NEJM Journal Watch: Interview with Dr. Caleb Gardner on the limitations of an increasing focus on biologic knowledge in psychiatry

Not sure if this is relevant:

https://www.nejm.org/action/showMed...=audiointerview&area=production&query=pfwNGTa

Caleb Gardner is a psychiatrist who recently completed his residency at Cambridge Health Alliance. Stephen Morrissey, the interviewer, is the Executive Managing Editor of the Journal.

 

It's puzzling that as we verge on gaining actual understanding of the human brain that goes beyond the very simplistic, there are people who expect that too much biology may be the problem. This thing is just getting started. It has mostly failed because we still don't understand the organ that is being studied.

As opinion goes, it's right there with saying that the phone is interesting and all but the technology has pretty much peaked in usefulness... right on the cusp of the computer industry beginning to work on telecommunications. Or finding the steam engine interesting but otherwise saying mechanics will be of little utility in the future, based on how little they were before being mastered.

If anything, it highlights the fact that it's nearly impossible to solve a medical puzzle until you actually understand its mechanisms, that just winging it with guesses and basically coming up with some opinion at random and just rolling with it obviously yields poor results. I just don't understand how people can say it's been a failure to understand disease of the brain while we still barely know a damn thing about how it works at all. Learn to walk. Then learn to run. Don't write off the toddler that's just beginning to walk steadily as never going to be able to run based on current wobbliness.

It's not as if alternative approaches will have anything new to offer. Non-biological approaches today are still exactly the same as they were a full century ago: think happy thoughts and don't not think happy thoughts. Technology isn't going to make any difference here, unlike what an actual understanding of the brain will do.

 

Like the Ancient Greeks. Their steam engine was a useless curiosity.

 

He seems to think that the most important purpose of psychotherapy is to entertain psychiatrists and provide them fodder from which to build a sense of edification based on the supposed wisdom of clinical experience.

It's reminiscent of the voyeur-onanistic interest wesley recalls pulling him to psychiatry, capped off by his proclamation, 'psychiatry is for grown-ups'.

It's all wandering very far-afield of rigorous analysis of evidence with the goal of improving people's lives.

 

Couldn't even follow his own advice, uh? He has behaved towards us like a petulant child who feels entitled to be celebrated no matter what he does for the mere fact that he is present.