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> I wonder why it is so important for some people to fight over definitions This is the work of most of medicine and science. It's not fighting. But understand

> I wonder why it is so important for some people to fight over definitions This is the work of most of medicine and science. It's not fighting. But understanding what the correct definitions are is foundational to being able to talk accurately about the phenomena. There's a lot of work that goes into understanding psychological disorders from various different perspectives, including neural anatomy, genetics, behavior etc. > what to me mostly look like different maladaptive coping mechanisms with very similar underlying causes and very similar treatment options. The existing disorders these days do a pretty good job of not being too overlapping with respect to cause or symptoms. They are frequently confused with each other either due to incomplete information at the time of diagnosis or due to practitioners not being familiar enough with the latest research. Autism I know is one that gets frequently misdiagnosed as bipolar disorder or anxiety. There are comorbidities, but those comorbidities are sometimes due to things like misdiagnoses. > To you, things seem to be either "pseudoscience" (on what grounds?) or "scientific" I'm not sure what you're driving at here. But science and pseudoscience are different. > what you write sounds very much motivated by your own political beliefs The only things I think I've written about my political beliefs on HN are that I'm opposed to political violence, I value democracy, and I value truth and the pursuit of truth. I'm not sure what you are trying to say here. > And, why shouldn't people be motivated by their beliefs? They can still be good scientists too. You can't serve two masters. Science is about what is true. If one believes in a sort of "higher truth" that they make science subservient to then they're not really doing science. That goes for whatever they take the "higher truth" to be. Often it's a religious commitment, but it could be other things. > dismiss Freud as "pseudoscientific", where he expressed very clearly that he wants people to challenge his theories .... Science isn't about things like having people challenge your theories. It's about making predictions, having on objectively verifiable method for checking the outcome of the predictions, assessing how and why the predictions went wrong, etc. Freud didn't do any of that. Freud's theories and whether they are scientific or not has been written about a lot. I think it's probably covered in a lot of intro do psychology books. But you can also find web pages about it.

rendx 1y ago
You may disagree, but I'm more in line with publications such as this: Frank Tallis, We should still pick up the pearls: on the scientific status of Freud, Brain, Volume 147, Issue 4, April 2024, Pages 1115–1117, https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/awad414 https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/awad414 "We do not think of Galileo as being a bad scientist because he cast horoscopes. Rather, we consider him to be an excellent one on account of his mathematics. Similarly, our estimate of Freud’s scientific reputation should not be based on what he got wrong—or for that matter, whether his putative affair with his sister-in-law proves that he was a congenital liar—but rather, what he got right. Militant ‘Freud bashing’ has favoured a style of argument that lacks nuance, and sometimes, integrity." The theories of 100 years of psychoanalysis may not be scientifically proven (nor disproven), but there's plenty of opportunity to do that. There's no need to dismiss any and all ideas coming from that space outright based on some generalization around specific people or their individual-centric approach and reasoning. "The answer to the question of whether psychoanalysis is ‘scientific’—or not—is less clear than is commonly supposed. Popper’s assertion that psychoanalysis does not meet the falsification criterion, which is often automatically accepted as an incontestable truth, hasn’t prevented ‘scientifically minded’ researchers testing psychoanalytic hypotheses experimentally." I strongly disagree with your statement that psychological disorders are distinct in terms of etiology. That's just not true, and frankly, unscientific to make up such a claim. To provide some citations: "The reliability and validity of traditional taxonomies are limited by arbitrary boundaries between psychopathology and normality, often unclear boundaries between disorders, frequent disorder co-occurrence, heterogeneity within disorders, and diagnostic instability." Kotov, R., Krueger, R. F., Watson, D., Achenbach, T. M., Althoff, R. R., Bagby, R. M., Brown, T. A., Carpenter, W. T., Caspi, A., Clark, L. A., Eaton, N. R., Forbes, M. K., Hyman, S. E., Jonas, K. G., Latzman, R. D., Li, J. J., Nelson, B. D., Regier, D. A., Rodriguez-Seijas, C., Ruggero, C. J., … Wilson, S. (2017). The Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP): A dimensional alternative to traditional nosologies. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 126(4), 454-477. https://doi.org/10.1037/abn0000258 https://doi.org/10.1037/abn0000258 "Mental disorders traditionally have been viewed as distinct, episodic, and categorical conditions. This view has been challenged by evidence that many disorders are sequentially comorbid, recurrent/chronic, and exist on a continuum." Caspi, A., Houts, R. M., Belsky, D. W., Goldman-Mellor, S. J., Harrington, H., Israel, S., Meier, M. H., Ramrakha, S., Shalev, I., Poulton, R., & Moffitt, T. E. (2014). The p factor: One general psychopathology factor in the structure of psychiatric disorders? Clinical Psychological Science, 2(2), 119-137. https://doi.org/10.1177/2167702613497473 https://doi.org/10.1177/2167702613497473

rendx 1y ago

You may disagree, but I'm more in line with publications such as this: Frank Tallis, We should still pick up the pearls: on the scientific status of Freud, Brain, Volume 147, Issue 4, April 2024, Pages 1115–1117, https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/awad414 https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/awad414 "We do not think of Galileo as being a bad scientist because he cast horoscopes. Rather, we consider him to be an excellent one on account of his mathematics. Similarly, our estimate of Freud’s scientific reputation should not be based on what he got wrong—or for that matter, whether his putative affair with his sister-in-law proves that he was a congenital liar—but rather, what he got right. Militant ‘Freud bashing’ has favoured a style of argument that lacks nuance, and sometimes, integrity." The theories of 100 years of psychoanalysis may not be scientifically proven (nor disproven), but there's plenty of opportunity to do that. There's no need to dismiss any and all ideas coming from that space outright based on some generalization around specific people or their individual-centric approach and reasoning. "The answer to the question of whether psychoanalysis is ‘scientific’—or not—is less clear than is commonly supposed. Popper’s assertion that psychoanalysis does not meet the falsification criterion, which is often automatically accepted as an incontestable truth, hasn’t prevented ‘scientifically minded’ researchers testing psychoanalytic hypotheses experimentally." I strongly disagree with your statement that psychological disorders are distinct in terms of etiology. That's just not true, and frankly, unscientific to make up such a claim. To provide some citations: "The reliability and validity of traditional taxonomies are limited by arbitrary boundaries between psychopathology and normality, often unclear boundaries between disorders, frequent disorder co-occurrence, heterogeneity within disorders, and diagnostic instability." Kotov, R., Krueger, R. F., Watson, D., Achenbach, T. M., Althoff, R. R., Bagby, R. M., Brown, T. A., Carpenter, W. T., Caspi, A., Clark, L. A., Eaton, N. R., Forbes, M. K., Hyman, S. E., Jonas, K. G., Latzman, R. D., Li, J. J., Nelson, B. D., Regier, D. A., Rodriguez-Seijas, C., Ruggero, C. J., … Wilson, S. (2017). The Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP): A dimensional alternative to traditional nosologies. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 126(4), 454-477. https://doi.org/10.1037/abn0000258 https://doi.org/10.1037/abn0000258 "Mental disorders traditionally have been viewed as distinct, episodic, and categorical conditions. This view has been challenged by evidence that many disorders are sequentially comorbid, recurrent/chronic, and exist on a continuum." Caspi, A., Houts, R. M., Belsky, D. W., Goldman-Mellor, S. J., Harrington, H., Israel, S., Meier, M. H., Ramrakha, S., Shalev, I., Poulton, R., & Moffitt, T. E. (2014). The p factor: One general psychopathology factor in the structure of psychiatric disorders? Clinical Psychological Science, 2(2), 119-137. https://doi.org/10.1177/2167702613497473 https://doi.org/10.1177/2167702613497473