Dr. Meera Narasimhan on Mental Illnesses - Part 1

[vishnudestroyer]

or feel less anxious. So the DSM operates effectively to grant to the psychiatrist the traditional role played by the shaman of being the exclusive source of such knowledge. In fact, virtually anyone with or without DSM diagnosable ADHD would concentrate better and be more motivated if they took a stimulant. Should ADHD be reclassified as stimulant deficit disorder? No, but the role of the psychiatrist in a free society should altered to be consistent with epistemological reality.

[vishnudestroyer]

To wit, why label a given brain pathologically "ADHD", "depressed", "anxious", ect? If an individual wants to focus better, recommend the individual take a stimulant, meditate, exercise, etc but why function is there in diagnosing the "patient" as suffering from a psychopathology? In fact, there is a great function is such labeling: psychiatrists (and other physicians) are granted a legal monopoly in prescribing certain desirable drugs that can help anyone who wants to concentrate better

[vishnudestroyer]

Psychiatry will find a better foundation by simply changing its paradigm from a value-laden discipline aimed at treating alleged brain pathologies classified arbitrarily through the political process of the DSM to one that is pragmatic and results oriented. The psychiatrist should be tasked with following aim: if an individual "Y" wants to do "X", then what medication or other treatment modality will likely increase Y's chances of doing X? 

[vishnudestroyer]

While the psychiatrist alludes to pathology existent in post-mortem brains for proof that the DSM is scientific, this simply doesn't stand up to rational criticism. Clearly the brain is constantly changing and the causal result of an interaction of genes and environment but again one can't make the epistemological leap from this premise that there exists something "pathological" about different brain state classification schemes labeled "depressive", "schizophrenic", etc, etc. 

[vishnudestroyer]

The good doctor is trapped in a paradigmatic echo chamber whose premises remain unchecked and whose conclusions are therefore suspect. Her joke about Sherlock Holmes was ironic for a reason that apparently escaped this well intentioned psychiatrist: one of the seminal psychiatric papers, "on being sane insane places" successfully challenges psychiatric diagnoses and the "pseudo-patients" simply say they hear a "thud" and are summarily diagnosed schizophrenic.