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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.
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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: 2) by HiThere on Friday April 24 2015, @06:01PM
If you are sure you really understand how the mind works, build a model. That will enable you to demonstrate that you are correct. Fortunately computers are flexible enough to implement ANY sufficiently detailed model of a mental process, though they may well run at a lot less than real time.
FWIW, I'm still working on the problem of understanding language from written text. It may not be soluble without including detailed sensory emulations of the things being referred to, or pieces of them. (I've never seen a unicorn, but imagining one is no problem, so compositions from basic images are a reasonable inclusion, and may well be necessary.)
P.S.: By understanding language I don't mean understanding the meaning of language. That's a much more difficult problem that includes understanding language as a subset. I mean merely the ability to segregate strings of text into "language" and "not-language". With corner cases like the famous "The Gostak distims the Doshes."), which starts off as a title and turns into legitimate language, though not understood language, by the end of the short story. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gostak [wikipedia.org]
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 25 2015, @02:13AM
A little extra worth looking into is the idea that you can't ever understand the language someone communicates until you know the matrix of assumed knowledge necessary on the part of the communicator in using that language.
Part of the fun in philosophy is that it reads like really drawn out code. First the dependencies are discussed, then the variables are defined in the form of common language words that are given a very specific meaning, after that the formal logic structure is designed and defined, finally culminating with quality control work through heading off disputes and applications discussions.