In addition to being a young field, though, psychiatry is fundamentally wrong-headed. It puts the brain at the center of phenomenon and not the person and their context.

For instance, let's say that instead of treating depression, you wanted low communication. Let's say you live in a very talkative society and people who don't talk a lot are suspect and considered ill.

Reasonable approaches to this social problem might be to investigate the context people are raised in, and the context in which they live. Maybe they had a father who actively discouraged them from talking, or they're in a minority that was bullied and staying silent was a survival strategy, or maybe they're embarassed by an accent.

But what would the "psychiatric" approach be?

Psychiatry's approach would be to examine the brains of people who do talk a lot and people who talk less. Then they would prescribe a medication that theoretically gets the brains of people who talk less to be more like the brains of people who talk more.

That's really missing the most important parts of the picture--the social and personal contexts. It's treating people like they are just the results of their brains, and not their brains being a result of their environment.

Now there is value in looking at the brain in isolation. In this hypothetical, it would be hugely helpful to know about autism! The problem is that psychiatry has an outsized authority that it really doesn't deserve, an authority society is happy to give it in exchange for not having to address what are much more likely to be social problems.