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Psychiatry divided as mental health 'bible' denounced

natasa778

Senior Member
Messages
1,774
Hi Jarod,
Yes, I agree with you. I think they will make a fundamental mistake if they think that psychiatric conditions start in the brain, or are caused by a malfunctioning brain. The malfunctioning brain has an alternative cause. I agree with you that any psychiatric symptoms are caused not by the brain but by the body as a whole. I hope that a focus on biological investigations will move them towards finding the causes, such as inflammation, genetic changes, epigenetics, endogenous viruses, exogenous viruses, faulty immune systems, etc. etc.
It is now universally acknowledged that many psychiatric illnesses are biomedical conditions, and I hope the proposed program will widen that to all psychiatric illness.
Personally, I view things like schizophrenia, autism and depression to all be biomedical conditions that need biomedical research.
It looks to me as if they are taking a step in the right direction. I hope so anyway.

The main problem here is that most researchers are still looking in all the wrong places. While many are ready do see psychiatric illnesses as biomedical conditions - esp in the case of autism, where it cannot be argued that children 'think' themselves ill, and so bps model cannot be applied - unfortunately for patients when many of those who should know better talk biology they automatically and ONLY are talking about genes. So when psychologists say that biology does not influence workings of the brain the evidence they bring forward is that genetic studies haven't brought us any answers. They do not for a second think that there could be other biological things APART from one's genetic makeup that could be playing a role. Psychiatrists on the other hand, when faced with the fact that genetic studies have not brought any answers to mental disorders, again say that either A) they just need to carry out more genetic studies, as this MUST be the answer or B) patients are thinking themselves ill.

This is why it is so easy to sell autism-as-a-genetic-condition myth to everyone. Because the BPS model does not apply the answer must be biology, but unfortunately the only biological agent many people think exists out there is your hardware genes. Very very few people are even aware that environmental things like toxins, viruses, the bacteria living inside you etc, can actually influence your biology, and hence your mental states.

So in order to crack schizophrenia, autism etc (including ME) it will take two separate changes of paradigm and opening of minds - one is that there is a biological underpinning to many mental health diseases, and secondly that there is much more to biological influences than your hardwired genetic makeup.
 

jimells

Senior Member
Messages
2,009
Location
northern Maine
"Autism-as-a-genetic-condition" serves a very useful purpose: it blames the patient and their parents. The medical industry will do anything to deflect attention away from what might be the real cause, since the real cause might upset their apple cart.

Overall I consider psychiatry to be the modern-day version of casting out demons. Instead of sprinkling holy water, just douse the patient with some (highly profitable) pharmaceuticals.

My psychiatric diagnosis is "Depression NOS", in other words, they have no idea what is wrong. Refusal to take any more antidepressants is more evidence of mental illness, I am sure. The therapist wrote that I failed to respond to her "treatment", not that her "treatment" failed to work.

I told her that the most effective antidepressant I could receive was a favorable decision on my disability claim. The therapist decided this meant that I was a lazy welfare bum who chose to stay sick. She seemed to be unaware that welfare in the form of Medicaid was buying her meal ticket.

I have now received my third monthly disability check. Surprise, surprise, I have not thought about killing myself since winning my disability claim. I'm certainly not eating steak and lobster, or vacationing in Florida, but my home is no longer in danger of seizure by tax authorities. I don't have to beg for heating oil from the government and firewood from my neighbors. I don't have to beg for a ride to the grocery store. I don't have to beg for money from my family to pay the electric bill. I even have a working toaster again, and I can use worn out clothes for rags instead of wearing them to town.

So what was the cause of my mental illness? Was it the M.E., or maybe, just maybe, it was caused by being tossed on the trash heap and kicked in the head by a society that prefers remote-control killing over helping people to live...
 

Bob

Senior Member
Messages
16,455
Location
England (south coast)
Psychiatrists under fire in mental health battle
British Psychological Society to launch attack on rival profession, casting doubt on biomedical model of mental illness
The Observer, Sunday 12 May 2013
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/may/12/psychiatrists-under-fire-mental-health


Do we need to change the way we are thinking about mental illness?
Experts on both sides of the debate over the classification of mental disorders make their case
The Observer, Sunday 12 May 2013
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2013/may/12/dsm-5-conspiracy-laughable



Our friend is quoted in the first article, and is given column space to express his opinion in the second article.

There are a lot of public comments under the first article, but I haven't read any yet.
 

Bob

Senior Member
Messages
16,455
Location
England (south coast)
@Firestormm, thanku for posting. We crossed posts.


Interesting article:
NIH rethinks psychiatry trials
Mental-health division will no longer fund research aiming to relieve symptoms without probing underlying causes.
Nature

14 March 2014
http://www.nature.com/news/nih-rethinks-psychiatry-trials-1.14877

Now Insel is translating that belief into action: the NIMH, based in Bethesda, Maryland, has decided to stop funding clinical trials that aim merely to ease patients’ symptoms. “Future trials will follow an experimental medicine approach in which interventions serve not only as potential treatments, but as probes to generate information about the mechanisms underlying a disorder”, he wrote in a 27 February blog postannouncing the move. This funding switch, which will affect grants due to be made in a few months’ time, intensifies the NIMH’s apparent shift in emphasis from abstract psychiatry to the neurobiological roots of disease.
History shows that Insel is not daunted by controversy. In April 2013, he raised eyebrows when he announced that the NIMH would stop using the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders 5 (DSM-5), the latest version of the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic guide, to classify mental disorders (see Nature http://doi.org/rvd; 2013). The book’s definitions tend to lump patients together by symptoms, which often do not precisely map to what is wrong with their brains, he says. With this haphazard approach to trials, even if symptoms are alleviated, researchers still may not understand what caused them.
“We’ve studied drugs, not disorders — if you throw something at the wall, and P is less than 0.05, you win,” he says. Such thinking, he adds, wastes time and money.

And apparently, according to one psychiatrist :rolleyes:, this is a reason for caution (see bold text):
But Harold Pincus, a psychiatrist also at Columbia University, cautions that the data-driven approach is not a sure thing. Focusing trials on more specific biological targets will require researchers to think very carefully about how they recruit and classify their research subjects.