SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
The British Medical Journal provides an editorial from Professor David Healy, Head of Psychiatry at the Hergest psychiatry unit in Bangor in which it is stated:
When concerns emerged about tranquilliser dependence in the early 1980s, an attempt was made to supplant benzodiazepines with a serotonergic drug, buspirone, marketed as a non-dependence producing anxiolytic. This flopped. The lessons seemed to be that patients expected tranquillisers to have an immediate effect and doctors expected them to produce dependence. It was not possible to detoxify the tranquilliser brand.
Instead, drug companies marketed SSRIs for depression, even though they were weaker than older tricyclic antidepressants, and sold the idea that depression was the deeper illness behind the superficial manifestations of anxiety. The approach was an astonishing success, central to which was the notion that SSRIs restored serotonin levels to normal, a notion that later transmuted into the idea that they remedied a chemical imbalance. The tricyclics did not have a comparable narrative.
Serotonin myth
In the 1990s, no academic could sell a message about lowered serotonin. There was no correlation between serotonin reuptake inhibiting potency and antidepressant efficacy. No one knew if SSRIs raised or lowered serotonin levels; they still don’t know. There was no evidence that treatment corrected anything.
[More...]
This lack of evidence-based practice was apparent to Thomas Insel, Director of the US National Institute Of Mental Health who announced in 2013 that the institute would abandon funding towards the DSM:
While DSM has been described as a "Bible" for the field, it is, at best, a dictionary, creating a set of labels and defining each. The strength of each of the editions of DSM has been "reliability" - each edition has ensured that clinicians use the same terms in the same ways. The weakness is its lack of validity. Unlike our definitions of ischemic heart disease, lymphoma, or AIDS, the DSM diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure.
In the rest of medicine, this would be equivalent to creating diagnostic systems based on the nature of chest pain or the quality of fever. Indeed, symptom-based diagnosis, once common in other areas of medicine, has been largely replaced in the past half century as we have understood that symptoms alone rarely indicate the best choice of treatment.
Does this mean that psychiatry is finally moving away from a practice akin to leeches for everything?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Hartree on Friday April 24 2015, @01:34PM
So, there is this knowledge that you can't communicate to anyone effectively without years of study. Yet, it solves the problem of neurosis and psychosis as well as explaining the deeper recesses of the mind. And you've not found a way to apply it to the masses or apply it in your own life such that you are demonstrably at an advantage? Yes, being free of neurosis alone would be a huge advantage for a group of people who had found it. One would expect that this would be noticeable in at least some way if a group or person really had that.
Forgive me, but Scientology makes the same claim to esoteric secret knowledge being the key to everything from self knowledge and rationality to the success of Travolta and Cruz and I'm not convinced.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 24 2015, @02:24PM
How would I communicate knowledge of all of mathematics in a forum post in a way that is meaningful to you and immediately understandable? Yet that knowledge exists and has efficacy.
If you choose to look at people with PhD level knowledge in philosophy, or for that matter devout and experienced Taoists (they come to the same conclusions about the issues we are discussing) you will see that they do in fact have demonstrable advantages in the area that we are discussing.
As for the silly false comparison to a cult, isn't that what science and every other form of knowledge does too? I am not trying to prove anything, merely inform that something exists knowing that I could never fully convey it to you. As to where to start, you already know, but have not spent enough time on it yet. Sort of the way that someone who has taken an undergraduate physics course or two is not convinced that we know enough to predict complex systems.
(Score: 2) by Hartree on Friday April 24 2015, @05:06PM
Well, I'm sure you have found things that you feel are useful and explain a lot. And, they may even do so for you. But, there's little way to distinguish your position from that of many who have said they've found great answers that they can't really communicate. There have been many through the ages. There are many now.
I can only speak for myself and say that despite a certain amount of study of the problem of mind, I am profoundly ignorant on it. And, I'm sure the psychologists, cognitive scientists and neuro-chemists I work with on a daily basis in my job (I work at a university that has a very large emphasis on understanding intelligence.) would say they were profoundly ignorant on the subject. Oh, they know a lot of things, but certainly not something so simple as how we can form a percept of, say, the color red, whether that percept is the same for all, or even to say just what this consciousness that seems to allow us to be aware of it really is. I suspect I'd mostly get the same answer in the philosophy department.
So, good luck with that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 25 2015, @02:05AM
It sounds like you are intentionally, or entirely not aware, of the question you are seeking answers to. When presented with help, you go on the attack and change focus to something else. If you carefully defined your question, perhaps you will find an answer.
(Score: 2) by Hartree on Saturday April 25 2015, @03:45AM
I'll go with entirely not aware, since I've found that assuming I am ignorant of things is more likely to be right than not.
Since I'm not sure, what question am I seeking answers to, or what question should I be seeking answers to?