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, Interesting) by Yog-Yogguth on Saturday April 25 2015, @07:45PM
What? Aren't you forgetting a lot of things? The ability to do neurology is directly linked to philosophy.
Philosophy invented science! [wikipedia.org]
We're back to a new dark age if people haven't understood the reasons or heard the explanations of how we escaped the last one.
Bite harder Ouroboros, bite! tails.boum.org/ linux USB CD secure desktop IRC *crypt tor (not endorsements (XKeyScore))
(Score: 2) by Hartree on Monday April 27 2015, @12:54PM
Not at all.
Philosophy is not only the precursor of science but is a valuable field in itself. I was objecting to the OP saying that "reductionism" (assuming that's just not code for whatever the OP doesn't like) was standing in the way of our understanding the problem of mind.
Though how our mental life arises (regardless of what is at it's base) is full of emergent behavior at multiple levels, reductionism is still a useful tool for gaining more information. It doesn't give you all of the answers, but then again staring naively at the whole doesn't either. It's such a hard problem that many different fields and viewpoints have to be involved in understanding the problem of mind.
(Score: 2) by Yog-Yogguth on Tuesday April 28 2015, @04:50AM
Sorry I misunderstood you, in addition I have to agree with both of you about reductionism/determinism¹ depending on the specific case (…and a million disagreements bloomed haha :D). It is incredibly easy to ignore that which doesn't give an easy answer or doesn't fit in immediately/intuitively, humans are biased by nature to prefer any easily recognizable pattern over any complicated pattern even if the easy pattern is misleading, wrong, or circumstantial (and the more complicated something is the longer it usually takes to realize). But it can also be very useful and has been very (perhaps even wildly) successful in many sciences which is why this became a problem in the first place as people tried hard to apply it to everything almost no matter what.
¹ Determinism is usually the culprit when something has been reduced beyond the meaningful. It easily becomes a game of random chance/luck if one puts far too much value into determinism on levels and/or numbers of steps/iterations far removed from the end result being studied: for each additional level/iteration of determinism the complexity must increase by at least a factor of two if not far more and with a potentially equal decrease in explanatory or predictive power (ouch & thanks: you've reminded me about something I meant to get done long ago).
Bite harder Ouroboros, bite! tails.boum.org/ linux USB CD secure desktop IRC *crypt tor (not endorsements (XKeyScore))