Life as a Nonviolent Psychopath

The idea that understanding the biological/physiological basis of behavior is part of psychology has been part of the field since the 19th century. Establishing those things -- whether under the comparatively new label of neuroscience or any of the older labels under which such exploration have been done (e.g., "psychobiology") -- isn't "moving beyond psychology", its just grounding psychology in the same way that physics grounds chemistry, and establishing that grounding has always been understood to be part of chemistry.

> That's true, but clinical treatment can't go anywhere without knowing causes, which the DSM -- and psychiatry and psychology -- don't address.

This is simply false: psychology and psychiatry do address causes, and even the DSM does in some cases.

Yes, but as an unrealized goal. William James stated that it was an unrealized goal in the late 19th century, and the director of the NIMH mentioned the same issue a few months ago as he ruled that the DSM would no longer be accepted as the basis for scientific research proposals, for the simple reason that it has no scientific content:

http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2013/transforming-dia...

>> ... clinical treatment can't go anywhere without knowing causes, which the DSM -- and psychiatry and psychology -- don't address.

> This is simply false: psychology and psychiatry do address causes, and even the DSM does in some cases.

Tell that to the NIMH, which has ruled against use of the DSM for the best of reasons -- the claim is false. A quote from the above link:

"The goal of this new manual, as with all previous editions, is to provide a common language for describing psychopathology. While DSM has been described as a “Bible” for the field, it is, at best, a dictionary, creating a set of labels and defining each. The strength of each of the editions of DSM has been “reliability” – each edition has ensured that clinicians use the same terms in the same ways. The weakness is its lack of validity."

"Unlike our definitions of ischemic heart disease, lymphoma, or AIDS, the DSM diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure. In the rest of medicine, this would be equivalent to creating diagnostic systems based on the nature of chest pain or the quality of fever. Indeed, symptom-based diagnosis, once common in other areas of medicine, has been largely replaced in the past half century as we have understood that symptoms alone rarely indicate the best choice of treatment."

So tell me -- which word didn't you understand?

> You can keep saying that, but its not going to make it true ...

Which part of this are you not getting? I'm not saying it, the NIMH is saying it. The NIMH has ruled that the DSM can no longer be used as the basis of scientific research proposals because it only lists symptoms, not causes.

> ... psychology and psychiatry do address causes ...

You need to locate some evidence for this claim. Psychiatry and psychology deal in symptoms, not root causes. Don't bother to tell me how wrong you think this is, just write directly to the director of the NIMH, whose recent ruling is based on this uncontroversial fact.

In the 1950s, schizophrenia was blamed on refrigerator moms (among other things). Now it's thought to have roots in genetics, but no one knows for certain. All that is certain is that its root cause is unknown. I choose schizophrenia for this example because, among the many disorders listed in the DSM, it's one of the better-understood. But its actual cause is unknown, as is true for all the other disorders listed there.

In his recent book "Book of Woe", psychoanalyst Gary Greenwood reports that melancholia was proposed for DSM-5 but was turned down because its cause really is known, and the committee members realized this would represent the single exception to the rule that none of the listed conditions include a cause, and this would undermine the editorial scheme. So they voted it out, leaving the new DSM in a pure state -- all symptoms, no causes.

I ask that you think a bit more deeply about this. Why did the DSM committees vote disorders into and out of the text? Why didn't they instead use scientific results that prove an association between causes and symptoms? The answer is that no such results exist.

> ... you keep repeating the same ignorant statements ...

Nice argument. Do you have any idea how this makes psychiatry and psychology look? Are you familiar with the term argumentum ad hominem?