Aug 11, 2015

Fragmentation Of Knowledge 2 - [Or, The case against over-specialization in theory based academics]

Background:

Education Part 1 - The Problem Of Psychiatric Drugs

The Fragmentation of Knowledge Part 1 [Or, The case against over-specialization in theory based academics]

Psychology: An introduction to the use of psychology in understanding culture and society

How Can Psychiatrists Be Allowed To Prescribe A Physical Substance For A Mental Disease That Has No Biological Source?

Article: Do Psychiatrists Create the Very Mental Problems They Claim to Treat? It's easy to blame Big Pharma and the DSM for creating trendy mental illnesses, but the real problem is psychiatry's blindness to culture. 

Article: Why Psychiatry Holds Enormous Power in Society Despite Losing Scientific Credibility It helps to be funded by Big Pharma.

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The modern state of the "science" of psychology and psychiatry kinda prove that even the best college's degree can't help a person become a scientist. A scientist is born or nurtured but certainly not created. Especially given how bound to tradition and resistant to new ideas this field as become.

I've pre-argued this case indirectly in the above 4 posts. This post is just putting all of these in context of the title above. Attacking something with the title "doctor", no matter how undeserved such a title may be (this isn't a medical science but a "mental one), is always risky.

Often people will hear the word doctor or PhD and shut down thier thinking faculties the way a religious person does when they encounter a priest.

This post presents you with a few very important points meant to show how ridiculous diagnosing people's psychological problems from theories in a book when we haven't even understood what humans are or where we are going (for it to be a practical social science) and when the field of psychology repeatedly ignores success in favor of tradition - exactly like a religion does. It may be that one of the ailments humans suffer from when encountering something they are unfamiliar with and without a cultural bestowed framework from which to work from, is to revere it as something extra ordinary, sublime or "holy".

First a very strong critique from psychiatrists against more traditional psychiatrists (who are literally trained to prescribe as if by rote, or more accurately, by pamphlet);

Jeffrey A. Schaler, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology





Psychiatrists On Psychiatry



A few links;

How drug companies' PR tactics skew the presentation of medical research

How flimsy research gets inferior drugs to market

Xanax Addiction from ABC News

Anti-Psychiatry.Org

Bad Effects of taking Psychiatric Drugs

Psychiatric treatments impair the function of the brain and mind.

PSYCHIATRIC DRUGS: Cure or Quackery?

Why Psychiatry Should Be Abolished as a Medical Specialty

Why I Never Recommend Psychiatric Medications

School Support for ADHD Children May Be Missing the Mark: Inattention, Not Hyperactivity, Is Associated With Educational Failure

Depression is not a one-size-fits-all condition. 

A simple alternative to giving kids drugs (unfortunately for drug company shareholders, it's extremely cheap)...


What is it that's said about a hypothesis? That even one negative result proves it wrong?


Article extract:


Psychiatry’s Lost Scientific Credibility
DSM Invalidity. In 2013, the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic bible, the DSM, was slammed by the pillars of the psychiatry establishment. Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and the highest U.S. governmental mental health official, offered a harsh rebuke of theDSM, announcing that the DSM’s diagnostic categories lack validity, and he stated that “NIMH will be re-orienting its research away from DSM categories.” Also in 2013, Allen Frances, the former chair of the DSM-4 taskforce, published his book, Saving Normal: An Insider's Revolt against Out-of-Control Psychiatric Diagnosis, DSM-5, Big Pharma, and the Medicalization of Ordinary Life.
Biochemical Imbalance Theory Debunked. It was a great surprise for NPR reporter Alix Spiegelin 2012 to discover that the psychiatric establishment now claims it has always known that the biochemical imbalance theory of depression was not true. Ronald Pies, editor-in-chief emeritus of thePsychiatric Times stated in 2011, “In truth, the ‘chemical imbalance’ notion was always a kind of urban legend—never a theory seriously propounded by well-informed psychiatrists.” NIMH director Insel had already told Newsweekin 2007that depression is not caused by low levels of neurotransmitters such as serotonin. However, psychiatry made no serious attempt to publicize the fact that the research had rejected this chemical imbalance theory, a theory effectively used in commercials to sell antidepressants as correcting this chemical imbalance—an imbalance psychiatry knew did not exist.
Rethinking the Effectiveness of Antipsychotic and Antidepressant Drug Treatments. In 2013, NIMH director Insel announced that psychiatry’s standard treatment for people diagnosed with schizophrenia and other psychoses has not been helpful to many people and needs to change so as to better reflect the diversity in this population. Citing long-term treatment studies, Insel concluded that in the long-term, many individuals who have been diagnosed with psychosis actually do better without antipsychotic medication. With respect to antidepressants, “60 Minutes” in 2012 reported on what antidepressant researchers have long known: placebos do almost as well as antidepressants even in drug-company studies that are biased in favor of the antidepressants. The “60 Minutes” report focused on research psychologist Irving Kirsch who used the Freedom of Information Act to study published and nonpublished drug company studies involving 6,944 patients from the FDA database trials of the six most popular antidepressants (Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, Effexor, Celexa, and Serzone).
Read more of the article here.

Clearly psychiatry is no longer a viable science and needs to be treated as such before it causes even more harm, though the harm so far may be immeasurable in itself.

That said, Carl Jung is probably the closest we have had to a real psychological investigator. His personality descriptions still prove to be useful in todays world and is more in depth analysis has clearly been ignored. So that woul be my best guess of where the future of psychology & psychiatry lies.

Related posts: 

Education


Introduction To Culture

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