Is Psychology Broken?

[IndigoChild5559]

It seems like psychology is beginning to question itself. The following article is from Psychology Today. The magazine is not a peer reviewed journal, but is nevertheless a respected source of news in the psychological community. It reports that the disease model and status quo of treatment with pharmaceuticals is on its way out due to the fact that it is not producing results.

Is Psychology Broken?

 

[Left Coast]

It seems like psychology is beginning to question itself. The following article is from Psychology Today. The magazine is not a peer reviewed journal, but is nevertheless a respected source of news in the psychological community. It reports that the disease model and status quo of treatment with pharmaceuticals is on its way out due to the fact that it is not producing results.

Is Psychology Broken?

I don't completely buy the new classification system proposed in three article, but I do agree that psychotropics often treat the symptom, not the underlying cause of the disease. Certain forms of psychotherapy, on the other hand, seem to be both more effective than meds and address the underlying maladaptive behaviors and thought patterns that occur in various mental health conditions.

 

[February-Saturday]

Of course, anyone who's been in the system for a long enough time can probably tell you that. If a healthy person goes to 7 different psychiatrists, they might receive 7 different diagnoses. If that drug didn't work, let's try this one, etc.

That said, throwing away the DSM entirely might not be the answer. While there are numerous reasons why somebody might have specific symptoms, there have been a variety of efforts to understand the underlying nature and reason behind why certain systems might cluster together.

For instance, people with BPD tend to be afraid of abandonment, whereas people with AvPD tend to be afraid of intimacy. This underlying problem results in the symptoms you see listed in the DSM when they're severe enough, so seeing these symptoms clustered together might help you realize the underlying social issue.

This isn't a perfect, one-to-one correspondence, but I've participated in some research that's going in that direction and read a few studies on these correlations. I know some researchers are working together to create a multifactor model based off of the Big 5 and the MMPI, and working alongside neuroscientists to find correlations for the various factors. They're retaining names for specific placements on the spectrum from the DSM.

So if you consistently show up in the tests that you're worried about abandonment, then you rank higher in the spectrum correlating to BPD. If you show up as worrying about intimacy, then you rank higher as avoidant. It's all meant to be focused on those underlying issues that the symptoms stem from, to be used by diagnosticians.

So far, it seems promising. I'm not sure if it will ever become mainstream, though.

 

[Nakosis]

It seems like psychology is beginning to question itself. The following article is from Psychology Today. The magazine is not a peer reviewed journal, but is nevertheless a respected source of news in the psychological community. It reports that the disease model and status quo of treatment with pharmaceuticals is on its way out due to the fact that it is not producing results.

Is Psychology Broken?

So they want to try something else. This doesn't mean something else will work any better.

It's fine to question established views. Maybe it will lead somewhere but then again, maybe not.

 

[lewisnotmiller]

It seems like psychology is beginning to question itself. The following article is from Psychology Today. The magazine is not a peer reviewed journal, but is nevertheless a respected source of news in the psychological community. It reports that the disease model and status quo of treatment with pharmaceuticals is on its way out due to the fact that it is not producing results.

Is Psychology Broken?

It's actually always been a controversial topic, and people have questioned it over the years.
From my perspective, drugs don't fix anything...they treat symptoms.

Now, depending on what we're talking about that can indirectly assist with enabling patients in very meaningful ways. But drugs are only really going to be effective if used as part of a more holistic approach to patient care.

 

[Heyo]

It seems like psychology is beginning to question itself.

Beginning to? About twice a year there are articles like this in Psychology Today and that for the last ten years. The reasons are manifold and each one a hard obstacle to overcome.
1. Existential fear
A paradigm shift of the size that is necessary to revolutionise the fields of psychology and psychiatry endanger the qualifications of the practitioners. This makes them very sceptical of any change at all.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” ― Upton Sinclair
2. Inflexible bureaucracy
Similar to 1. but for different reasons. The bureaucracy of the health insurances is inherently phlegmatic. That means that alternative treatments will not be paid and that means that field studies will lack data.
3. Drug laws
Psychotropic substances are heavily regulated. Trials based on prohibited substances are hard to get green-lit and even if they prove to be successful the treatment will not make it to a mainstream therapy.

 

[Stevicus]

One thing I could never get about psychology is that, if depression and other mental illnesses are caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain, then does that imply that there's something physically wrong with the brain itself? If so, wouldn't that be more in the realm of neurology?

Still, psychology and the treatment of mental illness seems to have made some progress since the days of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. And even that was the sanitized version; the actual conditions in mental institutions were much worse back in the day. I remember hearing the term "Thorazine Shuffle" referring to the long-term effects of Thorazine.

So, they seem to have come a long way since then. But I guess there's still a lot of unknown territory when delving into the inner workings of the human mind. I don't think it means that psychology is "broken," but they might still have more study and research to do.

I don't think that psychology can ever really "cure" anything, but they can help to some degree. I have mixed feelings about the medications they prescribe. Some people I know who have been served by the mental health system have told me horror stories about some of the med issues they've faced. One person told me her meds were finally working, but then she was assigned to a new psychiatrist who changed all her meds out of the blue and really messed things up. Or sometimes there's insurance foul ups. This whole med business is pretty much a racket.

I think that mental health is somewhat neglected in this country, so maybe if they put more money in it, they could attract more competent people and improve it. I think psychologists and psychiatrists can still help a lot of people, although they don't have to just hand out meds. Still, there's a lot of people out there who need help, so broken or not, it falls on that profession.

If not, then maybe someone can invent some kind of "mind ray" that can turn unhappy people into happy people.

 

[Kangaroo Feathers]

I don't completely buy the new classification system proposed in three article, but I do agree that psychotropics often treat the symptom, not the underlying cause of the disease. Certain forms of psychotherapy, on the other hand, seem to be both more effective than meds and address the underlying maladaptive behaviors and thought patterns that occur in various mental health conditions.

The current vogue is for cognitive behavioral therapy as much as possible.

 

[Mock Turtle]

Purely from my own (limited) perspective of having had certain mental health issues and having passed beyond such (more fortuitously than anything else, since I've never had any medically prescribed therapy), and also having been prescribed anti-anxiety medication which no doubt did more harm than good (including addiction to such), I suspect that the problem is one of resources and how much society is willing to give towards these issues. Here in the UK, I doubt that the NHS is funded sufficiently for such.

Medication might aid many, especially where a problem is perhaps related to short timescale occurrences, but for many, where the problems arise from more deep-seated issues, then suitable therapy would likely be better. The problem as I see it is that we still don't have appropriate therapy for many mental health issues - tending to use things like CBT for many when something else (but what?) might be better.

R D Laing might have been wrong in the 1960s but right in that we still seem to think that we can get away with not treating the whole nature of any problem rather than just the symptoms. Or so it seems to me, and hence the reliance on medication.

 

[February-Saturday]

The problem as I see it is that we still don't have appropriate therapy for many mental health issues - tending to use things like CBT for many when something else (but what?) might be better.

DBT, hypnotherapy, and archetypal psychology have shown to be more effective when addressing certain issues than CBT, that's true. Many therapists aren't well-versed in these methods here in the US and you have to go to a specialist.

 

[Secret Chief]

The medical model belongs to psychiatry; psychiatrists are medical practitioners who have decided to specialise in psychiatry.

Psychology is different.