Criticism of Modern Psychiatry

Since my initial admission to a psychiatric ward in 2002, I have always had a sceptical view of the approach taken to Mental Health by the medical profession. I have had an even more sceptical view of the research behind it, such as trying to assess treatments with randomised controlled trials (see RCTs and Criticism of RCTs in Psychiatry and Criticism of Evidence Based Psychiatry). To my mind there appears to be a massive mismatch between the complexity of the brain on the one hand, and the simplicity of having a few diagnostic labels in a diagnostic manual and a handful of effective chemical remedies for each. The purpose of this section of this wiki is to detail the nature of my scepticism and criticism of modern psychiatry as it is presently practised and researched, from the view of someone with both a background in mathematics and with two decades of lived experience of a mental disorder that comprises episodes of mania possibly with psychosis. (The complexity of what I experience in mania also adds to my beliefs that things just aren't as simple as modern psychiatry makes out, to the point that an approach like testing medications through RCT's just seems to be too simplistic to be workable.)

As the saying goes, extraordinary claims require extraordinary justifications. The claim that one can test out treatments for mental disorders by a RCT-like approach is to me such an extraordinary claim, and one which lacks any extraordinary justification beyond a naive 'seems to work' attitude.

Now my mindset here is that of someone with a background in the foundations of mathematics. Biology is an alien subject to me, but mathematics is not. I'm no statistician, but I do have an appreciation of the kind of assumptions statistics relies upon. Then complexity, computer science, logic and associated areas of pure mathematics are areas in which I'm far more familiar. The trouble I always have with the medical approach to mental health is that I can't escape the instinctive feeling that, amongst other things, they're just blindly assuming Mind and brain are many many orders of magnitude simpler than they are. If they don't, how on earth do they believe they can have a small handful of diagnostic categories for people who get diagnoses like Bipolar Disorder or Schizophrenia. They seem to assume that two people with Schizophrenia have 'the same thing'. They seem to assume that two instances of 'mania' are two instances of the same thing. Personally I find that very hard to believe, unless one is so broad and abstract in what 'mania' means that it becomes essentially meaningless as a diagnostic tool. Given only the knowledge that 'person A has a diagnosis of mania' one can say about as much as when a computer program just displays a box with an opaque error like 'Oops, something went wrong' as is becoming popular with modern software.

Criticism of Modern Psychiatry

Overview