101–110 of 225 posts
What counts as a “disorder” is often not based on empirical evidence but on what is determined as undesirable, maladaptive, or outside the social norm…by Americans. The DSM in many ways represents the worst of so-called social science.
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How else would you do it? Unlike an e.g. viral infection there is no positive test you can look at. Generally a disorder is considered something that significantly impacts someone's life, getting in the way of things like working, social life, life enjoyment. I don't think you can be totally objective about this, and you get into things like if i.e. autism is mild is it a disorder? It's pretty clear to me it should b…
> Generally a disorder is considered something that significantly impacts someone's life, getting in the way of things like working, social life, life enjoyment. With the same argument, we could arguue that working and social life are getting in the way how I am, thus working and social life should be considered disorders.
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A "disorder" is just a collection of symptoms that have been empirically shown to benefit from certain treatments. If someone doesn't think they have those symptoms then they can just not seek a diagnosis or treatment. Nobody is forcing a diagnosis on somebody who doesn't want it.
If you look into the history of psychiatry I think you’ll find quite a lot of examples when diagnosis and treatment was forced on people who didn’t want it. It’s not hard to find contemporary such examples either.
If the proposition here is that mental health disorders are fabricated maliciously in order to sell more medication or enforce some sort of social order, then I don't see how the very rare court-ordered enforcement of short-term stays at psychiatric institutions could be the mechanism for that.
The vast majority of people in the US who receive psychiatric care do so voluntarily, because they experience real symptoms that really affect their life, for which they need real treatment.
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But people do. Psychology courses do, with a similar "tool to help standardize communication" line recited robotically and then practically ignored. Most practicing psychologists do as well, to only a somewhat lesser degree. You cannot have an authoritative textbook proscribing definitions, and then expect people to treat them as just "a self-described ontology" with all the nuances and caveats around that just becau…
I’ve had a bunch of neuro/psycho classes and this was always well understood. This stuff is complicated. People are going to get it wrong. That sucks. But if you’re going to judge the book, judge it by how it presents itself, don’t judge it by how a third party misrepresents it.
As long as the boards don't go after the shrinks who "misrepresent" the DSM, I would claim that this misrepresentation is systemic of (and possibly even intended by) the psycho-industrial complex.
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It's hard to tell honestly. I studied psychology for two years in uni, and I dropped out rather disillusioned about the field. Some of my least favorite aspects included: - Acknowledgement by our professors that P-hacking (pruning datasets to get the desired results) was not just common, but rampant - One of our classes being thrown in limbo for several months after we found out that a bunch of foundational research…
At least you're working with Rust now. As someone with zero knowledge of psychology, I'm biased against it. Partly because of my vague impression that psychology tries to fit people to models, rather than viewing models as limited approximations. For a while I've thought it would be nice to know what results the field of psychology actually has that are trusted. Was there anything at all in the taught content which y…
Then you are biased against "the science of mind and behavior"[0] by definition.
> For a while I've thought it would be nice to know what results the field of psychology actually has that are trusted.
Perhaps that people who seek out and engage in therapy with qualified professionals can (but not always) improve their lived experience?
Or that by studying the mind and human behavior, mental illness is now considered a medical condition, worthy of treatment, and has much less social stigma than years past?
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I took the liberty of indulging in some reading. I must admit, it feels a bit strange. The truth is that I learned my first steps in programming by working through large, formidable books. In fact, my very first programming book was Assembly Language for Intel-Based Computers by Kip Irvine. After that, I read even larger books, many of them multiple times. I have always been fond of reading well-written books by know…
> This kind of contradictory phrasing is standard in the DSM. I'm not sure I see what's contradictory in your example. Could you elaborate?
In fact, there is a way of doing that. And we, as programmers, have access to those methods. It's called Numerical Analisys. At times it's quite amazing to see how well mathematics can estimate data.
One of the examples, is German Tank Problem. https://www.numberphile.com/videos/clever-way-to-count-tanks
While being an extremely opaque problem we are able to handle it to an extremely precise numbers.
One does not have to be that acquainted with the ways of math to figure things out. One can just use some data source and point such data source out. I mean, any book, be that a book on financing or programming book would have a list of references under such statements.
And here we have it. An absolutely out-of-wack statement saying that the poorest regions of Britain are affected by this condition more than others. Who? Why? Where? How was this number obtained?
Probably "contradictory" is not a right word for such a claim. But I would love to see at least anything that would prove such a statement.
In fact, flip to the end of the DSM and look for the list of references. You'll find none. I kid you not, there is not a single reference to an outside source in this book. This means that my work on "Use of Dynamic Library Link to execute Assembly code in C#" that I've written in 2005 while in the university has 6 more references to outside sources than the DSM itself.
The reason for my beef in here mainly that all the numbers are just stated, with no respect to what numbers are. And I would expect either an explanation of a numerical method to estimate this number, or a source as to where this number has been gotten from.
I wonder how much of the DSM is based on loose correlations, non-replicated or fraudulent research. I get the feeling that we understand how our brains work about as well as we understand how well mitochondria work - - and I see reports of new findings on mitochondria fairly regularly...
It's hard to tell honestly. I studied psychology for two years in uni, and I dropped out rather disillusioned about the field. Some of my least favorite aspects included: - Acknowledgement by our professors that P-hacking (pruning datasets to get the desired results) was not just common, but rampant - One of our classes being thrown in limbo for several months after we found out that a bunch of foundational research…
How did you experience this? Did you fail to reproduce the same results when doing the research again while using R? This is how I interpret your statement, but I think it's not what you mean.
If SPSS was the norm, R or SciPy shouldn't have made a difference in reproducibility as the statistics should be more or less the same. I did social science with SPSS fine; T-Tests, MANOVA, Cronbach's alpha, Kruskall-Wallis, it's all in there. It seems you suggest that using SPSS inherently makes for bad and irreproducible science, it's similar to saying using Word instead of an open source package like LaTeX makes research unreproducible even if the data, methodology and statistics are openly accessible. This is not the case. What i mean is that while I agree there can be friction between using Word and SPSS and Open Science and FAIR principles because of the proprietary formats, this isn't inherently a problem as people can use the dataset (csv or sqlite) and do the mentioned statistical tests outlined in the published pdf (or even an imported docx) in any statistical language.
https://www.go-fair.org/fair-principles/
For anyone looking for an easy to use alternative to R, Jamovi is a capable and easy to use open source alternative to SPSS and RStudio. https://medium.com/@Frank.M.LoSchiavo/jamovi-a-free-alternat...
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Remember that in the US slaves wanting freedom was a mental disorder that made it past peer review: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drapetomania
Reading your linked article, it's clear that this was viewed as absolute quackery even back then, and is about as conflict-of-interesty as you can get: commissioned by Louisiana at the height of the Civil War, and proposed by a doctor who served in the Confederate Army [1]. His suggested treatment for Drapetomania was "whipping the devil out of them". [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_A._Cartwright
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Reading your linked article, it's clear that this was viewed as absolute quackery even back then, and is about as conflict-of-interesty as you can get: commissioned by Louisiana at the height of the Civil War, and proposed by a doctor who served in the Confederate Army [1]. His suggested treatment for Drapetomania was "whipping the devil out of them". [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_A._Cartwright
This was proposed a decade before the war started and was reprinted widely in the Southern States. That the North found it ridiculous is a bit like saying that because the Chinese Academy of Sciences says there is no such thing as autism then it's obviously viewed as quackery in the West too.
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Calling a comment "ridiculous" is against the guidelines? Okay. Hopefully it isn't against the guidelines to say I think that's a silly guideline. Apparently saying "ridiculous" in response to a comment is very selectively enforced, must be my lucky day. Anyways, this is probably the reminder I needed to stop commenting to HN. Some of the moderator decisions you guys are making lately are just.. way off base to me. E…
"What an absolutely ridiculous comment. That is extremely obviously not what I said or implied." is obviously a flamewar reaction. This is not a borderline call! If you had simply posted the last sentence, your comment would have been just fine.