Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

Cindexxx t1_j8vtcva wrote

He has so me point, but I don't really agree. Psychiatry helps a lot of people but it's basically a guessing game. Following the source from the link shared gave me this quote which makes a hilarious (to me) point.

>Young et al. (2014) memorably calculate that in the DSM-5 there are 270 million combinations of symptoms that would meet the criteria for both PTSD and major depressive disorder, and when five other commonly made diagnoses are seen alongside these two, this figure rises to one quintillion symptom combinations - more than the number of stars in the Milky Way

Kinda shitty lol.

−42

comradoge t1_j8w16x4 wrote

It is a guessing game because of the nature of the complaints. When your back hurts it is not normal, that is easy to decide. But you have no motivation towards life? This complicates things by orders of magnitude. Maybe you are naturally born that way, maybe you had certain traumas, maybe you had no particular trauma but your upbringing lead you that way slowly, maybe you had shitty friends or family... List goes on. It is even harder for deciding what is normal and what is not. How much sadness or joy should counted as pathological and under what conditions?

Psychiatry has the most subjective organ of interest of all fields in medicine.

32

Agouti t1_j8z01lf wrote

There has been a lot of criticism of the DSM over the years, most of it justified. Labels like "borderline personality disorder" are almost so vague as to be unhelpful.

At the same time, nobody has come up with anything better. There is so much nuance that simple labels can never capture what is really going on.

If you wanted to really accurately capture someone's personality you would need dozens of scales, 0-100, like a sadistic variant of a table-top RPG. Many of these sliders would have similar competing effects, and any test you gave would never be able to single out a single value. Then, on top of that, people actively hide and deceive the real answers to questions, and the answers might change significantly from day to day.

The key takeaway here is that you can't self diagnose or treat using labels from the DSM or (even worse) western pop psy. Practicing self awareness, finding someone you trust enough to talk honestly with, and if feasible a really good psychologist (because there are plenty of mediocre ones out there, too) is more important.

1