Can Psychiatry Turn Itself Around? • Hacker News Board

Re: Can Psychiatry Turn Itself Around?

#131

Post by vonmoltke » Fri, Aug 12, 2016, 7:03 PM UTC

intopieces wrote: post #130

vonmoltke wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How does the existence of side effects in other medicines affect the status of psychiatric medicines and their percieved (in)effectiveness or their overprescription status? > You claim I'm 'demonizing' (i.e., being unfair towards) a subset of the medical profession when in fact I'm only relaying my personal experience and skepticism based on that. I don't doubt that there are a whole host of other medicines whose e…

It's here you might benefit from the book: Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness To explain further the unique situation that mental health drugs present. You might benefit especially from the notes section, to which his citations refer. Am I saying there is a conspiracy between psychiatrists and pharmacuetical companies? Were it only so simple! There are…

> To explain further the unique situation that mental health drugs present.

...

> claiming that the situation is not unique, that my discussion of my personal experience and the research behind it is somehow a 'demonization' of an otherwise unremarkable industry belies both the thesis of the article and experiences of millions of patients

You are saying it is unique, I am saying it is not. How am I misrepresenting the thesis?

Re: Can Psychiatry Turn Itself Around?

#132

Post by atsaloli » Fri, Aug 12, 2016, 8:06 PM UTC

vonmoltke wrote: post #122

atsaloli wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/topics/mental-health-medicati... . That's from the National Institute for Mental Health Tics, liver damage, abnormal thinking are all listed as side effects. So is violent behaviour.

You can find those side effects for a number of non-psychiatric medications as well.

Aye. However,

"Antidepressants and ADHD Drugs Top List of Most Violence-Inducing Drugs"

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2013/10/0...

Re: Can Psychiatry Turn Itself Around?

#133

Post by internaut » Fri, Aug 12, 2016, 8:38 PM UTC

phren0logy wrote: post #21

I'm a psychiatrist. It is always amazing to me that despite four years of medical school, six years of residency and fellowships, and four board certifications, the assumption is that I have no idea what I'm talking about and have evil motives. There are fair criticisms of psychiatry, there are bad psychiatrists, but mostly there are crappy generalizations. Good psychiatrists have an understanding of what medications…

In Science there exist certain topics that are minefields.

Differences between human groupings. Race. Class. The Brain or Mind. Sexuality. Future/Past analysis. Most of economics.

Most interesting subjects contain taboos and dangers that should you cross them, shall ruin your career or life. That is why if we're really as smart as we think we have to use the Dark Arts. I don't know what would happen to a modern day Darwin but I doubt it'd be pretty.

The most controversial debate on science I ever saw was on Intelligence Squared on the subject of Organic Farming. My intuition is that one side felt strongly enough that they rigged the vote, and that the moderator knew it too when he saw the results.

Re: Can Psychiatry Turn Itself Around?

#134

Post by force_reboot » Sat, Aug 13, 2016, 11:40 PM UTC

epistasis wrote: post #128

force_reboot wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have time to read every book out there, so when I look for answers to questions like this I look for sources that are authoritative, that is, sources that summarize the majority opinion in a field. The book you recommend doesn't seem to be that, and so I'm not convinced that it's worth reading. Are there particular studies in the book that specifically address whether depression is qualitatively different fro…

This is not secret information, some key google terms may be "biology of depression" or something like that. Just one piece of the literature that you might find convincing (not sure if its from that book or another) that you might find convincing is that there are structural differences in the pre-frontal cortex that can be seen under a microscope. The biological basis of depression is something that's so well estab…

I think that a "biological basis" means something different to you than to me. How exactly do these studies show that depression is different from being unhappy? Did they study the brains of merely unhappy people and find no such biological differences? Again, in my understanding psychiatrists and researchers make no attempt to differentiate between depression and unhappiness because they have no reason to make this distinction.

I'm going to assume that your argument is that if depression is caused by biological factors then it must be treated differently from unhappiness that is caused by life events. But in that case you will have to explain how this is consistent with the fact that "...depressive episodes are strongly correlated with adverse events..."[0]. This fact seems more consistent with either reverse causation (depression causes biological changes) or that depression can have multiple causes, and can occur in the absence of a biological cause.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_depressive_disorder#Psyc...