Psychiatry is not a Pseudoscience

June 25th, 2005 - 15:28 | 2 comments

Just posted the below. I didn’t realise that Scientology and Cruise in particular have quite such a thing about psychiatry and that it’s been covered by people more knowledgeable than me. So feel free to ignore it ———————————-

Tom Cruise on NBC last night:

Psychiatry is a pseudoscience.

Firstly, it’s psychoanalysis that’s the pseudoscience. Psychiatry is perfectly reasonable. However, when you find out that he’s calling psychiatry a pseudoscience while simultaneously pushing Scientology, one of the most notorious pseudosciences around, you know something’s a little messed up. In accordance with scientological (?) doctrine, Tom Cruise is claiming that antidepressants are no use. His recommendation? Vitamins. Seriously. Never mind the large body of evidence showing that antidepressants have a significant impact over placebo, and the complete lack of a corresponding body for vitamins.

I know he’s just a film star, but he’s in a position to push this nonsense onto people who don’t know that it’s ridiculous. Argh.

-----

2 Responses to “Psychiatry is not a Pseudoscience”

1 Steven Pearce Jul 8th, 2005 at 12:22 am

Wow, the above comments defending psychiatry are pretty lame. So what test shows that there is anything wrong with a persons brain? Oh, there is no test. Some try to say that brain scans prove mental illness, but then others point out that these scans don’t show a normal brain, and only show different rates of function - they don’t show cause. So, psychiatry has a problem here, they are rightly being called on the carpet for lack of science. They cannot produce repeatable, objective evidence that A. anyone suffers from a chemical imbalance (the head of the APA recently said there was no test to confirm mental illness) B. that anyone needs psychotropic drugs C. that what they treat isn’t anything but behavior deemed disease for the convenience of selling drugs, giveing them a livlihood and dominating others.
2 Andrew Jul 8th, 2005 at 8:13 am

Hang on just a minute, I think you’re confusing absolute understanding with the process of science.

Mental illness can be diagnosed from behaviour (and what constitutes ‘normal’ behaviour is indeed an interesting argument, but that’s not confined to psychiatry - it’s what keeps people in prison, for example).

You’re right that the causes of mental illness are not well understood. But it’s still possible to diagnose without a full understanding. It’s known, for example, that serotonin level has a major effect on overall happiness. While people’s ideal serotonin level will differ, making it impossible to use an objective test to diagnose this particular issue, it’s been scientifically proven (using placebo-controlled, double-blind studies with statistically-significant results) that increasing serotonin levels through antidepressants will effectively treat depression (it’s actually more complicated than simply serotonin levels, but the point still stands). So there *is* science involved, and just because it’s a step back from performing a definitive test doesn’t make it any the less valid.

So perhaps we can drop the paranoia? Like every other medical science, psychiatry is there to help people, and is built around the scientific method. It uses evidence just like anything else, and just because it’s more complicated than ‘look, this particular bit of the brain isn’t working’ doesn’t mean that it’s all a big conspiracy.

If your intent is to defend scientology, then the onus is on you to prove that your methods work. If they do, great! That means we can help more people. Incidentally, there’d be nobel prizes all round and an overhaul of medical science generally, but if it’s the truth then that’s only right and proper! However, if they don’t (and they’ve never been shown to), some critical thinking should be applied before trying to wreck people’s faith in the medical community, and their ability to live a happy life, through ignorant nonsense that somebody eloquent once made up.

-----

Commenting Policy: Thoughts, observations, argument, debate and all other conversational wonderments are encouraged, but personal attacks or general trolling will result in your comment being deleted and your account/IP banned. If you're nice, however, you get strawberries.