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Undisclosed financial conflicts of interest in DSM-5 (2024)

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Re: Undisclosed financial conflicts of interest in DSM-5 (2024)

#111
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Experiencing first-hand just how unreproducible most research in our faculty was (SPSS was the norm, R was the exception, Python was unused). 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 reproducibilit…

obviously p-hacking wouldnt be as prevalent if we just re-wrote DSM in rust

Re: Undisclosed financial conflicts of interest in DSM-5 (2024)

#112
post #38

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.

Without a clear and agreed behavioral model, I don’t see how disorders can be properly defined.

Re: Undisclosed financial conflicts of interest in DSM-5 (2024)

#113

I’m a psychiatrist, so if you consider that a significant bias I’m disclosing it. While there has been a level of diagnostic expansion that I don’t think is helpful, it’s also important to consider: What’s the psychiatric equivalent of a sprained ankle? Does something have to be catastrophic to warrant a diagnosis?

Doesn't that presume that human psychology (cognitive functioning) is uniform at a level that would obviate the need even for personalities and styles? Our physiological system does have that uniformity across the population but our psychological system does not seem to. Isn't it then misguided to try characterizing small deviations when we don't even have a uniform "background" to subtract?

I think you’re overlooking the difference between diversity and changes to an individual.

Some people can’t get stranded ankles because they don’t have legs, so you don’t necessarily need a universal baseline across all of humanity when diagnosing conditions. Someone who is still within normal ranges but significantly doing worse than they where can quite reasonably seek treatment.

Re: Undisclosed financial conflicts of interest in DSM-5 (2024)

#116
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But conceptually in the DSM most disorders are defined by whether they cause hardship in the patient's life. Whether that means some disorders would not have to be considered disorders in an ideal society is irrelevant for this context, because people need help navigating the society we have.

Remember that in the US slaves wanting freedom was a mental disorder that made it past peer review: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drapetomania

Slaves wanting freedom is a mental disorder if it is maladaptive, debilitating, and infeasible in their circumstance, no? Being crazy doesn't mean you're wrong, it could mean you are right in a world where you must be wrong to survive.

Re: Undisclosed financial conflicts of interest in DSM-5 (2024)

#117

I’m a psychiatrist, so if you consider that a significant bias I’m disclosing it. While there has been a level of diagnostic expansion that I don’t think is helpful, it’s also important to consider: What’s the psychiatric equivalent of a sprained ankle? Does something have to be catastrophic to warrant a diagnosis?

There isn't one because a sprained ankle is a binary diagnosis.

One of the biggest problems with psychiatry is that every diagnosis is a spectrum, and over time it's become more and more obvious that the boundaries for what is considered "neurotypical" are way too narrow.

Depression being a chemical imbalance was a complete lie to sell more medication, and how prolific this type of occurrence is within the industry is not hard to see.

At the very least, a plurality of phycological diagnoses are manifestations of physical behavior: diet, exercise, exposure to sunlight, etc

We're so overprescribed on medications to try to feel a certain way within far too narrow of a spectrum.

Why do you presume that there has to be an equivalent to a sprained ankle? Maybe the answer to your question is yes, only the catastrophic is worth addressing.

https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...

Re: Undisclosed financial conflicts of interest in DSM-5 (2024)

#118

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...

Nearly all of it, because that's the case for the overwhelming majority of the social sciences.

When you do not have an objective metric to measure, prove, or hypothesize (as in physics, chemistry, etc), you're basically doing statistics on whatever arbitrary populations and bounds you choose with immeasurable confounders. That's why the replication crisis and p hacking are intrinsic properties of the social sciences

Re: Undisclosed financial conflicts of interest in DSM-5 (2024)

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are you able to tell us a bit more about the Chinese Academy of Sciences saying there is no such thing as autism? I was curious but cannot find anything about this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autism_in_China

There's none lol. I may have participated in studies as a researcher partially funded by Chinese academy of sciences because we had Chinese collaboration, and some studies involved autism biomarker research.

Re: Undisclosed financial conflicts of interest in DSM-5 (2024)

#120

I have particular issue with “diseases” defined as done for osteopenia. Rather than define an objective measure of the problem, they (by definition) effectively define the percentage of the population affected. In other words, osteopenia is defined in such a way that it is not curable, preventable, etc. What is the point saying, “disease X affects 5% of the population by definition”. It’s like throwing away half the…

That’s not accurate in the case of osteopenia. It’s defined by a T score. The quantile of the distribution of bone density measurements of young, healthy people that matched the bone density of this patient. Treatments for osteopenia are basically making sure you’re getting enough calcium, vitaD, and high impact exercise…if everyone did all those things (and they worked), the rate of osteopenia would drop to zero.

Yeah, and the T score doesn’t seem to have any medical basis.

Between 1.0 and 2.5 standard deviation is something like 15% of the population. “1.0” and “2.5” are ridiculously round number. What is the medical significance of such?

Sure, at some point, it will be correlated with fragile bones.

Adult male height is roughly 5’9” with standard deviation of 2.8”.

We DON’T say adult males under 5’2” are diagnosed as having medical disease.

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