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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)

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What the DSM defines as normal is far too narrow and we're too eager for quick fixes without discomfort or discipline.

A person's treatment doesn't depend on what's "normal" it depends on the level of impairment/improvement. Why do you even care if somebody takes medication for a condition they have and it makes their lives easier? Why should anyone avoid a "quick fix" to a major problem because you think they should suffer more discomfort?

East Asians are "impaired" the least, and the presumption among Western scientists, particularly American scientists regarding Asian Americans, is that they are simply undiagnosed despite their out performance in nearly every metric of success.

Why do you think that is?

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

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The stimulants don't alleviate the discomfort. I honestly question whether you have adhd or whether yours and mine are remotely the same. Oftentimes it would be a great relief to do a specific thing...or it's something i actually want to get done and no matter how much i want to I struggle. Getting sleep right helps a lot. Getting sunlight helps a lot. etc But in the end a notable problematic aspect of it remains.

Yes they do, as the OP said and I myself experienced, they make previously torturous tasks doable with a significantly reduced levels of discomfort and a priori mental resistance.

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

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> You can accept the discomfort and move through it just like you do when the stakes are actually high. Just like I do. Have you ever considered that the things which you find doable or even trivial might be incomprehensibly more difficult for other people? You mentioned being diagnosed with ADHD higher up, but part of the diagnostic criteria for ADHD is quite literally about severity of the symptoms: DSM-5: "There i…

They were incomprehensibly difficult for me, so yes. My mind and body literally entered fight or flight at the thought of not doing a compulsion or forcing myself to focus on doing a task I didn't want to do.

"Quality" is an arbitrary definition that means nothing, that's one of the problems we're talking about in psychiatry. The OP clearly mentioned that there was minimal impact on academic, professional, or social functioning other than internal discomfort, for example, yet was prescribed anyway.

>False, regarding CBT

Wow it's almost like the replication crisis is a real thing and we have no idea what we're talking about. Look at these completely disparate results when examining a different population group.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01651...

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

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're behind the times https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-022-01661-0 https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/debunking-two-chemical... https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/insight-therapy/2022...

Not sure if you noticed that your sources disagree with your thesis, with the limited exception that theres no convincing evidence that seratonin is the single causal factor for depression, which myth was heavily promoted by the relevant pharma companies. Your articles also say that: - depression medication does appear to be effective in some cases regardless, indicating some other neurochemical mechanism at work. -…

Why are you just making stuff up?

Exact quote from second article

"Furthermore, the SSRIs were accorded a rock-star status as effective antidepressants that they did not deserve. Most troubling from the standpoint of misleading the general public, pharmaceutical companies heavily promoted the “chemical imbalance” trope in their direct-to-consumer advertising."

There second article admits the overuse of the term while trying to defend psychiatry for never officially adopting it, but everyone who's been on them knows that's exactly what they were told about their effectiveness, so whether the trope originated with the pharmaceutical companies (my assertion) or not, they were still way over prescribed and there's no statistically significant evidence they actually work when controlling for confounders, as the first meta analysis clearly demonstrates.

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

#185
post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it’s worthless Hundreds of millions of people whose lives have been saved or improved thanks to broader recognition and treatment of their disorder would disagree.

Can you provide evidence-based numbers of how many people's lives have been saved or improved vs how many have been ruined or ended in part due to the guidelines DSM? Or what the outcomes would have been had psychiatry not continued to rely on it as the gold standard? Without a comparison, a vague, unsubstantiated claim such as that is worthless.

I'm not familiar with every diagnosis in the DSM-5, but I'm very familiar with ADHD. The DSM lays down the diagnostic criteria, brain scans of people diagnosed according to those criteria have confirmed structural and functional differences, and even more extensive studies have confirmed the overwhelming efficacy of the medication used to treat the disorder. Is that worthless?

Claiming that DSM-5 is "worthless" simply because it doesn't provide physical mechanisms that cause the disorders is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence, not the other way around.

> how many have been ruined or ended in part due to the guidelines DSM

You tell us, how many have been ruined? What "guidelines" are you referring to?

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

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you presume I'm neurotypical and undiagnosed with any psychiatric disorder? I'm formally diagnosed with severe OCD, depression, and ADHD. I was on SSRI, then SNRI and additionally methylphenidate for years. Eventually I got tired for feeling like a shell of a human being, and weaned off of the SNRI. It took a lot of effort to induce neuroplasticity and ease my OCD and depression, but I did it. Eventually, I we…

That's a hell of a journey! Congratulations on the accomplishment and thank you for sharing. Like many other biological systems, neurological wiring is multidimensional and not a natural fit into our arbitrary culturally defined abstractions, or even language. And the dimensions themselves are multifaceted expressions of multiple genes and environmental factors. I am happy to hear stories like yours, of people who ca…

Yes I have and it was just as difficult post medication as it was pre. Ironically, while on the SNRI my ADHD was "worse" due to the sheer apathy I felt about literally everything, so I was prescribed to help me "focus" and be "motivated".

You're leaving out the part about being "well studied" paired with your conclusions is almost exclusively in American and Western European populations, things are significantly less clear in other populations and cultures.

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

#187

The DSM is a bunch of nonsense. As long as they don’t provide physical mechanisms for disorders, it’s worthless. It clusters symptoms without knowing the underlying causes. It’s like going to the doctor with a runny nose, who the claims it’s influenza, due to the runny nose, without testing for Covid.

It clusters symptoms "without underlying cause" because we don't know the underlying cause. If we wanted to go for a fully "physical mechanism" approach to mental health, we could just end any treatment attempts and say "come back in a few decades or perhaps centuries".

But we do know that certain symptoms tend to show up in clusters, and that patients in certain clusters tend to respond to certain drugs with an above-placebo level of effectiveness.

The same is true for a runny nose: It can be caused by any number of viruses (there is no such a thing as "the" influenza virus or "the" common cold virus), or allergies, or irritants like pepper spray, or a problem with the body's ability to regulate itself, or something else entirely – but going through the effort to test for every virus, allergen, irritant, and whatnot is wasteful, if all the patient needs at that moment is some nasal spray to breathe properly again. Incidentally, a runny nose is (or perhaps: was) not a common symptom of Covid, so unless other symptoms more indicative of it show, there may not a good reason to test for it, or prescribe medication specific to it.

If more symptoms accumulate over time, or the symptoms don't go away, you then probably can go back to your doctor, will get a different diagnosis and possibly a different prescription. The same is (or at least: should be) true for mental issues, where you might switch treatment over and over until something is found which actually helps your symptoms. Is this a flawed process? Frustrating? Absolutely. But is it "worthless"? I don't think so.

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

#188
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is it's obviously a problem of perspective. Things are not important because they aren't considered important. If the stakes are higher they are elevated in importance and more demanding of attention. To pretend that humans are hedonic beasts incapable of cognitive adaption is ridiculous. We do not operate purely on impulse save for pharmaceutical intervention. We can force ourselves to give things more or…

You are forgetting what people did before psych meds were available. Almost everyone treated themselves with alcohol and tobacco. Coffee is up there, too. There is cognitive adaptation, not denying it, but only up to a point.

Tobacco didn't exist for most of the world until the 17th century and you're discounting the fact that life was objectively much worse by virtually every metric.

People were constantly bombarded with death, disease, things like starvation were near term risks, violence was everywhere, etc.

You're also overestimating the prevalence of alcoholism. Alcohol consumption was largely driven by safety and necessity, not abuse. Alcoholism was arguably more of a social stigma historically than it was today, certainly with harsher criminal penalties in many societies.

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

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can accept the discomfort and move through it just like you do when the stakes are actually high. Just like I do. Have you ever considered that the things which you find doable or even trivial might be incomprehensibly more difficult for other people? You mentioned being diagnosed with ADHD higher up, but part of the diagnostic criteria for ADHD is quite literally about severity of the symptoms: DSM-5: "There i…

They were incomprehensibly difficult for me, so yes. My mind and body literally entered fight or flight at the thought of not doing a compulsion or forcing myself to focus on doing a task I didn't want to do. "Quality" is an arbitrary definition that means nothing, that's one of the problems we're talking about in psychiatry. The OP clearly mentioned that there was minimal impact on academic, professional, or social…

> "Quality" is an arbitrary definition that means nothing, that's one of the problems we're talking about in psychiatry.

Why is that a problem? It's not completely objective but it's the best we have. That criteria is typically combined with more objective neuropsychological testing for a well rounded assessment.

> The OP clearly mentioned that there was minimal impact on academic, professional, or social functioning other than internal discomfort, for example, yet was prescribed anyway.

They didn't say that, they said that they weren't suffering "catastrophic failures", which is distinctly different from "minimal impact". They also said they had high intellectual abilities which is entirely consistent with the ICD-11 description:

> The degree of inattention and hyperactivity-impulsivity is outside the limits of normal variation expected for age and level of intellectual functioning

High-IQ can mask ADHD, but that doesn't mean they haven't been experiencing challenges associated with ADHD.

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

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s the right word to differentiate this from a psychiatric diagnosis? Neurological?

Not in my understanding. The line between neurological and psychiatric is more about history than about anatomy. Instead, I would point to the physical trauma of a concussion as the differentiating factor.

There’s underlying physical causes for psychiatric conditions including in some cases physical trauma.
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