This thread is sad. There's good psychiatrists and bad psychiatrists, good and bad psychologists, and the pharm industry has done a lot of good for society as

This thread is sad. There's good psychiatrists and bad psychiatrists, good and bad psychologists, and the pharm industry has done a lot of good for society as well as harm. I'm not even sure where to start. Take, for example, psychologists: a lot of whatever progress has been made in mental health comes from psychology (quantitative measurements, moving away from monolithic, homogenous diagnostic categories, lots of research, even neurobiological research--hell, the head of federal mental health research recently was a psychologist with a neuroscience research focus); the pushback is often from entrenched MD political groups who play off the "trained doctor" stereotype. Pharm research, too, often complains about the overly simplistic disease models, but are required by the FDA to follow them in clinical protocols, further entrenching them (a different former head of NIMH has complained about this). Psychiatrists often are screwed by the health care industry, trying to care for the most ostracized segments of society (see the recent GOP health care bill, which basically gutted mental health care services completely). These sorts of discussions are always frustrating, because they're full of armchair, backseat scientists who are all too-happy to declare bad science, etc. without any solutions themselves. Behavioral health is a very challenging subject, and slapping on physics, chemistry, or mech engineering as some kind of perfect model just doesn't work. The irony is that it's more challenging than those fields in a lot of ways; if someone could just drop down from their physics throne and solve all the mental health problems, it would have been done already. It's been tried, believe me, and what usually happens is they grossly underestimate the complexity of what they're getting involved with.