Is psychiatry a legitimate field of medicine???

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Psychiatric drugs are used to raise levels of serotonin and other neurotransmitters. However, it's already known the serotonin is made in the body with the amino acid tryptophan. Depressed people who improve with anti-depressants probably have low levels of serotonin due to low levels of tryptophan and could probably raise serotonin and treat the depression simply to supplementing the amino acid tryptophan without any side effects. Why isn't tryptophan used to treat depression? Because drug companies can't put a patent on it and charge the insurance companies $10 a pill for it. People who visit conventional psychiatrists to treat depression are often given expensive, dangerous drugs, with numerous unpleasant side effects. Natural treatments for depression are cheaper, safer, and probably more effective. The problem with psychiatry is that it is designed to increase profits for the pharmaceutical companies instead of actually helping the patients.

http://www.antipsychiatry.org/ gives you all the reasons to oppose psychiatry

Generalization. In fact, a particularly stupid generalization. Neuroleptics are usually/often dopamine blockers. Anticholinergics and opioid antagonists are also common in psychiatry, and many drugs, such as clonidine, simply act in place of the real thing. I honestly suggest that you learn the first thing about psychiatric medicine before attempting to lecture us on it.

Naive and possibly dangerous assumption. Reuptake blockers don't put more serotonin into the body. Furthermore, the most common genetic cause for depression, as far as I know, is a short-gene for some serotonin transporter. The same gene is also associated with obesity and OCD. This is a defective transporter gene, not a starting deficiency.

Because it's poison. It has plenty of problems of its own.

Careful. Their spies are everywhere. Besides, most drugs used to treat serious disorders are old-fashioned neuroleptics. They're dirt cheap. The expensive thing is actually helping those who suffer from real problems. Real problems can't be treated with medication alone, and psychiatrists have always acknowledged that. In fact, many of them consider medication more a source of frustration than anything else. The trial-and-error approach is an outright acknowledgement that they're pretty clueless most of the time as to what these medications do. The reason you see so many reps from the pharmaceutical industry in their offices is that their dreadfully insufficient education forces them to count on these guys to help them understand what the medications actually do. It's not the pharmaceutical industry's fault, though. Not really. Although their primary motivation is to make money, they didn't ask to be entrusted with completing the half-assed education given to those who have the power to perscribe their products, and, in the end, they don't really even benefit from this dearth of understanding because they lose money every time a psychiatrist makes a mistake. Everytime someone has a bad reaction to medication, there's about a 50-50 chance this person will never trust medication again and just go with traditional therapy.

The problem stems from the fact that psychiatrists are insufficiently educated. Ask any single one of them, and they'll give you a two-hour lecture on how much this problem pisses them off. Unfortunately, there's really not a whole lot they can do about it because there's hardly anyone in the government willing to make a real, serious investment in improving matters.

My solution: stop voting for dumbass Christians to run your freaking country. They can't get anything right, and I'm about tired of you jackasses screwing everything up for the rest of us.

I dunno. A friend of mine responds pretty well to Zoloft, and his whole family seems to benefit from this class of drugs. I'd say it's an almost certainly mendellian genetic issue. He doesn't call himself outright cured, but he's no longer trying to think of tactful ways to kill himself.

This remains to be seen.

What if we listen to people like you? You haven't really thought about it, have you? If we were to listen to you clowns, you would be in the same position as the psychiatrists, putting money into someone else's pockets. When the weight of responsibility for helping treatment-resistant schizophrenics falls in your lap, you'll have a bunch of representitives from the corporations that produce these homeopathic remedies parked outside your own office door. The only difference would be that, unlike the guys from the pharmaceutical industries, these guys don't know anything at all. At least the clowns from the pharmaceutical industry are clued in as to what they're talking about. If I have to trust somebody, I'll trust them. I don't really want to trust anybody, but not trusting anybody at all just puts me straight up s**t creek.

Yes, I know. That is why I sad one of it's functions is "thinking (among others)". But since psychiatry and psychology mainly do with behavioral disorders, I used thinking and behavior as my example.

Is anyone on this thread NOT a Scientologist?

The loons always hate the shrink. Never fails.

Who's to say the shrink isn't a loon?

Most people who seek a degree in this area have problems of their own. (Duh, who doesn't). But who's to say it isn't a subconscious attempt to understand oneself? (Don't get me started on the subconscious...). Do I believe in psychiatry? (No, I don't.).

Preciousssss...

That's like saying your oncologist has some wicked bad tumours. Or that your wedding-planner doesn't know jack about weddings, but takes clients all the same.

God I love these debates!!

Actually it's not. Tumours can be detected chemically and/or physically. Personality disorders (for instance) can't. If there were a blood test for these things, things would be so much easier.

Wedding planner?! Where did that come from?

"If Doug is an oncologist, he MUST be riddled with cancer."

The above statement is example of the screwy logic I'm talking about. Being a member of the psychiatric profession does not automatically make you a loony. I would think insanity would make getting through med school very difficult.

What's your definition of insanity? When does one become insane? After what point?

I said they had problems of their own, not that they're insane. "Problems" does not equate "insanity."

Edit: Some people just undergo a whole college course in order to try to understand themselves.

I think one issue is that some psychiatrists are more interested in what they can get from the drug companies than how patients are doing, so they see people just long enough to write a prescription.

The main difference between Psychiatry and Neurology are merely their beginnings (not to say that they are identical today, but the differences one sees today are rooted in the two fields' histories).

The insane asylums were always the domain of the psychiatrists, and since their inception, neurologists and psychiatrists have been fighting to try and treat the same people (it's a fame and money thing). Head psychiatrists used to be called "superintendents" in these asylums and they eventually formed an organization in 1844 called The Association of Medical Superintendents of American Institutions for the Insane. That organization is now known as the American Psychiatric Association (APA), which writes the DSM.

Instead, neurologists at that time were more involved in private practice and hospitals.

And since then, the two factions have been warring. For a period of time, those with obvious brain damage went to the neurologists, and those with idiopathic conditions (unknown causes) went to psychiatrists.

For awhile, with the rise of Psychoanalysis, psychiatry got swept up in its wake, especially because Freud and his followers were sometimes tackling the same conditions that psychiatrists were trying to treat. The Freudians and Neo-Freudians didn't dare approach neurology because the cause of "neurological" conditions was known and often due to trauma or physical illness, so how was Freud to say "Ah, you're brain tumor was caused by your sexual repression and that you desired your mother and wanted to kill your father"? That wasn't going to fly. But when it came to conditions like Schizophrenia and other psychoses, there was, then, no evidence to show that anything organic was occurring to cause these and so they were swept under the domain of psychoanalytic analysis. Therefore, psychiatrists became involved in using psychoanalysis as a form of treatment for their patients.

Since the late 50s, psychiatrists have been known more as being med-pushers because of their involvement in the asylums and it was there that the advent of psychotropic meds was most felt, what with thorazine, etc.

But in essence, I really do think there's no quantifiable difference between these two fields, except their divided histories which have caused them to be divided still today. The brain is the brain, whether you know a condition is caused by a tumor, a vascular disorder, blunt trauma, or has an as-yet unknown cause.

However, to answer the original question, no matter my UNENDING ill will towards most of the psychiatrists I've had the misfortune to meet in my lifetime: yes, psychiatry is considered a valid field by the medical and psychological establishments. Is it a necessary field which adds something to treatment neurology could not? I don't really think so. But it exists anyways... for now.

And even though psychiatry has now become associated with psychotropic meds, some med schools are starting to train their psychiatry students to do therapy, so as to offer something the neurologist cannot, as well as to compete against psychologists and licensed social workers and counselors.

history_of_psychiatry posted: I picked my user name to make fun of when tom cruise was blasting matt lauer (sp) about psychiatry and he said "Here's the problem. You don't know the history of psychiatry. I do." Even though I think cruise's ideas are extreme i can't totally disagree with him. Psychiatry is the most ignorant field of medicine. You go to a psychiatrist, tell him how you feel and then he just writes you a prescription. A psych is an MD, but he doesn't really do any examining. It would be much better if psychiatry was blended with neurology. Let's say you went to the psych and told him you were depressed and you don't know why. Then he gives you a CAT scan and an MRI. Then he looks over the results and says "Well, based on the scans, i can see why you are depressed. It's because your serotonin is depleted here and here and yada yada etc. Based on these charts i'm going to prescribe this med." That would be a more accurate field. But the psych normally just hands out meds without any physical data to show why you are having mental issues. What if people get stressed or depressed in different ways because of different chemical reactions that each individual person may have? Though i'm on psych meds that have saved my life (i probably would've killed myself) I still see it as ignorant to blindly prescribe meds without any evidence of what's causing their illness. This would be like you telling your dermitologist about a rash you have on your arm, and without even examining your rash he just writes you perscriptions. I know that psychiatrists have a general idea about what causes mental issues, but that is still just a very general idea. Not more than 70 years ago they believed that jamming an icepick into your frontal brain lobe would cure insanity. I hope that psychiatry someday evolves. But for right now i only see a psychiatrist to get more meds he prescribes me.
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Is psychiatry a legitimate field of medicine? That's a good question but it's too late to do much about it since the political powers that be (business trade unions/guilds) have already divided up the playing field into segments and has given the many epilepsies to neurology and other challenges like autism, Asperger, ADHD, dyslexia, and learning disabilities to psychiatry. The medical field/the medical industry has its business turfs and that's the way the business pie - aka the money pie - year 2010 - is allotted in the USA.

Does neurology tend to use brain scans far more frequently, for whatever reason, than psychiatry? Yes.

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Words

Neurology (many epilepsies)
Physiatry (car crashes, brain injuries, concussions)
Psychiatry (Asperger, autism, ADHD, dyslexia, learning disabilities and so on)

General Practice
Family Medicine

and so on

Speaking as someone who's struggled with depression and wouldn't be alive if it weren't for psychiatric drugs, anti-psychiatry people piss me off.

Yes, psychiatry does have its problems. However, medicine in general is imperfect.

Id just like to mention that I strongly support psychiatry.

None of us would have been diagnosed without it.

Lets not have scientology or silly people mess up science, facts and good work.

As in any profession, the work is never more perfect that the persons doing the work.

i've heard that this is where it's headed.

it makes sense when you consider that a lot of people with previously baffling problems have been discovered to have AS which is a neurological problem. and in that case it is difficult to understand what is going on until you understand the neurology behind it.

a big problem i think is that currently most people go to a psych for a brief consultation to be prescribed meds. the psych consequently does not really know you very well. you might concurrently be seeing a therapist, who is likely to know you well, but a lot of therapists are hesitant to label or diagnose anyone and dig for emotional underpinnings to problems that might be neurological in origin.

Why do people always say this to refute doctors? Nobody is saying that they are gods or god-like. I am well aware that a doctor of any field has their limitations and cannot simply fix everything. I'm pretty sure that most people know this (unless they are stupid or naive). However, I would like to point out that it's difficult to refute neuroscience if you haven't studied it. If you have some reservations about how people are treated in the psychiatric services, fair enough. However, most of the people on this forum (I presume) know very little about neuroscience so it doesn't make much sense to treat it like its a dodgy science. I agree that we should be skeptical but I often feel like these discussions end up creating some kind of strawman of psychiatry.

Furthermore, how come nobody ever complains about the history of surgery? It has a really bloody history and there's still a chance, even today, that people can die on the operating table. The medication my mum takes so that her body doesn't reject her kidney f***s with her immune system and she can easily get sick. She's been hospitalised a few times because of it. Does that mean that the doctors are evil or that surgery is a pseudoscience? Of course not! Also, a psychiatrist doesn't just sling meds into you. They can, but they don't always. If medication is used, it's usually done alongside therapy.