Nevermind that perhaps the most prescribed class of psychiatric drugs has been called into question: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/are-antide

Nevermind that perhaps the most prescribed class of psychiatric drugs has been called into question: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/are-antidepressants-just-placebos-with-side-effects/ http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/are-antidepr... Psychiatry is a really, really hard field for canonical drug research. Mechanisms of disease are for the most part completely unknown, the mechanism of action for the drugs is often unclear in the patient (why stimulants treat ADHD? it's complicated...) and you've got the additional complication that diagnosis for the disease is purely symptomatic (in fact, that diagnosis process is nearly identical to that of psychology) so two people with the same symptoms may have radically different diseases, but hey, they'll both be in your clinical trial! Drawing a difference between Psychology and Psychiatry doesn't really hold up. Doing research on people is extremely difficult to get right, all medical and psychology research is subject to these problems.