Making psychiatry more open-minded

Peter Gøtzsche is not joking when he asks if psychiatrists are more mad than their patients (see his Mad in America blog post). I understand what he means about the wishful thinking of biomedical psychiatrists (see eg. previous post). 

It’s important not to distance ourselves from people with whom we just disagree by labelling them insane (see eg. previous post). Even those who are truly delusional because of the idiosyncratic, solipsistic self-centrality of their belief system (see eg. another previous post), which may well only be temporary, have got to that position because it is the only way they can make sense of the situation in which they find themselves (see eg. yet another previous post). Delusional beliefs make sense at least to the person that holds them.

We shouldn’t be too surprised that psychiatrists tend to adopt the biomedical views they do. For example, the belief that brain pathology is the basis for major mental illness helps to avoid having to deal with complicated metaphysics about the mind–body problem. It also appears to bring psychiatry closer to the rest of medicine by seeing mental illness as having a material basis as do physical ill­nesses in general. Furthermore, it also creates a scientific ambition and associated research programme to uncover the neuroscientific causes of mental illness, which attracts massive amounts of research funding. All these wishes and desires are understandable, but they may be more based on faith than science. Peter is right to object to the pseudoscientific nature of much of modern psychiatry (see eg. previous post).