What do you think about psychiatry?
Posted: Sat Aug 10, 2019 9:36 am
So, what do you guys here think about psychiatry?
My mother has been complaining about hearing voices that frighten her, and I am not sure if visiting a psychiatrist if you are mentally ill is a good or a bad idea today. Psychiatry has a terrible track-record of basing itself on science. Its history is basically a history of wrong (if not simply crazy) ideas that costed the patients a lot until they got corrected. You know, from the Freud's idea that cocaine is a cure for many mental illnesses and that most mental illnesses were caused by being a victim of paedophilia, to the ideas that schizophrenia can be cured by destroying the frontal lobe of the brain or the electric shocks.
And, as far I know, there is little evidence that anti-depressants and anti-psychotics work any better than placebo. There is also no scientific explanation of how they are supposed to work. We don't know what causes depression. We also know very little about what happens in our brains when we hear something, and we know basically nothing about what happens in our brains when we hear something that isn't there, and even less about how the anti-psychotics are supposed to work.
Without a doubt, 50 years ago, visiting a psychiatrist was a bad idea. It's hard to tell whether it is a bad idea now. It's certainly not as extremely bad idea as it was 50 years ago, but it could easily still be.
What do you think?
My mother has been complaining about hearing voices that frighten her, and I am not sure if visiting a psychiatrist if you are mentally ill is a good or a bad idea today. Psychiatry has a terrible track-record of basing itself on science. Its history is basically a history of wrong (if not simply crazy) ideas that costed the patients a lot until they got corrected. You know, from the Freud's idea that cocaine is a cure for many mental illnesses and that most mental illnesses were caused by being a victim of paedophilia, to the ideas that schizophrenia can be cured by destroying the frontal lobe of the brain or the electric shocks.
And, as far I know, there is little evidence that anti-depressants and anti-psychotics work any better than placebo. There is also no scientific explanation of how they are supposed to work. We don't know what causes depression. We also know very little about what happens in our brains when we hear something, and we know basically nothing about what happens in our brains when we hear something that isn't there, and even less about how the anti-psychotics are supposed to work.
Without a doubt, 50 years ago, visiting a psychiatrist was a bad idea. It's hard to tell whether it is a bad idea now. It's certainly not as extremely bad idea as it was 50 years ago, but it could easily still be.
What do you think?