It really is.

It isn’t.

Psychiatry is a medical practice (one of the neurosciences) which relies heavily on chemical analysis, structural analysis, and comparison to global and individual baseline using tests such as MRI, fMRI, CT, PET, and other scans.

1. Psychiatry is not a neuroscience; they do not study the brain. They focus on treating “mental disorders”, which lack the ability to be objectively falsified.
2. I said that Psychiatry is based on treating mental disorders, which lack a test to objectively falsify them. It does not matter if Psychiatry uses tests; it must be able to objectively falsify mental disorders to be a science. Are those tests used to attempt to disprove mental disorders? If not, then mental disorders can’t be objectively falsified.

• Mental disorders were not tested to be disproven through objective testing and data.
• Mental disorders are literally just formed from assertion.

Where is that chemical analysis and structural analysis in mental disorders then? because they are not used at all in the DSM and ICD. They’re not even used!

Btw:

• MRI scan studies (edit: on the brain) are apprently too unreliable to be useful (edit: for deriving conclusions).^[1][2][3] (I improved the text because it was sending the wrong message.)
• brain scans are misused by Psychiatrists to try and “prove” that mental disorders are real.^[4][5]

Additionally, Psychiatry has an holistic component (hence why practitioners of Psychiatry have medical degrees and licensure, unlike psychological counselors), whereby the rest of the body and the impact that can have on medication, testing, resolution, and practical management of disorders and illnesses.

Degrees are just papers that declare someone as knowledgable. Several psuedoscientific fields have degrees. A degree doesn’t make one knowledgable; learning does.

Also, Psychiatry is still founded on dogma, so it doesn’t even matter what they are teaching. Psychiatry is still a psuedoscience.

I don’t think Psychiatry, a field that regularly ignores socioeconomic factors, is “holistic”.

You’re objectively, and likely willfully, confusing the fields of clinical psychology and Psychiatry. You’re resting all of this on some version of the DSM, which is only used where necessary because even many practitioners take umbrage with much of the DSM (another reason why Psychiatry is not only a better science, but a better practice, is that it doesn’t require reliance on the DSM like much of clinical psychology does).

I’m not confusing them. I’m specifically referring to Psychiatry; I’m not focused on Psychology.

Edit because I forgot to include this: What is your opinion and experience of the ICD codes for diagnostics? Additionally, what is your experience utilizing and experience with the DSM in practice?

I read them. The mental disorders in them literally require no objective analysis to be “diagnosed”.^[6][7]

Experience is just another method of gaining knowledge; but it does not make arguments any more correct. Science demands that all persons be able to test an explanation; a field suppressing critics does not make it scientific.

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Here’s a good summary: https://leddit.xyz/r/Antipsychiatry/comments/hkpump/psychiatry_is_a_deeply_flawed_pseudoscience/

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1. Researchers: MRI Studies Unreliable, Not Suitable for Research ↩︎

2. Conclusions From Brain Scan Studies are “Problematic if Not Unsubstantiated” ↩︎

3. Nature: Brain Imaging Studies Are Most Likely False ↩︎

4. Psychiatrists Raise Doubts on Brain Scan Studies ↩︎

5. Lancet Psychiatry Needs to Retract the ADHD-Enigma Study ↩︎

6. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders - Fith Edition ↩︎

7. ICD-11, Mental Disorder Browser (can’t find the full PDF), will edit the link to it later. ↩︎