Do you think psychiatry should be abolished as a medical profession?

[kylamonkey]

There is ample evidence for an organic and/or biochemical basis for much psychiatric illness.

After studying Freud enough, I can honestly say (and this is entirely my own opinion) that I find what he wrote offensive as a scientist & woman. Although I understand what he was doing, and what he did for psychology in general, the psychoanalytic school is NOT scientific (in my opinion), and I'd hazard a guess that most psychiatrists use it in a very limited way (if at all) in their practice.

I'm no psych expert, by any means. This is all just my own opinion.

You can read this if you want.
http://debunkingdenialism.com/2012/0...iatry-dualism/

Or the wikipedia article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-psychiatry

[Femto]

That first article really annoyed me! There is so much contradiction even within this article, which is where much of the debate and confusion arises from. Its a debate arising from semantic ambiguity...

For example, read this quote and notice the somewhat subtle, but yet highly disparaging to achieving any clarity, contradiction:

"In modern neuroscience, there is no real separating between the mind and the brain. While there is a genuine debate on how exactly how brain activity makes up the mind, there is no real opposition to the notion that the brain and mind are one and the same."

First bolded part: explicitly states mind and brain are identical

Second bolded part: implicitly states that mind and brain are different (yet highly related)

Third bolded part: Again, explicitly stating that people agree the mind and brain are the same thing.

Even if the mind does consist entirely of brain activity, brain activity is not identical to the brain! The brain is the brain, and brain activity is brain activity. They're different.

[leviathan]

Originally Posted by OttawaURookie

I think psychiatry is a speciality only in the sense that it deals with a specific problem - mental health. But its obviously not a speciality when it comes to specific/special/advanced knowledge.

Yeah, they just spend 5 years training after medical school for the fun of it, right?

[OttawaURookie]

Originally Posted by leviathan

Yeah, they just spend 5 years training after medical school for the fun of it, right?

I'm suggesting that maybe it shouldn't be that long considering the facts.

[ellorie]

I don't mean this in a mean way, but how familiar are you with "the facts"? Have you worked with or talked with a lot of psychiatrists? Because I have and there is definitely 5 years in there.

[leviathan]

Originally Posted by OttawaURookie

I'm suggesting that maybe it shouldn't be that long considering the facts.

Partially agree but there's still quite a lot to know to be a good psychiatrist. Aren't you a premed? I think you should wait until you finish medical school / do a psychiatry rotation before you start judging how long you feel the length of a psychiatry residency should be. Just my opinion.

[thebouque]

5 year for psychiatry is fine (maybe you could cut it to 4 years if you remove the 1st year) but 5 years for ER is overkill

[KaraNari]

Thanks for all the comments everyone! I didn't realize the article was so old, I was just doing some research and found it and got scared! Lol :P I think psychiatry is important too!

Also, thanks for bringing up how the article contradicts itself, I think I was too shocked by what I found to comprehend all of it!

Made for a good debate though!

[nick]

Originally Posted by kylamonkey

There is ample evidence for an organic and/or biochemical basis for much psychiatric illness.

After studying Freud enough, I can honestly say (and this is entirely my own opinion) that I find what he wrote offensive as a scientist, woman, and also as someone who identifies with an alternative sexuality. Although I understand what he was doing, and what he did for psychology in general, the psychoanalytic school is NOT scientific (in my opinion), and I'd hazard a guess that most psychiatrists use it in a very limited way (if at all) in their practice.

I'm no psych expert, by any means. This is all just my own opinion.

You can read this if you want.
http://debunkingdenialism.com/2012/0...iatry-dualism/

Or the wikipedia article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-psychiatry

I respect your position that you find Freud's writings on gender/sexuality offensive, but I feel that that's a somewhat facile position to take: it's easy to look at his antiquated attitudes and dismiss what he has to say, but he (as far as I know) founded the critical study of sexuality, and I think there's still a lot we can learn from him, despite the shortcomings of his essays on sexuality (probably his weakest works). For instance, many people take objection to his idea of penis envy, which was 1 or 2 sentences in one of his essays (if I recall correctly), largely because some later psychiatrists used the concept of penis envy to dismiss woman patients who felt subjugated by men, instead of understanding it as a symbolic symptom of being oppressed by men (the penis, I argue, being a symbol for power). I argue that Freud was acknowledging and criticizing women's subjugation and implicating it as a cause of neurosis (cf. Nancy McWilliam's work on hysteria), not making a biological argument for women being inferior to men.

All-in-all, despite his problems, he had some radically progressive (for the time) ideas about non-normative sexualities: he considered bisexuality normal, and though he called gayness a "perversion" (in Strachey's English translation), he defined "perversion" in an academic way and stressed that he was using it non-judgementally. He wrote that gayness is not a disease, and that psychiatrists must not attempt to "cure" it. This is all in the late-19th/early-20th centuries, far (far) ahead of his time.

As for the scientific basis for psychoanalytic therapy, I'll refer you to Jonathan Shedler's "The Efficacy of Psychodynamic Psychotherapy (PDF)" for a comprehensive review of the empirical literature supporting psychoanalytic therapy, and let you decide whether you still think it's unscientific (his "That was then, this is now (PDF)" is a good general introduction).

[SK404]

I honestly find Freud to be a pretty big disgrace to the discipline of psychology, which is a great and important discipline that sometimes gets a bad rep because of Freud. He did have some interesting findings throughout his career, and even some valid findings that still hold weight today, but a good portion of what he proposed in his career was a load of crap and much of it had little evidence to back it up. Being tied to psychology to some degree through the area of neuroscience, I can tell you that most professors are not a fan.