"Psychiatry is in decline and is becoming obsolete, a victim of its own psychobabble and increasingly mind-numbing research, understandable to the elite few".
Francis J Dunne , FRCPsych, Consultant Psychiatrist
http://www.bjmp.org/content/psychiatry-decline
Psychiatry is arguably the least scientific, most dogmatic and most contentious of all medical disciplines. Many argue it is not a medical discipline at all except, and most contentiously of all in the way it employs pharmaceutical interventions.
Is it time it was re-thought and reclassified?
Voting UP, especially in presence of spreading new smart technologies.
Emad
I think that this is quietly happening.
Scratch, in the context of psychiatry, means going back to the phenomenology of mental illness. Phenomenology almost died out in the late 20th century, in the face of the successes of SSRIs and novel antipsychotics. However, it's undergone a quiet renaissance of late, where the combination of imaging techniques with traditional phenomenological methods promise a more solid footing for the description of mental illness.
Of course, meanwhile in the world of commercial pharma, the medicalisation of everyday life continues unabated.
Enter your answer I think the pressure to appear "more scientific" and the high pressure marketing form big pharma has led to psychiatry trying to medicalize a lot of everyday problems that should not be medicalized.Just to use an example even if it may not be the best one; I come form a third world resource limited setting and I have seen children in the village with difficulty behavior who if they had presented to psychiatric services would have satisfied DSM criteria for Oppositional Defiant disorder. However thank God perhaps due to shortage of psychiatrists and other mental health professionals the parents and other caregivers accepted them as just being difficulty children and dealt with them the best they could( usually a combination of tough discipline and "unconscious" use of negative reinforcement "you were rudely arguing with your uncle today , so there will be no supper for you ". Believe you me or not as time goes on a lot of this children grow out of the behavior and now remain the subject of fond reminiscences from parents "The way Tom is so polite , you cant believe how difficult he was when he was young". If "Tom" had been in a different setting perhaps they would have been taken to a psychiatrist who would most likely have "symptomatically " put him on some med . Psychiatry still helps a lot of people but needs to rethink its current preoccupation with trying to find a biological link to every diagnosis it has conjured up .
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