| > The DSM is not the "bible" of psychology, but psychiatry. They are two completely different areas of science ... First, mental health professionals disagree with you -- the DSM is the standard guide for all mental health diagnosis in the U.S. and to some extent elsewhere, in both psychiatry and psychology. Second, neither psychiatry nor psychology are scientific enterprises, as you have just proven. What do I mean? Let's look at a real science -- physics. Within physics there are any number of specialties -- let's look at two: cosmology and particle physics. Cosmologists study nature at the largest scale -- the entire universe. Particle physicists study nature at the smallest scale -- below the size of atoms. But, notwithstanding this apparent difference in focus, cosmologists and particle physicists recognize their respective fields as both grounded in physics, and they productively attend each other's conferences. These two specialties are united by (a) science, and (b) a common desire to understand nature. Psychiatrists and psychologists, although apparently specialties in the same field (human psychology), insist (as you now insist) that they're not related. And they're right -- the reason they're not related is because human psychology offers no central corpus of scientific theory to join them together, in the way that the standard model joins cosmology and particle physics, and in the way that the theories of evolution, natural selection and cell biology unite biology and medicine. If human psychology were a science, psychiatrists and psychologists would endeavor to explain what they are satisfied to describe, these fields would be joined by reliable scientific results and theories, and the DSM would not be rejected by thinking people everywhere, including the director of the NIMH, who recently ruled that the DSM may no longer be accepted as the basis of scientific research proposals, for the simple reason that it has no scientific content. > I know a tremendous amount about this topic ... All except the single most important thing to know -- psychiatry and psychology are not sciences -- they're primarily steered by anecdote and belief. > Psychiatry, however, IMO, is for the most part, useless. How typical. Need I tell you that psychiatrists say the same thing about psychologists? > Another big problem is that "depression" is such a fuzzy label ... This is why the world is moving on from psychiatry and psychology, toward neuroscience, where (among other things) deep brain stimulation is showing very promising results where psychological treatments have failed. |