My problem with Psychiatry as it is now is that once they diagnosed you with something, there is no test to confirm this diagnosis.
Most times the next step is giving you drugs and see how you react, with results varying getting better to no effects on the symptoms to worsening of the condition to being high and just not giving a fuck about the still existing condition.
That is not scientific at all.
Yeah, I man I would say I partially agree with you but that's one of the problems with psychiatry is that it's just not as far along as many other hard sciences because for many different disorders there are not necessarily any specific tests that can be done to be 100% sure that a person has this or that disorder or diagnosis and much of it has to do with whether or not a person responds to a certain drug.
Ideally I think we want to get to a point where there actual brain scans and scientific tests that can be done on the brain to specifically show what is lacking in terms of chemicals or where this is damage and specific results that would definitively prove one diagnosis, but we are far from there and I don't know if we ever will be, or if so how long it will take.
There do seem to be a few diagnoses, like bipolar and schizophrenia specifically, which we can be pretty damn sure someone has, but not most disorders.
That being said, I had a good psychiatrist once and he said "diagnoses should not be that important, just what your symptoms are and what helps with them" and I agree.
Why does it really matter what label we put on a disorder or diagnosis if we know what the negative symptoms are and how to make them go away?
Honestly, I think it hardly matters at all.
I mean, for the sake of argument, if you think someone has borderline personality disorder and give them certain drugs based on the symptoms, and somehow they work, and then we later find out that in fact the person was not borderline but was schizotypal, then why does it even matter?
That is why the DSM is constantly being updated every year because it's so hard to ever nail anything down in psychiatry, but the fact that it is being updated so often is proof that psychiatry is attempting to be a real science and constantly evolve and not just decide on different definitions of disorders being set.
I mean I honestly think that as a whole a lot of the people who are in the highest positions in the field of psychiatry and who are able to make changes to the DSM are often really doing the best they can but that they are just limited in so far as what they can do.
Psychiatrists are often the same way, and there are good ones, shitty ones and average ones, but they are often limited by conventions and laws.
My biggest gripe is both to do with psychiatry's conventions and also the drug laws themselves which make it often impossible to prescribe certain types of drugs which might be helpful, like psychedelics, but of course psychiatrists have little to no control over the drug laws.
I mean, that being said, we are starting to see drugs like psilocybin mushrooms, MDMA, weed, ketamine and in some cases even Ayahuasca and Ibogaine as being acknowledged as having therapeutic uses and there are trials done sometimes, and that is what needs to continue.
But what pisses me off is that if you come to most psychiatrists and they think you have whatever disorder, like lets' say unipolar depression or whatever, then they often just throw the same old SSRIs or tricyclis or MAOIs at you and will not really think outside of the box or be willing to try anything unconventional.
I'd say in a perfect world if (and this perfect world includes all drugs being legal hahaha), and you go to see a psychiatrist, they ask you what your symptoms are and focus much less on what disorder you might have and instead on what might help your symptoms, THEY ASK YOU SPECIFICALLY HOW YOU WOULD LIKE TO BE TREATED...and if you would like to try unconventional methods like various types of shamanism, forest retreats, meditation, hypnosis, etc.....and then they would be just as likely to consider prescribing that you spend a month isolated in the forest while taking Ayahusca, mushrooms and Ibogaine along with daily meditation, hunting animals with a bow and a pescaterian diet, as they would be to suggest taking SSRIs and just going about your day LOL.
There are more and more experimental psychiatrists out there, for example, I once did a native american sweatlodge with a guy who was both a psychiatrist and native american shaman, but I think psychiatry needs to increasingly be mixed with: shamanism, mysticism, psychedelics, medication, religion, Yoga, hypnosis, neurofeedback/brain technology, philosophy, diet, isolation tanks, other weird modalities, experimental lifestyles etc etc etc and not just consider itself some SUPER SERIOUS SCIENCE.
We should be at a point where psychiatrists take an active role in being part of the therapy of their patients and it shouldn't be unusual to imagine your psychiatrist taking his or her shoes off and accompanying you on a trek into the wilderness where you both eat mushrooms and do yoga lol.......but really our laws make it so they can't do that cause that's some kind of fraternizing with a patient or some shit.
The boundaries are just too great and many psychiatrists take themselves WAAAAAY too seriously.
But that being said, psychiatry is just not as far along as many other sciences so it is often simply not possible to find out for sure what a person's diagnosis is other than throwing pills at them and seeing if they respond, which is very unfortunate.
Hopefully in the future we have better tests to find out what a person really has, and psychiatry stops taking itself so seriously and starts combining with a lot of the other things I mentioned.
