3 ms·
It would be interesting to look back in history on how many real diseases used to be categorized as psychological by doctors at the time. Or how many proved to
by bsaul 7y ago
It would be interesting to look back in history on how many real diseases used to be categorized as psychological by doctors at the time. Or how many proved to be in fact a single name given to many different diseases for lack of better understanding.
But it would also be interesting to find out how many things we considered to be diseases were actually psychological.
- 0xcde4c3db 7y agoProbably the most striking case of the former is anti-NMDA-receptor encephalitis, which causes schizophenia-like symptoms in its early stages (delusions, hallucinations, disorganized thinking, depersonalization/derealization) [1]. It doesn't even seem to be especially rare, but it wasn't identified until 2007. The latter is tricky because modern psychiatry doesn't really give us the notion of confirming that a condition is psychogenic. Almost all modern psychiatric diagnoses are diagnoses of exclusion (more or less) and do not carry any particular assertions about etiology. We can be reasonably certain that cases of psychogenic disorders do exist, but I don't think they tend to explain any preexisting diagnosis because the signs and symptoms vary so much. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3983958/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3983958/