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.
Pace is a fraud designed to confirm an irrational theory.
Psychiatry is about using chemicals to alter emotions and "improve" emotional well being
Psychology is about human behavioral traits, personality types such as Myers-Briggs constructs, and logical fallacies and so forth.
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.
Psychiatry is about the belief that negative emotions are caused by brain defects and can only be fixed by drugs. Its a conclusion looking very hard for a cause to justify it. And the amount of money and propaganda spent on this is enormous.
Its much easier to claim there is defects in much of the population then to admit reality sucks.
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.
There is plenty of research that uncovers the painful part of our psyche, and how to deal with emotions we don't like. But its not mainstream and its got little money behind it unlike the biochemical theories that are always 5-10 years away for over half a century now. They will eventually be now because some day we will understand enough of the brain to say this is what combination is sadness, but that misses the point, its not a defect, its an emotion and emotions have roots even if we would do almost anything to avoid seeing them. Houses of cards can be very resilient when we don't want the truth.
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.
Alzheimers is a physical condition that causes irreversible brain damage, schizophrenia has been chased forever and was considered biochemical or demons for untold centuries, depression and anxiety are emotions. That said sometimes people do have legitimate medical conditions that affect emotions, from prions to thyroid to hormonal to tumours... But these are real conditions not i feel hopeless so there must be something biochemically wrong and we won't rest until we invent theory after theory to explain it an they all keep failing but we will never stop believing.
Interestingly the current class of antidepressants can't be treating the "real" problem because we are not investigating their target as "the cause" anymore because we found nothing yet they "work" and are indispensable. Also if they are still somehow hitting the real cause then its an amazing cause, because a dozens of classes of drugs work on it.
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.
If you don't want to know then you will never see.
There is plenty of evidence that PTSD is caused by real life events, there is plenty of evidence that abuse leads to long term emotional problems, there is plenty of evidence that insecure attachment patterns often leads to long term negative effects, there is plenty of evidence that attempting to force societal norms onto people causes long term harm (conversion therapy for example is now considered unethical yet is still being pushed in many quarters)...
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.
Behavioural problems are an outcome not a cause, emotions are a reaction to things, hence A leads to B leads to C. The problem is you can't always trace a straight path from A to B then to C hence its easy to ignore the path dependence involved or explain it away.
Social maladaption can be a brain issue, a learned issue, or an outcome of society.
Someone once said bad manners are a fault of the parent and not the child. A bit punitive but the point is maladaption is not the result of faulty human evolution but of what preceded the problem. Again if one has a physical issue as mentioned above (tumour, thyroid etc) that should be treated but if people are unable to function then we don't need to wait for scientific "discovery" and treat it with uppers.
I am reminded of this article i recently read which has nothing to do with biochemical imbalances, neuroinflammation, genetic defects, tumours, schizophrenia or any such biochemical cause.
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsa...32/the-conflicting-educations-of-sam-schimmel
We need to be very careful here because some mind consider barracking for a sports team to be abnormal (how can you support team X, their 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.
Tribal behaviour, hate, discrimination, violence, doublethink are likely evolutionary leftovers, ones we can use as an excuse to hate thy neighbour or challenges we can overcome if we choose to. Unfortunately these base emotions are great for politicians who want to drag back social progress.
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.
The "media" is as human as the rest of us as it is composed of humans. While there are many ways i would improve it its biggest flaw currently is its insistence on bothsiderism and false equivalence. The theory of being "objective" is incompatible with the actual truth that bothsiderism in many cases does not exist or the unwillingness to acknowledge that the media being manipulated is easily done.
Social media is a quagmire, ranging from the very good, to blatant propaganda, to shear nonsense
Its an echo chamber of its users, and more so with algorithms that will elevate alternative facts. And powerful people with money enhance this as a form of manipulation for their own gains.
Just as government lobbying is dominated by big business, it takes money to fight protracted and continuing legal battles. Most citizens have limited options.
This is true, money talks, it is used to convince people to vote against their own interests. In a democratic country its voters who choose their leaders but they are persuaded by big money and appeals to hate to vote against their own interests over and over again. The solution to this is to either attack the source or for voters to use their brains. Obviously brainpower is not winning.
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.
Social issues are not mental issues. Trickle down economics is a fraud but scapegoats are used to keep people from recognizing reality and holding the perpetrators responsible.
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.
I disagree completely. The current CBT paradigm is an evolution of Freud who made an interesting observation but his theories about why and how to fix it were complete crap. CBT for depression is much like the ME/CFS version where you pretend the problem doesn't exist so it will disappear. The difference being that we have a physical condition so when we do what our bodies tell us not to we get worse. In depression its an emotional condition so when you ignore your emotions it gives you some relief. You can also bury your emotional pain with pills which works better then ignoring it. Symptom control.
I know i am stepping on some feet here and will likely be asked to edit this post or it will get deleted. My intention is not to piss people off, but to explain that which is uncomfortable to hear which i apologize for doing.
michael sharpe@profmsharpe
