Yes, I may be being too generous to body medicine, but there sure seem to be a raft of objective tests to interpret; such a thing does not exist in psychiatry, except maybe for some recent genetic testing which is even less conclusive than a cholesterol test. And then you give a treatment and run more objective tests to see if anything's budged. Psychiatry has nothing siimilar.

I'm willing to give psychiatry a chance, but my problem is that it hasn't really done anything to deserve its current status. Just about every psychiatric drug started for another use and people noticed its psychological effects. Then they tried to come up with a reason the drug worked, then they marketed it. SSRIs are the classic example. "These drugs make you happier. What do they do? They manipulate serotonin. Therefore: depression is caused by a serotonin imbalance." Completely and absolutely wrong.

There is a long list of similar failures in psychiatry; schizophrenia used to be a passing thing in the past, now people are dx and treated for schizophrenia for life.

The entire approach of looking at the brain in isolation is problematic. Because, really, the brain is just a reflection of everything we experience. If you're monitoring someone's brain activity, you might notice a spike in chemicals associated with joy. "Hm. Looks like there's been a spike in the brain chemistry associated with pleasure," you'd say, and make a note of it somewhere. Whereas if you talked to the person, you'd realize that what (also) happened is that they got the good news that their wife survived the surgery. Which of those two approach, followed more assiduously, will get you closer to the human truth of existence?

Another factor against psychiatry is that we are highly suggestible. There's a reason that so much woo works with pain. Because pain is a subjective experience, as long as someone thinks they're getting an effective treatment, they'll have a placebo effect. The problem with medicalizing something like anixety is it suggests that the person has a problem with anxiety, and they must fix it; this causes an obsessive loop. Same for depression--people learn they have a BRAIN DISORDER making them depressed and they both lose hope and dedicate their effort to "fighting the depression."

One thing that seems very healing across the board across almost any illness is investing in your life, learning about your dreams, and going for what you want in life and relationships.. My problem is that medicalization and (to a large extent) therapy foregrounds an abstract diagnosis that disempowers people, violating the very first line of the Hippocratic Oath: do no harm..

I came to most of this largely through long and painful personal experience, but I've done plenty of reading and research and met quite a few people who've had the same struggles with the system and only got better once they got out..

But, anyway, to bring it back to the article.... I do think there's been good work on understanding and appreciating autism and ADD, but I'm wondering why we have to draw lines around THESE problems and not others. For instance, why does a student with ADD automatically get extra time for a test but a student who is going through a personal crises does not?

And as far ASD, I did just see a comic say she failed two tests for autism, and the second doctor said, "You were really close, but the tag on your shirt doesn't bother; you don't have the sensory issues, therefore you don't have ASD." The joke she had was that being annoyed by a tag on a shirt is the difference between someone being rude and someone having autism.

But the joke just points back to what I'm saying, If someone doesn't like making eye contact, why do they need a diagnosis so they don't get fired for being "anti-social"? The reason, of course, is the ADA and only people in protected classes have ADA protection. I'm asking why can't we just treat people the way they like to be treated in an environment that's best for them, regardless of anything?

I failed Autism Video: https://youtu.be/4JnlN6exqhI