3 ms·

The "good old days" of psychiatry were a far cry from "the days of science."

• lutusp 13y ago
  Yes -- as true now as it was then. But moving away from talk therapy toward symptomatic drug treatment moves neither toward nor away from science. Also, by "the good old days" I was referring to the medical practice of first identifying a disease's cause, then designing a cure. Most mental illnesses don't have this property, which open them up to exploitation by Big Pharma.
  • jonahx 13y ago
    Agree that things haven't progressed much toward an ideal of rigorous science, but the process you're lauding of first identifying a cause and then designing a cure doesn't mean much when you're just making up stories for both things, which is essentially what those good old days were.
  • psloth 13y ago
    Of course scientists are trying to identify the underlying causes of mental illnesses. They're even making a lot of progress, but the brain is just unbelievably complex. In the meantime, treatments are found by trial and error. Testing whether a drug treats a disease's symptoms can be scientific even if you don't know how the drug actually works.