Biomedical psychiatry is a pseudoscience

Scientific knowledge is seen as the most respectable form of knowledge (see eg. last post). It is based on the scientific method of reasoning about observations to develop hypotheses which can be tested. Biomedical psychiatry claims primary mental illness is brain disease, or at least that brain abnormalities are a factor in its cause. Mental illness of course shows through the brain. That’s mere tautology. But biomedical psychiatry wants to claim that primary mental illness will be demonstrated to be located in the brain in some way.

Even eminently plausible and widely held beliefs, such as psychiatry’s mainstream belief that something is wrong in the brain in primary mental illness, can be pseudoscience. The value of scientific theories depends on their objective support. Psychiatrists as scientists want their theories to be respectable and provide genuine knowledge. Like all scientists, their aim is to prove their scientific theory beyond doubt, even though that may be an impossibly ideal dream. However, there still isn’t any proof that primary mental illness is brain disease, despite the vast research programme directed towards fulfilling that aim (see eg. previous post). When evidence accumulates against or fails to confirm the latest hypothesis, then attention is turned to another line of inquiry or some adaptation is made to the theory to accommodate the lack of evidence to rescue the original hypothesis. The underlying fundamental belief that progress is being made in discovering the cause of mental illness is therefore maintained. How psychiatry will change from its fundamental belief that brain pathology is at least an element in the causation of mental illness is unclear (see eg. previous post).