WHO to recognize gaming disorder as mental health condition

> 1. mental health patients are extreme in their dysfunction, never common.

I agree with what you're saying, but the US does have a problem of over-testing, over-diagnosis, and over-treating illness. Not just mental ill health, but everything.

In the US about 10% of children have ADHD

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3489818/

> Based on the Heath Resources and Services Administration's National Survey of Children's Health, the percentage of children aged 4–17 years diagnosed with ADHD increased from 7.8% in 2003 to 9.5% in 2007, representing a 21.8% increase in just 4 years (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2010).

An estimates 3million US children take stimulant medication:

> Experts estimate that approximately 60% of children with ADHD are treated with prescription stimulants (Center for Disease Control and Prevention 2005a); therefore, approximately three million children in this country take stimulants for problems with focusing. At the same time, many studies have revealed the numerous adverse effects associated with prescription stimulants when they are used inappropriately.

These numbers are a bit worrying, especially if medication alone is being used, and it's not provided as a package of bio-psycho-social treatment.

But isn't modern clinical psychiatry marred by the same problems social or economic sciences are? Ultimately you are studying/interpreting human behaviour, which doesn't lend itself well to quantisation or categorising.

That is the point. It is so overwhelmingly well-researched, that even if its conclusions are wrong, no lay person is going to be in a position to have "an argument" that hasn't already been considered and researched and folded into the consensus.

This isnt the case with social sciences, and it isnt the case with macroeconomic policy. Both of these are about groups of humans, not individual humans, and are fundamentally about behaviour in the face of cultural/economic/social changes. That kind of analysis is purely speculative and historically accidental in the way that giving people adderall and measuring their cognitive performance isn't.

A man on the street may well have good reasons to speculate differently about the evolution of his society that those speculations produced in some university in a foreign country.

A man on the street can have no good reason to act against the consensus of research-based medicine. To do so is to fly blindly into an area of profound research depth and consideration.

We have a problem today of these domains being equivocated. About people believing they are experts because the "Experts" they see are really political speculators and commentators of macro-cultural changes. And so everyone thinks everything is speculation.

This is profoundly not the case for, let's say, what the best treatment plan for bipolar disorder, adhd, autism, clincial depression, psychosis, etc. etc. etc. is.

...which has folded in lifetimes of research on the way the brain works, the way that drugs work, CBT, social therapies, counselling, etc. etc. etc. ...

An opinion on what "should be done" about a family member with bipolar disorder may as well be an opinion about what should be done about their thyroid problem, carpal fracture, lymphoma, etc.