Psychiatry Pseudoscience?

[Karl12]

Because they can work.

Hi mate I appreciate the reply and do realise there are subjective (and sincere) testimonies out there - on the whole though I would say the situation with 'mental health' in places like the UK has never been so dire - basically whatever they have been doing (or prescribing) for the last thirty years is simply not working and has resulted in utter disaster.

Did you check out the content in the first two posts concerning the absolute lack of objective evidence for the whole field of 'psychiatry'?

Not to mention the colossal financial incentives for pharma cartels involving the mass prescribing of extremely powerful psychotropic drugs to children?

Cheers.

[quintessentone]

It appears in a 2018 study that the drugs do work. So, what happened from 2018 to now that has caused them to stop working? Could it be that 80% of patients stop taking these drugs after a time? Could it be societal stresses getting worse and worse for regular people?
 

“Depression is the single largest contributor to global disability that we have – a massive challenge for humankind,” said John Geddes, professor of epidemiological psychiatry at Oxford University. It affects around 350 million people worldwide and instances rose almost 20% from 2005-2015.
“Antidepressants are an effective tool for depression. Untreated depression is a huge problem because of the burden to society,” said Andrea Cipriani of the NIHR Oxford Health Biomedical Research Centre, who led the study.
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The debate over antidepressants has unfortunately often been ideological, said Cipriani. Some doctors and patients have doubts over whether they work at all and point to the big placebo effect – in trials, those given dummy pills also improve to some degree. Some people suspect drug companies of fiddling trial results. Some patients simply do not want to take pills for a mental health condition.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018...tudy-shows

[Sirius]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFtsHf1lVI4

[Ray1990]

Hi mate I appreciate the reply and do realise there are subjective (and sincere) testimonies out there - on the whole though I would say the situation with 'mental health' in places like the UK has never been so dire - basically whatever they have been doing (or prescribing) for the last thirty years is simply not working and has resulted in utter disaster.

Did you check out the content in the first two posts concerning the absolute lack of objective evidence for the whole field of 'psychiatry'?

Not to mention the colossal financial incentives for pharma cartels involving the mass prescribing of extremely powerful psychotropic drugs to children?

Cheers.

I did check them out months ago, briefly watched the first video again and remembered it was full of sound bites and comments that could serve as ultimatums but are ultimately taken out of context.

I haven't checked my older posts but I highly suspect I wrote about chemicals, long story short how can the brain be chemically tested without massively intrusive procedures?

Psychiatry is a specialised field and puts into practice the 'theories' of psychology. Many of those theories are fairly sound and based on volumes of work, understanding and evidence.

The word psychotropic doesn't really mean much to me personally, I've got a bunch of stuff in my kitchen that has psychotropic properties and most people have a cup or two of something that has psychotropic effects every day.

Not to mention the colossal financial incentives for pharma cartels involving the mass prescribing of extremely powerful psychotropic drugs to children?

Define hard/powerful psychotropic drugs?

I've never met a parent (yet) who'll pay £1000's for their kids drugs if they weren't needed. A diagnosis for what I would class as the harder stuff can take upto a decade in the UK, a discerning parent could pay privately but that's expensive and so are the drugs if they get the diagnosis.

Generic issues get generic drugs. Generic drugs are cheap. Could an evil international consortium profit from cheap generic drugs? Sure, but they'd do a damn sight better convincing idiots that this 800% more expensive paracetamol blend are much better than the generic ones you normally buy (from us) for a few pence per pill.

As a conspiracy it doesn't appeal to me since the long game of pushing hard drugs is too much of a gamble compared to a bit of lobbying and the registering of patents.

All that said, yes. Pills are pushed too easily. I'd struggle to question the morality of my (or any) GP for prescribing beta blockers or SSRIs to a kid when alternatives are seemingly few and far between though.