Are you sure he's deliberately trolling, perhaps he genuinely believes this? Distrust of psychiatry is not uncommon, and there certainly are some really awful facets of psychiatry to selectively draw an extremist position on, especially if one looks into its abuses in recent history.
Distrust of SSRIs is also mainstream science, although it's still mainstream practice. The meta-analysis that showed that studies don't show a significant affect on depression from SSRIs was not published in a crank journal, and has very few serious disputes or alternative ways to view the numbers.
People who cite that paper and others (and this one in the future) get treated like cranks still, though. There are a lot of people that feel like they owe their lives to SSRIs, and that they will die if they stop taking them, sent back to the same mental state as they were in during a period that they will all identify as the worst in their lives. There are also a lot of people who make an enormous amount of money in encouraging that belief.
I'm not against the treatment of depression, and even possible chemical treatments of depression. I just would prefer them to work better than placebo.
> The meta-analysis that showed that studies don't show a significant affect on depression from SSRIs ... has very few serious disputes or alternative ways to view the numbers.
"Effect size is a hard statistic to work with (albeit extremely fun). The guy who invented effect size suggested that 0.2 be called “small”, 0.5 be called “medium”, and 0.8 be called “large”. NICE, a UK health research group, somewhat randomly declared that effect sizes greater than 0.5 be called “clinically significant” and effect sizes less than 0.5 be called “not clinically significant”, but their reasoning was basically that 0.5 was a nice round number, and a few years later they changed their mind and admitted they had no reason behind their decision.
Despite these somewhat haphazard standards, some people have decided that antidepressants’ effect size of 0.3 means they are “clinically insignificant”."
...and...
"They also note that Kirsch’s study lumps all antidepressants together. This isn’t necessarily wrong. But it isn’t necessarily right, either. For example, his study used both Serzone (believed to be a weak antidepressant, rarely used) and Paxil (believed to be a stronger antidepressant, commonly used). And in fact, by his study, Paxil showed an effect size of 0.47, compared to Serzone’s 0.21. But since the difference was not statistically significant, he averaged them together and said that “antidepressants are ineffective”. In fact, his study showed that Paxil was effective, but when you average it together with a very ineffective drug, the effect disappears. He can get away with this because of the arcana of statistical significance, but by the same arcana I can get away with not doing that.
So right now we have three different effect sizes. 1.2 for placebo + drug, 0.5 for drug alone if we’re being statistically merciful, 0.3 for drug alone if we’re being harsh and letting the harshest critic of antidepressants pull out all his statistical tricks."
Here's a thread about cosmology where he drops in his cut'n'pasted screed about psychiatry. Derailing a thread to rant about some unrelated topic is trolling or kook-like.
Frustratingly he has useful stuff to say about other things.
Trolling does not have to be deliberate to be effective.
Lutusp makes very good points about the awful state of science reporting; about the very poor quality of a lot of research; about the lack of scientific rigour in some areas.
But the rest of it is kook-like noise that refuses to address the actual thing being discussed.
