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.
Psychologists branding everyone with a disorder. You can spend a whole lifetime trying to understand yourself and you won’t. 4 years of schooling and a book full of labels doesn’t give you any extra magical understanding of everyone else.
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 I regularly disagree with my professors when they present outdated information in lecture.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 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.
4 years where? To become a real psychologist (not a therapist) in most places you need a PhD or a PsyD. In total, you probably do at least 8 years of schooling.
Not to mention that that “book full of labels” is constantly reviewed and was made based on consensus from psychiatrists, which are medical doctors with a lot more than 4 years of schooling.
Ok me and several others are constantly reviewing the pirate anime One Piece. It takes a long time to complete and we’ve collectively decided that it’s better than every other show and probably something that happened for real.
Hey it’s ok to be wrong on this one.
I feel that, I feel like diagnoses is one of the least important parts of psychologists’ work. And if they assign medication based solely on that limited scope, then there is clearly a problem.
EDIT: To clarify, I think medication should be used to treat specific symptoms when there are no contraindications, I think it is wrong to assign medication based on a broad categorization.
Psychology isn’t science so no harm being doubtful about parts of it.