Psychiatric Diagnosis Found to Be “Scientifically Meaningless”
Every good mental health professional I&#x27;ve had has understood this. Effective treatment treats the individual, not the diagnosis -- the diagnosis is only to get authotizarion from insurance and government agencies to get the necessary resources. My insurance paid $1500 for psychological testing that &quot;confirmed&quot; my severe ADHD -- which was completely obvious to my psychiatrist, she just wasn&#x27;t allowed to diagnosis it -- just so I could get authotizarion to try stimulants... and find they didn&#x27;t work for me at all.<p>Psychiatric diagnosis is at the level of pre-scientific symptom-based diagnosis, for the most part. Imagine if you went to the doctor for a cough and, without any tests, they prescribed a month long course of antibiotics with no idea how effective they would be. A friend of mine was prescribed powerful antipsychotics to &quot;fix&quot; a problem that was actually being caused by another psychiatric medication they had been prescribed earlier to fix something else. Their mental health kept getting worse and worse, and what finally helped was starting a DBT (dialectic behavior therapy) program, and now they&#x27;re in the process of getting off all those meds that turned out to be more harmful than helpful.<p>We need to stop pretending that a point-scored questionnaire is a scientific way to distinguish a diagnosis, or that we understand the chemistry of the brain well enough that medication can be the first line of defense.