3/1 New Yorker Article: Head Case

[Dizzier]

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Who has read the article "Head Case: Can psychiatry be a science?" by Louis Menand in the 3/1 issue of the New Yorker? Any thoughts on this?

 

[sunlioness]

Is there a link to the article online?

 

[swanny]

Try this:

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2010/03/01/100301crat_atlarge_menand

 

[billypilgrim37]

I really tried to get through it, but it's exactly like every other psychiatry piece in the New Yorker, or really, any other piece in the New Yorker. Bland. Pretentious. Contrarian. And bereft of enough understanding of context to say anything interesting or new. I gave up on page 3, I think.

 

[VMSmith]

Doesn't say anything new, but at least it's a more balanced article than most articles nowadays about psychiatry in the popular press.

 

[masterofmonkeys]

The critical view of CBT kind of surprised me. I would not have thought of that as a way to characterize it. Supportive therapy maybe.

 

[billypilgrim37]

The critical view of CBT kind of surprised me.

Hammers don't like screws.

After you've read one of these books, you've read them all. I read Christopher Lane's book on shyness, which was basically the same sort of anti-psychiatry gotchalism as this article.

 

[GoBruins17]

I really tried to get through it, but it's exactly like every other psychiatry piece in the New Yorker, or really, any other piece in the New Yorker. Bland. Pretentious. Contrarian. And bereft of enough understanding of context to say anything interesting or new. I gave up on page 3, I think.

You should finish it...it gets better. The author's distillation of psychiatric questions as 3 in 1 (biological, psychological, and moral) is well-written and a useful explanation. I actually found this to be a fair and helpful article, if a bit ambitious with the amount it tries to cover in only a few pages.

 

[TheWowEffect]

Nothing new here...same old cliches.....

Analysts bashing behaviorists and meds.
Anti-psychiatry people bashing psychiatry...
Psychiatrists bashing each other...
So-called intellectuals just trying to stir up another pot...
Too simplistic bashing..

 

[kugel]

"Science, particularly medical science, is not a skyscraper made of Lucite. It is a field strewn with black boxes. There have been many medical treatments that worked even though, for a long time, we didn’t know why they worked—aspirin, for example. And drugs have often been used to carve out diseases. Malaria was “discovered” when it was learned that it responded to quinine. Someone was listening to quinine. As Nicholas Christakis, a medical sociologist, has pointed out, many commonly used remedies, such as Viagra, work less than half the time, and there are conditions, such as cardiovascular disease, that respond to placebos for which we would never contemplate not using medication, even though it proves only marginally more effective in trials. Some patients with Parkinson’s respond to sham surgery. The ostensibly shaky track record of antidepressants does not place them outside the pharmacological pale."

Although much of the article is psychiatry-bashing, this paragraph may be my new favorite anti-antipsychiatry argument.

 

[kugel]

A less thoughtful, but perhaps more thought provoking article

"Why psychiatry needs therapy," in the Wall Street Journal

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB100...227601116.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_sections_lifestyle

 

[Red Beard]

A less thoughtful, but perhaps more thought provoking article

"Why psychiatry needs therapy," in the Wall Street Journal

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB100...227601116.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_sections_lifestyle

The last paragraph of this article:

Where is psychiatry headed? What the discipline badly needs is close attention to patients and their individual symptoms, in order to carve out the real diseases from the vast pool of symptoms that DSM keeps reshuffling into different "disorders." This kind of careful attention to what patients actually have is called "psychopathology," and its absence distinguishes American psychiatry from the European tradition. With DSM-V, American psychiatry is headed in exactly the opposite direction: defining ever-widening circles of the population as mentally ill with vague and undifferentiated diagnoses and treating them with powerful drugs.

Curious if someone can elaborate on exactly what the writer means by "European tradition."

These articles certainly bring up important issues, I think to deny them outright out of professional defensiveness or discomfort is to further endanger the field.

 

[billypilgrim37]

These articles certainly bring up important issues, I think to deny them outright out of professional defensiveness or discomfort is to further endanger the field.

You shouldn't confuse disinterest with denial. Besides, there's probably a psychologist-prescribing thread out there to distract the people who feel like discussing these things on internet message boards. 😉

 

[johnny9]

The last paragraph of this article:



Curious if someone can elaborate on exactly what the writer means by "European tradition."

These articles certainly bring up important issues, I think to deny them outright out of professional defensiveness or discomfort is to further endanger the field.

These articles are poorly written and poorly referenced Op-Ed. You might as well read an article by the same author on how to land a rocket on the moon.

I think the comment on psychopathology is based on how there has been an emphasis on psychopathology here from early in training; it's specifically examined e.g., in MRPsych Part 1, after 12 months of basic residency training, and the two gold standard type books are Fish's Clinical Psychopathology (dated now) and Andrew Sim's Symptoms in the Mind. Both are pretty standard basic training / 1st year house officer books and required reading and examination material.

DSM (and ICD) do not focus heavily on classical psychopathology. The author probably just found out what the word means and decided it would make a good addition. What are the US equivalent books?