Encefalus

Remember what we were saying at Psychiatry, anti-psychiatry and mental disease: Does psychiatry suck?.

I found the other day this article The Mental "Illness" Metaphor Has Not Worked: What’s Next? at Psychology Today

It addresses pretty much the same thing that we do, albeit more briefly.

To make a synopsis, it starts with some of the methods used by psychiatry in its early years

"The mad were injected with horse’s blood and malarial fever, placed in refrigerated “mummy bags,” given camphor derived seizures, subjected to various “heating” therapies–the list goes on."

"At last antipsychotics arrived, and when they did they were referred to as “chemical lobotomies” because their chief effect was to produce disinterest and apathy (just like today, in my opinion)."

Then it goes on to conclude to what many people (including the readers of Encefalus ) already know

"The sad fact is that in over 100 years of research into mental “illness” driven by a defect-based disease model, the yield in terms of true understanding has been negligible. That may sound unrealistically unkind, but here is what I mean.Still today, we have no idea what schizophrenia even is, let alone what causes it or how to effectively treat it (to take just one example)."

"Although it may seem different, the case is much the same for depression.We do not know what causes it—though there are lots of theories—and the antidepressant medicines on average only slightly outperform placebo in clinical trials (one study, for instance, found a 89% placebo duplication rate for Prozac in particular)."

And so it ends by saying

‘"With mental problems, diagnosis is sketchy and almost never definitive (no UA or blood draw or brain scan tells me what you “have”), causality is a mystery, and treatment is trial and error (for instance, no one knows with any degree of certainty which antidepressant will work for which individual)."

"Prima facie, the disease model makes very little sense.And, even more importantly, it hasn’t gotten us anywhere.Psychiatry is in the stone ages."

Modern (?!?!?!?) psychiatrist

It’s good to see a popular and american magazine like Psychology Today to publish such an article. I am saying american, because the USA is the main country where psychiatry and the drug companies operate. I don’t forget here, that psychiatry began from Europe, but let’s face it, the bulk of scientific knowledge is now produced in the USA, including psychiatry (if you consider psychiatry a science , no flame intended). Of course, we can’t forget that Thomas Szasz (the father of anti-psychiatry) is also an american .

I just hope we see more such articles published in mainstream magazines, so that we can see subjects once "deemed" controversial become a part of our everyday lives and incite lively debates.

Further Reading:

The Metaphor of Mental Illness (International Perspectives in Philosophy & Psychiatry)

Thomas Szasz’s Summary Statement and Manifesto

Cruising Szasz by Jeffrey A. Schaler

Psychiatry - Label-Based Quackery or Research-Based Science?

The Anti-Psychiatry Movement

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 6th, 2008 at 4:03 pm and is filed under Clinical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.