3 ms·
The theory has been that if you could find a single underlying cause, you could just treat that, and then all the symptoms would disappear in one go. This would
by LatteLazy 6y ago
The theory has been that if you could find a single underlying cause, you could just treat that, and then all the symptoms would disappear in one go. This would also let you treat symptoms that can't be treated directly (you can tranquilise away anxiety, you can't do much about hearing voices).
That theory has largely failed as we can't even really agree which groups of symptoms make which diseases. Hence the constant changes to systems like the DSM.
Full disclosure, I may be bias and I'm also an example: I have Major Mood Disorder. I used to have Severe Clinical Depression. Before that, I had Treatment Resistant Depression. Before that it was just Clinical Monopolar Depression (It's still called monopolar sometimes to differentiate it from Bipolar). My symptoms haven't changed. Nor has the treatments offered. But in the last 10y we've repeatedly renamed, recategorised, reshuffled etc just common depression. God knows what it's like in more complex, less common symptom sets...
The BBCs Life Scientific podcast discusses this very question in this episode if you're interested:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000sj7c https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000sj7c
The wider series is also very good imho.
- tediousdemise 6y agoIt amazes me how complex the brain is. We are barely equipped with the tools to understand its complexity. An article I read earlier today on HN stated that the brain contains up to 11-dimensional neural networks. [1] I think we’ve been incredibly lucky to have the fields of psychology and psychiatry to fill the medical role, especially when the quantitative gaps in our understanding of the brain seem to be widening. [1] https://bigthink.com/paul-ratner/our-brains-think-in-11-dimensions-discover-scientists https://bigthink.com/paul-ratner/our-brains-think-in-11-dime...
- hpoe 6y agoThis kind of constant relabeling and recategorizing along with everyone I know who works in mental health fields constantly diagnosing everyone around them is why I am skeptical of the entire field of psychology/psychiatry.
- tediousdemise 6y agoLook at it this way. Turbulence is an observable phenomenon that you may have experienced while riding an airplane. Modern fluid dynamics cannot adequately explain turbulence. Richard Feynman has described turbulence as the most important unsolved problem in classical physics.[1] We don’t dismiss fluid dynamics because turbulence is ill-defined, and we also don’t deny that turbulence exists just because we lack a thorough mathematical understanding of it. This is analogous to psychology/psychiatry and mental illnesses. If we had magical brain oscilloscopes that we could hook up to visualize every mental disorder, we’d use them. Until those exist, we must rely on qualitative and statistical approaches to provide treatment. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbulence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbulence
- LatteLazy 6y agoI think it shows these fields remains more art than science.