The Cult of Sigmund Freud
I think it&#x27;s fair to compare modern psychological knowledge and treatment strategies to mid-19th century medical approaches to infectious disease, in that root causes of mental illness are poorly understood and diagnosis is based more on opinion than on irrefutable tests.<p>For example, compare the understanding of tuberculosis in the 1850s to the understanding of today.  Then it was called &#x27;consumption&#x27; and there were various theories about its causes, its transmissibility, and its treatment, but today we can do a definitive PCR test and we know the root cause is an infectious bacteria (though even so, we are still not really sure why, in a cohort of exposed individuals, some immune systems are capable of defeating the microorganism and others are not).  Doctors could fairly reliably diagnose it, but that was about it.<p>Similarly, today there are no definitive tests for schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, ADHD, depression or anxiety, and it really just comes down to the opinion of the psychologist&#x2F;psychiatrist.  It&#x27;s clear a history of trauma of various sorts increases the risks of developing mental illness, but nobody can say with much certainty if there are genetic predispositions or not.  The two most prevalent approaches to treatment are therapy vs. a collection of drugs with problematic side effects, and even there, the psychedelic class of drugs has largely been banned though they do show promise in controlled treatment (this is changing, but slowly).<p>Obviously the whole mental illness field has a long way to go if it wants to catch up to the infectious disease field (and even there, we&#x27;re seeing a lot of recent failures of public health goals, be it from the rise of antibiotic resistance or reckless gain-of-function research).