I'm not sure if
Nassir Ghaemi's letter to a medical student about choosing psychiatry as a speciality (see
Medscape article) is another acknowledgement of mistakes in his career, like that of Robin Murray (see
previous post). He says that DSM is "inherently unscientific" and psychiatric diagnoses are social constructions. From his point of view, psychiatry has pretended diagnoses are scientific facts. As he says, "This has been proven a lie, but we are unwilling to admit our self-deception". He seems to be saying it took him two decades to realise this.
I have several times mentioned the spat I had with Ghaemi when I reviewed one of his books (eg. see
previous post). As I said in my review, he was one of the psychiatrists at the forefront of promoting bipolar depression, which I guess he now realises he helped to construct.
Actually, I don't think he needs to be quite so disillusioned about the prospects for psychiatry. It just needs to accept its inherent uncertainty (eg. see
previous post).
1 comment:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2017/01/14/fmri-mental-illness/#.WHt2EFzRMk4
'A remarkable and troubling new paper...Sprooten et al.’s analysis included 537 studies with a total of 21,427 participants. Five mental illnesses were examined: schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder, anxiety disorders, and obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD)...
...The results were rather surprising. It turned out that there were very few differences between the different disorders in terms of the distribution of the group differences across the brain...In other words, there was little or no diagnostic specificity in the fMRI results...
...Sprooten et al. suggest that “the disorders examined here arise from largely overlapping neural network dysfunction”, in other words that the transdiagnostic trait is a neurobiological part of the cause of the various different disorders. But it seems to me that there’s no reason to assume this.
What if the common factor is more straightforward: something like anxiety or stress during the MRI scan?'
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