Hacker News Reader

Comment by siliconc0w | Hacker News Reader

Psychiatrists also have been known to over prescribe amphetamines to children.

Honestly, just from personal experience, the profession seems to be marginally above chiropractors in legitimacy. Diagnosis and treatment is inconsistent and arbitrary - varying widely from practitioner to practitioner. Treatments are prescribed with "guess and check" methodologies. Longitudinal effects of many treatments aren't even known and results of many which have been eventually studied aren't good.

I recognize a lot of people have net positive experiences but the profession and pharmaceutical industry surrounding it 'needs improvement'.

View on HN

Your analysis is obviously spot on. Psychiatry is subjective at best and quackery at worst.

When you write "needs improvement" I think "need a complete overhaul" would be better.

Other people in this thread have already mentioned the drugging of children but I'd like to stress something else.

You compare psychiatrists to chiropractors as far as legitimacy is concerned, but there is a very big difference.

No one can force someone to see a chiropractor and that chiropractor can't strip you of every civil right without an accusation or a trial based on his assessment.

A psychiatrist can and does that on a regular basis.

This is a huge difference.

Let me reply the counter case. Someone very close to me suffered a severe episode of manic depression. So much so that they were getting evicted from their apartment and losing their job. We tried to escalate help from across the country and NONE came from the medical establishment. (Talked to both the psychologist and psychiatrist.) No offer of evem brief inpatient care, which would have helped ameliorate the damage which they are still facing caused by clearly a medical problem. Their answer was to let my friend ride it out, even though he was vandalizing buildings and threatening neighbors in his delusion. (Friend being heretofore a very high performing person in grad school.)

So yes, the profession is BS but I would say the pendulum has swung a bit too far based on the help we were asking for and didn't get.

A hard balance for sure.

There's a piece of information missing from you anecdote:

How did the situation develop?

What happened to your friend?

> and that chiropractor can't strip you of every civil right without an accusation or a trial based on his assessment.

Sucks to be American, I guess. Here we have human rights laws which protect people with mental illness.

http://www.echr.coe.int/Documents/FS_Detention_mental_health...

> Sucks to be American, I guess.

Don't go there. The situation is almost global with a few legal nuances that barely have any practical impact.

Since you're mentioning the ECHR, have a look at the German man that was involuntarily committed and drugged for years just because he said his wife was engaged in a large financial fraud.

Spoiler: she really was.

Of the millions of people who get psychiatric treatment obviously some are going to be abused. I don't tell people to avoid GPs just because Shipman murdered at least 200 of his patients.

Protections in the UK for mental illness are reasonably strong. (Much worse for people with learning disability, but psychiatrists tend not to be involved so much in the worst abuses there.)

That tone isn't great.

"AIDS? Sucks to be African, I guess. Here we use protection."

Really? Compared to the ignorant ranting of parent comment?

Care to elaborate what I'm ignorant about or is it just a broad insult for something you don't like?

Edit:

OK. I've read your Bio (stating that you only follow mental health related handles) and I've also read you twitter feed. It reads like a propaganda piece. It would be funny were it not for the seriousness of the subject.

You are anything but unbiased and have a large interest in maintaining the status quo therefore the baseless "ignorant" insult.

I have a story similar to the parent poster's. While I fully agree with you, based on my own experiences, it also saved my life. So you know, you win some, you lose some.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com