WTF, you are talking about you retard ?
Psychiatric science has hoped, and spent most of its research funds on the idea, that what we are classifying as psychiatric diagnoses are the products of abnormal functioning of the brain. This has relied on predominately two types of research attempting to establish a similar causal framework as the rest of medicine by pointing to bodily processes. The first type of research is genetics and the second is various types of brain imaging studies.
Such endeavours create an image of science and help popularise the belief that what we do in psychiatric diagnostic practice has a solid basis in science. The utter and total failure of these lines of enquiry to produce anything useful for the science of psychiatry will be further discussed with examples in this book.
The tell-tale signs of this failure are the absence of concrete molecular genetic findings that can explain hereditary factors for any psychiatric condition (despite samples of tens of thousands of patients) and that we have no brain scan technology that identifies particular brain abnormalities or differences associated with any particular psychiatric condition (aside from the dementias, evidence for which may be seen with certain types of brain imaging technology).
In fact, it is the one area of medical practice where we have no physiological or other test available, independent of the practitioner’s opinion. The practice of psychiatry and mental health is therefore entirely subjective. It rests on clinical judgement and nothing else. This means that unlike the rest of medicine, not only are there debates about the boundaries of a condition, but that in addition, in psychiatry the parameters for defining a condition require subjective interpretation too.
Psychiatric phenomena cannot be measured by tapping into verifiable evidence that is independent of practitioners’ interpretation. Kidneys don’t have ambitions, dreams, doubts, and beliefs around the nature of suffering. But you cannot escape these subjective realities in attempting to delineate whether there is a psychiatric condition or not. There is no part of psychiatric practice that uses testing to provide empirical evidence on a quantity that is independent to the practitioner’s opinion.
The phenomena we use to classify symptoms in psychiatry are as subjective as the boundaries we make for them. Mood, impulsive behaviour, shyness, obsessional behaviour; can these be “medical” symptoms? Can persistent low mood be an ordinary part of the human experience? Indeed, for many cultures, personal growth and insight cannot happen without suffering. Could low mood therefore, in some contexts be seen as desirable, rather than pathological at any level of severity?
Mental health practice can only be socially constructed. The assumption that the phenomena that the practitioner encounters are the result of a brain dysfunction is as scientific as the Greek doctors who assumed that the phenomena that they faced were due to imbalances of the four bodily humours—blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm.-- Doctor Sami Timimi
https://www.madinamerica.com/2020/10...id=d8c71f0173s
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A [relatively] recent review of the science behind the psychiatric discourse concluded that
“no biological sign has ever been found for any ‘mental disorder.’ Correspondingly, there is no known physiological etiology” (Burstow 2015: 75). This conclusion also became clear to the APA’s own DSM-5 task force when they began work on the new manual in 2002. As Whitaker and Cosgrove (2015: 60) record, in reviewing the available research evidence it was plain to the committee members that “
[t]he etiology of mental disorders remained unknown. The field [of mental health] still did not have a biological marker or genetic test that could be used for diagnostic purposes.” Furthermore, the research also showed that psychiatrists could still not distinguish between mentally healthy and mentally sick people, and consequently had failed to define their area of supposed expertise. This issue was recently highlighted with reference to comments made by Allen Frances, the chair of the previous DSM-IV task force. When the DSM-IV (American Psychiatric Association 1994: xxi) was published in 1994, it stated that “mental disorder” was
conceptualized as
a clinically significant behavioral or psychological syndrome or pattern that occurs in an individual and that is associated with present distress (e.g., a painful symptom) or disability (i.e., impairment in one or more important areas of functioning) or with a significantly increased risk of suffering death, pain, disability, or an important loss of freedom.
However, as the architect of the DSM-IV, Frances was later quoted by Greenberg (2013: 35–36) as stating of the above definition, “[h]ere’s the problem … There is no definition of a mental disorder … it’s bullshit … I mean you can’t define it."--Professor Bruce Cohen
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https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9781137460509
Objective (biological, chemical, physical) tests for diseases are based on the assumption that diseases are somatic phenomena. Accordingly, the claim that mental illnesses are brain diseases is profoundly self-contradictory: a disease of the brain is a brain disease, not a mental disease.
Because there are no objective methods for detecting the presence or establishing the absence of mental diseases, and because psychiatric diagnoses are stigmatizing labels with the potential for causing far-reaching personal injury to the stigmatized person, the “mental patient’s” inability to prove his “psychiatric innocence” makes psychiatry one of the greatest dangers to liberty and responsibility in the modern world.--Professor and Psychiatrist Thomas Szasz
https://www.amazon.com/Psychiatry-Sc.../dp/0815609108
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