I just had my first psychiatry lecture this morning.
That whole fucking field is bullshit. Nothing is well defined, all patients are robots and doctors are giving out meds like they are fucking tic-tacs.
Why does this shit even exist?
>>7889609
>I just had my first child this morning
>That whole fucking being is bullshit. Nothing is well developed, all arms are weak and doctors are giving him meds like they are fucking tic-tacs.
>Why does this shit even exist?
your mother
>>7889609
because it is empiric science and in general works
besides you don't know shit about anything at all so shut the fuck up
>>7889609
Psychiatry is at least better than psychology. I would even it consider a science.
>>7889609
I just had my first math lecture this morning.
That whole fucking field is bullshit. Nothing is well defined, all students are robots and professors are giving out solutions like they are fucking tic-tacs.
Why does this shit even exist?
>>7889612
There are no meds for autism.
>>7889609
>I just had my first CS lecture this morning.
>That whole fucking field is bullshit. Nothing is well defined, all students are Indians and profs are giving out the fizzbuzz excercises like they are fucking tic-tacs and I still don't understand
>Why does this shit even exist?
>>7889612
brilliant
>Nothing is well defined
Welcome to soft sciences general.
Try meeting with a psychiatrist. Before you even meet them you know they're going to qualify everything you say as a symptom of some disorder or another and that's always exactly what they do.
I can attest that this is true based on personal experience from the patient side of the equation.
>>7889609
>I had 50 minutes of lecture today and somehow summarized an entire field based on generalized material that didn't even span an hour
Well done. Take a big step back and literally punch your own face.
>>7889609 (OP)
>I just had my first MechEng lecture this morning
>That whole fucking field is bullshit. Nothing is well defined, all students are fucking guys and employers are giving out the jobs like they are fucking tic-tacs
>Why does this shit even exist?
>>7890247
That's just you. Because you're not well, anon.
>>7890322
>That's just you
Borderline personality disorder detected
>>7889609
people only join the field to feel qualified in badmouthing freud
>>7889609
>Why does this shit even exist?
For the same reason homeopathy and breathanarianism exist: people get and believe crazy ideas all the time.
What you should ask:
>Why is this shit treated like real medicine?
For inpatient care and forced medication / chemical restraint: Because madness is a thing, and people want:
a) to believe there's something to be done about it, and
b) to have an excuse to violate normal standards of due process (because the patient is supposed to be "treated" and even "cured", no matter how appalling the actual abuse or how clearly the patient is opposed to what's happening, he's not entitled to a proper adversarial defense with a beyond-reasonable-doubt standard).
Psychiatric inpatient care normally makes an absolute mockery of due process. The exceptions are high-profile cases and patients who are rich, connected, and prepared enough to have their own lawyer ready to fight for them. Regardless of the laws officially governing psychiatric facilities, the psychiatrists and family pretty much just decide to do what they like with patients between them.
For voluntary therapy and general pill-pushing: Like the TSA does security theater, doctors do healthcare theater. They don't like to admit they can't do anything useful, and they get paid for interacting with patients whether they can improve the situation or not. This is certainly not limited to psychiatry, and psychiatry isn't even a particularly bad example.
>>7889612
Psychiatry isn't the first steps on a long path to genuine, effective medicine, rather it's a huge scam which denies the existence of the real challenges and pretends to have answers today.
It's today's primary obstacle to rational, ethical care for the mad, and progress toward better solutions.
Psychiatrists draw large paycheques, wield terrible power over conscious, actively objecting patients, and are permitted to promote mass drugging of the general population for the ordinary dissatisifactions of life, on the alleged merits of the diagnostic methods and treatments they have today, which are total snake oil.
Man, the amount of shitty psychiatrists that are apparently out there is serioudly disturbing. Psychiatry IS an effective practice, there are many psychiatric disorders that can be effectively managed with proper medication and therapy. My psychiatrist is actually pushing me to try and lower my dosage, and convinced me to stop taking a particular medication (prescribed by my previous psychiatrist) altogether.
Like any other well paying profession, there's going to be people who are just doing it for the money with zero fucks given, and those who are actually interested in the practice and genuinly want to help people. Personally I went out of my way to try and track down a good psychiatrist, but they most definitely are out there.
TL; DR if you want a legit psychiatrist you gotta seek them out specifically.
>>7890869
>Psychiatry IS an effective practice, there are many psychiatric disorders that can be effectively managed with proper medication and therapy.
Today people say, "It took me a year to recognized I was depressed and get diagnosed, and then I tried different medications for a whole year before I found something that worked. It was really worth it in the end, despite the side-effects, expense, and stigma, because now I'm enjoying life again."
Before those drugs existed, they said, "Well, I felt pretty unhappy for a couple of years for no apparent reason, but then it passed and I've been enjoying life ever since."
One of the most common features of a popular psychiatric medication is that its withdrawal effects look like the thing it's supposed to treat. Whenever they miss doses or try to quit, they have a bad spell, and this convinces them that it must be working.
>>7890904
So how do you explain clinical trials of psychiatric drugs with control groups?
>>7890910
How do you do a blind trial of a psychoactive drug, or one with obvious physical side effects? Psychoactive drugs bypass the senses entirely to make the user aware that they are taking the drug, and if you're observing someone closely enough to gauge psychiatric symptoms, you're likely to notice whether they've been drugged or not independently of whether their symptoms improve.
Psychiatric trials commonly show strong placebo effects. Rather than redesigning the trials until they show no placebo effect (which, properly understood, is an indication that you are measuring something other than the effect being tested), they take an effect which is somewhat stronger than the placebo as a positive indication of an effective drug. Never mind that if you fiddle with the placebos, you can make their effect stronger too, sugar pills remain the standard.
What you never see in psychiatry is an experiment that registers no effect of placebo and 100% effectiveness of the treatment. It's always something like 35% of the control group shows improvement, 55% of the test group. And they never narrow it down in such a way that they can identify the people who will show improvement before administering the drug.
Also:
- publication bias
- incompetent experimental technique
- incompetent analysis of results
- academic fraud
- corporate fraud
Homeopaths run studies that show that their methods work. They have journals. They do all the coconut landing light cargo-cult stuff, just like psychiatrists.
>>7890904
That's because depression is more of an environmental disorder, rather than a genetic one, and as such is more effectively treated with therapy as opposed to medication. Meds can be used in severe cases, or to initially break the cycle of self-destructive behavior and the resultant self-pity in cases that have been left alone for a while. Not all diseases are best treated with pills, but some, like schizophrenia, are.
>>7890946
Schizophrenia is a particular case where psychiatry hurts people. With psychiatric treatment, basically nobody recovers. They take the drugs forever, and they always have problems. Without psychiatrict treatment, a large fraction of schizophrenics just get better and stop having problems.
Schizophrenia is often a phase. It typically emerges in adults in the late stages of brain growth and maturation, which often happen after successful reproduction. The inflexible adult goes through changes akin to those which confuse and disrupt adolescents, and they react more severely and take a longer time to adapt. Keep them from hurting themselves for long enough, and they just get better.
Where it isn't a phase that can be worked through, it may be an undiagnosed physical condition, or an unacknowledge drug habit. There is really no such thing as "schizophrenia" which can be reliably diagnosed and determined to have a common cause. It's just a very loosely defined bundle of symptoms, such that people with no common factor, no symptom or physical influence in common, can both be diagnosed with schizophrenia. Patients, once diagnosed with schizophrenia, almost never get proper attention to the possibility of a physical cause: the misfortune of being put in front of a psychiatrist rather than a neurologist can doom them.
>>7890942
>What you never see in psychiatry is an experiment that registers no effect of placebo and 100% effectiveness of the treatment. It's always something like 35% of the control group shows improvement, 55% of the test group.
1) Stop cherry picking. Don't be that guy.
There are plenty of trials with success rates of 80+%.
2) You never see a 100% success rate because everyone's different, and since they don't have time to figure out the correct dosage for each individual patient, everyone gets the same amount which means that not everyone is going to get a dosage that works for them.
3) We are only just starting to unravel how many of these diseases work. At this point it's a lot of trial and error as to what works and what doesn't. As we understand more and more about what causes mental disorders, we can take better guesses and make more accurate predictions as to what will and will not work, leading to more successful trials.
> homeopathy
Although considering you believe that taking less of something has a stronger effect, I doubt any of this will make sense to you.
>>7890942
You claimed that psychiatric drugs don't help depression any more than simply waiting it out. I'm asking you how you can claim that given clinical results which prove the opposite. So saying that the trial is invalid because people know they are getting the drug doesn't seem relevant (it's also unsubstantiated).
>Rather than redesigning the trials until they show no placebo effect (which, properly understood, is an indication that you are measuring something other than the effect being tested), they take an effect which is somewhat stronger than the placebo as a positive indication of an effective drug
That's a ridiculous standard to impose. What matters in clinical trials is clinical significance, not "perfect" results.
>And they never narrow it down in such a way that they can identify the people who will show improvement before administering the drug.
That would require a deeper understanding of brain than we have.
I don't think you are being very rational here. You are dismissing valid empirical evidence due to a bias against psychiatry.
>>7890964
What about all the schizophrenic people that avoid treatment and end up homeless and crazy for the rest of their life? Have you never met a clearly schizophrenic homeless person who has never been medicated? I've met plenty.
>>7890971
>> homeopathy
>Although considering you believe that taking less of something has a stronger effect, I doubt any of this will make sense to you.
Just so everyone's clear, the person who's arguing against me here took this statement to mean that I believe in homeopathy, rather than as an indictment of psychiatry:
>Homeopaths run studies that show that their methods work. They have journals. They do all the coconut landing light cargo-cult stuff, just like psychiatrists.
So on that note, I conclude that there is no purpose in attempting to converse rationally with him.
>>7890964
>There is really no such thing as "schizophrenia" which can be reliably diagnosed and determined to have a common cause. It's just a very loosely defined bundle of symptoms, such that people with no common factor, no symptom or physical influence in common, can both be diagnosed with schizophrenia.
You clearly only have a basic concept of schizophrenia. The disorder is well documented as being a genetic one, and sloppy psychiatry will fuck up anybody with any disorder, just like how a sloppy surgery will fuck them up.
And don't look right now, but Big Pharma has their truck outside and is monitering your posts ;)
>>7890972
>You are dismissing valid empirical evidence
I am dismissing empirical evidence due to the many indications that it is invalid, some of which I explained and others I listed.
Blinding, in either direction, is not possible, making control groups useless. Furthermore, the outcomes are gauged by extremely subjective judgement. Under such circumstances, the researchers must be presumed to be allowing their expectations and hopes to influence their recorded outcomes. No limit of the effect of this bias on the results can be assumed.
This is not science. It's opinions and guessing dressed up to look like science.
>>7890977
>Homeopaths run studies that show that their methods work. They have journals.
So what the fuck are you saying then? That studies aren't a reliable source of discovery? If your response boils down to "______ also claims proof through studies, so studies from ______ are also meaningless", then you are in fact the one who is devoid of rational discourse as further evidenced by your nonsensical word salad:
> They do all the coconut landing light cargo-cult stuff
>>7890964
Having lived the past three decades as both a treated and untreated schizophrenic, I have to say there is a great deal of wisdom in this post. My schizophrenic symptoms have a cyclical aspect to them and they come and go based on this cycle whether or not I am being drugged by the psychiatric community. The most effective psychiatrist I have ever personally met is the one who taught me how to meditate instead of drugging me to the point of zombification. The meditation practice does not prevent any of the symptoms; however, it has taught me to understand the nature of how my mind works and to deal with the bad periods much better than I did when I was being over-drugged by the medical community.
>>7890978
>The disorder is well documented as being a genetic one
You mean that they went correlation fishing, and didn't pull in an empty net, as one never does after a correlation fishing trip. Pic related.
>>7890985
>Blinding, in either direction, is not possible, making control groups useless.
You're just making shit up at this point. Just throw in the towel so I can collect my shillbucks and call it a day.
>>7890994
>>Blinding, in either direction, is not possible, making control groups useless.
>You're just making shit up at this point.
I explained it in some detail already: >>7890942
>How do you do a blind trial of a psychoactive drug, or one with obvious physical side effects? Psychoactive drugs bypass the senses entirely to make the user aware that they are taking the drug, and if you're observing someone closely enough to gauge psychiatric symptoms, you're likely to notice whether they've been drugged or not independently of whether their symptoms improve.
You can't hide the fact that a person's been started on a new psychoactive drug, either from the person or from the people around that person.
...and in psychiatric drug trials, with subjective judgement of changes in symptoms, you can't separate the ability of either the patient or the researchers to recognize whether a patient is in the test group, from the ability to recognize a real effect on the condition causing the symptoms.
Psychiatric drug trials are effectively uncontrolled and subject to the biases of everyone involved.
>>7890993
>You mean that they went correlation fishing, and didn't pull in an empty net, as one never does after a correlation fishing trip.
Yes, that's how links are established. A correlation is discovered, and then investigated further to determine if there is causation there as well.
Through twin studies schizophrenia has been determined to be a genetic disease, as identical twins growing up in different environments had equal occurences of schizophrenia regardless of said environment. That's also completely disregarding the fact that the more closely related you are to somebody, the higher chance you are of having schizophrenia, right up to a full 50% chance if your twin is schizo.
Please do not discuss matters in which you are not properly educated.
>>7891012
>A correlation is discovered, and then investigated further to determine if there is causation there as well.
...and since they have no firmly established causative mechanism for schizophrenia, because they still don't know what the fuck is going on inside a schizophrenic person, they've had no power to investigate whether any correlated factor is directly causal.
And no, when you find out that if one twin is diagnosed as schizophrenic, the other is ~50% likely to also be diagnosed as schizophrenic (and remember that you never measure whether people are schizophrenic, only whether they're dianosed as such), you have not learned anything about direct causation, and therefore nothing about whether it's a genetic disease.
Sickle-cell anemia is a genetic disease. If you have the right genetics (two copies of the sickle-cell trait gene), you have it, every time. Malaria is a condition merely influenced by genetics. A person with one copy of the sickle-cell trait gene is more resistant to malaria than a person with none, so there are genetic correlations, and genetic causation between having non-sickle-cell-trait genes and dying of malaria. But the causation is not direct, and malaria is not a genetic disease. The direct cause is an infection by protozoans.
The causative factor in the correlation of the diagnosis of schizophrenia between twins could be as simple as the bias of psychiatrists taking family history into account, combined with the distress and self-doubt experienced by someone whose twin has gone mad. There's no way to eliminate this possibility.
>>7891001
Your explanation is flawed. First of all, we can objectively measure a drug's effect through brain scans (MRI's, EEG's, etc.) to directly observe any changes it might cause. This is also accomplished in a much simpler way by administering a test (written or oral) and then comparing the before and after results to see if there is any noted change in the given answers.
Secondly, if a person is talking to themselves and is making violent threats towards others while harming themselves, and after taking a drug these behaviors cease, would you not consider it a success? And don't go all "that person is so drugged up they don't even know what's going on" because you already said that it's impossible NOT to realize you've taken the drug here:
>Psychoactive drugs bypass the senses entirely to make the user aware that they are taking the drug
So if they are simply being sedated beyong recognition, then according to you they should realize this themselves and be able to report this negative experience.
>and if you're observing someone closely enough to gauge psychiatric symptoms, you're likely to notice whether they've been drugged or not independently of whether their symptoms improve.
This is a purely subjective conjecture and entirely situational. Who's to say whether the behavior is caused by the placebo or the drug?
>>7891035
>we can objectively measure a drug's effect through brain scans (MRI's, EEG's, etc.) to directly observe any changes it might cause
Okay, I'm done talking to you if you think this works, or is how psychiatry is done.
>>7891034
>The causative factor in the correlation of the diagnosis of schizophrenia between twins could be as simple as the bias of psychiatrists taking family history into account, combined with the distress and self-doubt experienced by someone whose twin has gone mad. There's no way to eliminate this possibility.
> Muh bias
Again, making a sweeping generalization based on conjecture. Is bias a thing? Yes. Does it significantly alter conclusions and interpretations in every single study of every single disorder, thus invalidating an entire field? No.
>
The causative factor in the correlation of the diagnosis of schizophrenia between twins could be as simple as the bias of psychiatrists taking family history into account, combined with the distress and self-doubt experienced by someone whose twin has gone mad. There's no way to eliminate this possibility.
So then why doesn't this happen with something like depression, which has been established to have a stronger environmental influence? Looking at the individual diseases it is near impossible to determine whether something is caused by external issues or internal, save for rates in the upper 90th percentile. Since there is no reason for psychiatrists to be more biased towards schizophrenia or major depressive disorder, we can compare the amounts of genetic corellation to environmental corellation to determine what is the likely cause for each. Unless of course, they WANT to believe depression is environmental, right?
>>7891038
> brings up valid point
> THAT'S NOT HOW IT WORKS IM TELLING YOU THAT YOU ARE WRONG BECAUSE I SAID SO
I'll give you the fact that this is very rarely, if ever, used for each and every drug. It is, however, used to establish effectiveness with a class of drugs on a patient. Or it is actually used with a specific drug if it acheives unusually high success rates in trials.
>>7889609
You really don't know?
>>7890247
That's because they are cold-reading charlatans.
>>7891035
>Secondly, if a person is talking to themselves and is making violent threats towards others while harming themselves, and after taking a drug these behaviors cease, would you not consider it a success? And don't go all "that person is so drugged up they don't even know what's going on" because you already said that it's impossible NOT to realize you've taken the drug here
I love how people who have never taken these drugs know it all. Anti-psychotic drugs, especially in the dosages administered to a hospitalized patient, fuck you up to the point that you just don't give a shit about anything anymore. It is a chemical lobotomy. If you are drugged to the point that you can't get out of a chair, you are unlikely to harm yourself or others. Do you consider that a successful outcome? I've been there and I don't. Psychiatric hospitals in the U.S. are prisons and the bars are the drugs.
>>7890942
>Psychoactive drugs bypass the senses entirely to make the user aware that they are taking the drug
No. This is wildly incorrect.
>Never mind that if you fiddle with the placebos, you can make their effect stronger too, sugar pills remain the standard
ISHYGDDT
The placebo effect is hyperawareness of the drug's claimed effects and side effects that makes a person more likely to associate unrelated symptoms or those they wouldn't report unsolicited with the drug they're told should/likely causes it. It's patient level confirmation bias. It's not an actual psychosomatic effect.
This is the whole reason we give inactive compounds and tell people to be aware of nausea, improvements in depression,, etc. To establish a baseline against which the actual effects of the actual drug can be assessed from obviously biased and imperfect data.
Confirmation bias appears at the clinician-level too, interactions with those known to be taking placebos vs actual drug can affect this patient sensitivity. That's why the studies must be double blind.
>>7889609
>Why does this shit even exist?
Idk but I play along enough to get my prescription of amphetamines
>>7889628
Mathematics is well defined you fucking failed meme
>>7891616
this
>>7889620
>Imfuckingplying
Nope, psychology is definitely more science than psychiatry.
At least psychology has tons of categories and theories that explain their object of study whereas psychiatry doesn't even try, it doesn't have any ideia why it even works, it just gives expensive drugs that are being used solely for their placebo effect.
>>7892402
>being used solely for their placebo effect
This is untrue and it's been addressed ITT.
>it doesn't have any ideia why it even works
This is also untrue.
It's a shame, you made one or two really good points mixed in with the rest of that
>>7891379
>The placebo effect is ... not an actual psychosomatic effect.
Here's the quality of argument in favor of trusting psychiatric research.
>>7891115
>I love how people who have never taken these drugs know it all
and how many have you taken?
because you sure seem confident in saying that ALL antipsychotic drugs are nothing but a chemical lobotomy, which just reeks of "I've been forced to take an antipsychotic once and it made me feel like shit"
I've worked in that area during my EMT training
and going from a man convinced that his neighbours, who are secretly undercover government agents, are dumping poisonous gas into his room at night to kill him to someone who can articulate his thoughts and wishes without sounding like a raving lunatic IS a successful outcome
we know that some of the staff in psychiatric care isn't interested in treating and instead decides to sedate the fuck out of their patient in order to get through the day
but that's no indication for the effectiveness of psychiatry itself
>>7890320
>all students are fucking guys
>fucking guys
I'm sorry but it seems you accidentally sat in a engineering lecture
>tfw have both autism and severe major depressive disorder which made the hospital people think I had schizophrenia
What if schizophrenia is just a form of autism and depression? Or something like autism like neurosis or some shit.
>>7892528
For nearly thirty years I have been fed a steady overdosage of Haldol, Thorazine, Compazine, Mellaril, Stelazine, Risperdal, Seroquel, Abilify, Clozaril, Zyprexa, and a few more that I can't remember the names of. In total, I have spent at least two years of my life locked up in psychiatric hospitals surrounded by others suffering in the same way. So, I'm entitled to an opinion and you can shove your EMT training up your ass.
>we know that some of the staff in psychiatric care isn't interested in treating and instead decides to sedate the fuck out of their patient in order to get through the day
but that's no indication for the effectiveness of psychiatry itself
That IS psychiatric care in the U.S. Are you fucking retarded? That massive over-prescription of these drugs benefits the staff of these facilities, not the patients.
