Psychiatric research does include some important research findings. However standards are lax, and PACE is, as I have been calling it for about seven years now, a Rosetta stone showing us just how bad psychiatric claims can be. They need translation. The methodology often falls short of scientific norms. They play to the tickbox versions of good trial design and good evidence based claims. Its beyond dangerous as this affects millions upon millions of people, far beyond the ME community.
We need psychiatry, or at least something that fills its current roles. However we need scientific psychiatry. No waffly theories. No unproven assumptions. Psychiatry starts with sociology, psychology, and neurology. All these fields are plagued by similar issues, but none are as badly affected as psychiatry. These three could replace psychiatry to a large extent.
I see no reason to consider mental disease as other than a confused mess of social, behavioural and brain problems, all jumbled together and with actual causation still in the realm of myth. We are close to getting understanding of problems like in Alzheimers and Schizophrenia, and perhaps subsets of depression, anxiety and so on, but that is coming from biomedical breakthroughs, not any improvement in understanding mind. There does not appear to be any credible evidence that can differentiate mind from brain function, and social and self learned issues. With brain function its a neurological problem. Social and learned issues vary from brain issues to issues in how society functions.
Behavioural issues are tricky, and really need to be teased out and understood better. I suspect most are behavioural outcomes but due to other things, including brain problems.
Social maladaption can be a brain issue, a learned issue, or an outcome of society. We need to be very careful here because some might consider barracking for a sports team to be abnormal (how can you support team X, they're useless!) and dissing a sports team is the other side of the same flaw. The same goes for political parties, with the very real consequence that because we are often at least partly blind about our favourite party, and our most hated opposition, we fail to deal with issues rationally. Society isn't working right? Government isn't working right? The population are at least partly responsible.
Investigative media is supposed to be a major way to balance this, as is the judicial system. Investigative media is in severe decline just as the world is become ever more complicated. Social media is a quagmire, ranging from the very good, to blatant propaganda, to shear nonsense. Just as government lobbying is dominated by big business, it takes money to fight protracted and continuing legal battles. Most citizens have limited options.
Its very dangerous to treat social issues as mental issues. At most there is conditioned behaviour like with cults, but most of it is social variation, and so subject to changing social trends.
In all this mess the BPS framework is trying to find balance and sense. Yet none of its components are figured out. Its like designing a sky scraper without any understanding of the materials science and engineering needed to construct it. You just hope the building doesn't collapse before its even built. You hope it survives unveiling. You never really look at long term problems because that might mean you get blamed.
Its also no surprise that most things I read from BPS are more bPs, and sometimes just P.
(Spelling edit.)
