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Scientific wasteland: recent problems with psychiatry

the-tls.co.uk

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Re: Scientific wasteland: recent problems with psychiatry

#2
Freud dealt with the realm of ideas. As much as he got wrong, his approach of dealing with the ideas in one's mind on their own terms, and finding and sussing out the bad ideas to be replaced with good ideas did, eventually, yield beneficial results -- like the big wins of cognitive behavioral therapy.

Re: Scientific wasteland: recent problems with psychiatry

#4
post #2

Freud dealt with the realm of ideas. As much as he got wrong, his approach of dealing with the ideas in one's mind on their own terms, and finding and sussing out the bad ideas to be replaced with good ideas did , eventually, yield beneficial results -- like the big wins of cognitive behavioral therapy.

I don't agree that it was mostly about ideas, Freud's main insight was to deduce the existence of the subconscious mind: i.e. the idea that we don't have direct access to our entire inner world.

It was a big departure from the way the mind was conceived till then.

Re: Scientific wasteland: recent problems with psychiatry

#5
"Advances in genetics, neuroscience and psychopharmacology all at once reminded psychiatrists that biology ruled, that talk could be dispensed with, and a truly medical psychiatry could finally emerge"

I don't know if this is true for a good chunk of mental illnesses, tbh. How does one use a purely biological model and treatment for PTSD, BPD, ASPD, etc?

Re: Scientific wasteland: recent problems with psychiatry

#6
The unspoke problem with psychiatry is- that the biggest knowledgebase on psychiatry today, are privately owned databases - owned by google and facebook. And the new lords do not really share there knowledge on zero-day exploits of the human condition. Makes little sense, with this knowledge, to visit a university to then gain a degree in asking your fellow students for theire views on the world.

Re: Scientific wasteland: recent problems with psychiatry

#7

"Advances in genetics, neuroscience and psychopharmacology all at once reminded psychiatrists that biology ruled, that talk could be dispensed with, and a truly medical psychiatry could finally emerge" I don't know if this is true for a good chunk of mental illnesses, tbh. How does one use a purely biological model and treatment for PTSD, BPD, ASPD, etc?

Hard to evaluate without being able to read the full article, but Freud has very little to do with modern psychological/psychiatric research.

Re: Scientific wasteland: recent problems with psychiatry

#8

"Advances in genetics, neuroscience and psychopharmacology all at once reminded psychiatrists that biology ruled, that talk could be dispensed with, and a truly medical psychiatry could finally emerge" I don't know if this is true for a good chunk of mental illnesses, tbh. How does one use a purely biological model and treatment for PTSD, BPD, ASPD, etc?

Psychiatry and drugs are essentially our caveman like tools for trying to manipulate the structure of the brain. Imagine at some point we are technologically able to rewire individual neurons and change chemical pathways in focused areas of the brain. Perhaps at some point we can artificially grow whole clusters of neurons and then implant or replace bad clusters. Once we have better tools and can edit the fundamental components of the brain (or really any part of our biology), then traditional medical fields and industries will be completely disrupted.

Re: Scientific wasteland: recent problems with psychiatry

#9
I didn't pay the $27.95 to read this, but the abstract is alarmingly wrong.

The analogous thinking is that software bugs, in particular data storage errors[1], are best understood as hardware malfunctions, and that precise interventions at the hardware level can solve them. It's not exactly wrong--for any given software issue, you might be able to devise hardware changes that correct it. But. I feel like I don't need to continue to make my point.

[1] In reality the lines blur between software and data, so the analogy might be better more solid between trained ML models and hardware, where trained ML models are both software and data in a way that can't be meaningfully distinguished. So we're talking about correcting a trained ML model via a precise hardware edit.

It's not wrong per se, not even insane in some cases. But the dismissive tone in the abstract of taking the trained model of the human mind on its own terms, versus as a purely biological object boggles my mind with how wrong-headed it is.

Re: Scientific wasteland: recent problems with psychiatry

#10
I didn't get much past the paywall, but it looks like a book review of this book: https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Fixers-Psychiatrys-Troubled-Biol...

There are other reviews like https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/04/mind-fi... (discussed previously at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19435815)

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