>> Medical drugs are prescribed by doctors to treat medical conditions, not psychological ones. > There is no such thing as a "medical condition". Are you sur

>> Medical drugs are prescribed by doctors to treat medical conditions, not psychological ones. > There is no such thing as a "medical condition". Are you sure you want to go down that road? Cancer is a medical condition. ADHD is not. Psychologists are not doctors and cannot treat medial conditions -- they are neither trained or licensed to do that. Psychiatrists are psychologists with an M.D. degree. When you call a psychiatrist "doctor" , you are acknowledging his medical training, not his psychological training. There is no mental doctor, and there is no mental specialty in medicine. The reason? Modern medicine is evidence based, and psychological treatments are not evidence-based. > Psychological malpractice cases aren't that rare. They are very rare. Public records show that, when something goes wrong in psychological treatment of children, the parents are more likely to face charges than the psychologist or psychiatrist, and I already gave one well-known example of a psychiatrist still practicing after being involved in a case that led to murder charges against the parents, who administered the drugs the psychiatrist prescribed. > Psychiatrists are no different. The public record shows that this is false. There are cases, but they represent a small fraction of those in medical fields, and the behaviors tend to be more egregious -- sexual abuse, damage to the patient through outright incompetence or prescribing the wrong drug. There are fewer cases such as one sees in medical specialties that have established procedures based on long clinical experience -- and scientific evidence to support clinical practice. > Psychiatry isn't clinical psychology, it is medicine A psychiatrist is a psychologist with an M.D. degree. The M.D. degree is acquired before the person begins psychiatric training, for a number of reasons including the fact that psychiatry is not a medical field in the modern sense of the word -- fields based on science, and on evidence. The only reason psychiatry exists is to confer an unearned status on psychologists and psychology. And recent changes will make this obvious even to those who have been avoiding reality. One of those changes is the NIMH's recent decision to abandon the DSM, psychiatry's "Bible" and primary diagnostic guide. The reason? It's not reliable enough to be useful in research. About this decision, NIMH director Thomas Insel said "While DSM has been described as a “Bible” for the field, it is, at best, a dictionary, creating a set of labels and defining each. The strength of each of the editions of DSM has been “reliability” – each edition has ensured that clinicians use the same terms in the same ways. The weakness is its lack of validity." Source: http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2013/transforming-diagnosis.shtml http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2013/transforming-dia... Now - imagine someone in authority deciding to throw out an influential oncology textbook on the ground that it's not valid. Imagine the uproar. But in this case, it caused some comment but no great surprise -- most people in the field saw this coming. The reason for that muted reaction is that psychiatry isn't evidence-based and it is not medicine, all public claims to the contrary. > Making up your own non-standard definitions of terms to justify your completely inaccurate rants isn't helpful. Shall I give you Insel's email address so you can complain to the source of my views about how inaccurate he is?