Someone very close to me had a serious mental illness. Nobody has any idea what the illness is. Different doctors give it different names. The same doctors give it different names.
I eat the impression doctors are less worried about the “anatomy” of the illness, and more worried about finding a cure.
If “take these anti-psychotics daily, get 8 hours of sleep a night, and meet weekly with a therapist” prevents symptoms … they really don’t care if it’s a psychotic disorder (as opposed to, say, a mood disorder).
Psychology seems to going from a “deep mind” approach to a “shallow mind” approach.
Psychology diagnoses (i.e. DSM diagnoses) are mostly about being able to reliably diagnose and communicate between providers, billing, etc. They are very much not about concrete underlying causes but about the ability to decide what label to put on a person.
The usefulness of these diagnoses are rather low and treatment tends towards "throw shit at the wall until something sticks". There are lots of things to try for each cluster of symptoms in common and useful heuristics, but the plain truth is that psychology's top-down approach to identification and treatment of conditions has had limited success and will be (and has been) slowly replaced by bottom-up neuroscience approaches which are starting to reach the levels useful to psychological conditions.
Diagnoses and categorisations are all fake, and constructed. The only reason why it's interesting to diagnose is that we may notice similar treatments are helpful for people with similar diagnoses. Diagnosis isn't inherently useful; it's a means to an end.
It leaves out a very important part of processing illness: knowing what happened.
When people are sick they want to know “what’s wrong with me.” When given medication they want to known how the medication works.
Unexplained healings are better than being sick, but not as good actually knowing what was wrong with you.
For example, someone has 6 hour episode where they detach from reality and have intense hallucinations. What are these hallucinations? Repressed fears? Forgotten desires?
These hallucinations are possible the most intense phenomena this person will ever experience. What do they mean?!?
The real upside is that psychiatrists have the humility to say “we have no idea how this works.”
The downside is it leaves room for pseudo-experts to peddle whatever trash they want.
I eat the impression doctors are less worried about the “anatomy” of the illness, and more worried about finding a cure.
If “take these anti-psychotics daily, get 8 hours of sleep a night, and meet weekly with a therapist” prevents symptoms … they really don’t care if it’s a psychotic disorder (as opposed to, say, a mood disorder).
Psychology seems to going from a “deep mind” approach to a “shallow mind” approach.