DSM-V Substance Related Disorders: Have your say

@Valejo, as a person who has lived with ADHD and have found a variety of useful medical treatments I find it offensive that you would think that I or my parents or my doctor simply made the whole thing up to market drugs. Your link is the typical cherry picking of sources that ignore scientific data. Read 'Driven to Distraction' if you would rather understand ADHD than deny it exists. [link]

What about ADHD? yet another "illness" supposedly on par with pneumonia or cervical cancer---and to be reimbursed by insurance companies in the exact same way. Here's a link to a paper by a child neurologist that claims ADHD is baseless:
[link]

BTW - I think we can both agree that too much of psychology is based in abstract models and outdated terms, thus the confusion of diagnosis, over diagnosis of certain things, over use of certain therapies and medications for differing disorders, and so on. But I think the knowledge of the brain is catching up enough to describe most pathologies in clinical terms that can be tested for by means other than an arbitrary diagnosis from a psychologist reading out of a textbook. That model is dying, but is not useless.

@superun - My comment was short, yes. My point is that medical research is continuing to find better ways to diagnose schizophrenia through scanning. No brain scan is 100% for anything, but taken as a part of a patient's profile it can indicate certain thing -- indicate, not prove as a fact. You want a scan that shows tissue damage or anatomical error to indicate schizophrenia; there may be no such a thing. What you are saying is that if a patient comes in and can't move his arm, and the MD takes an x-ray and it looks like nothing is wrong, the doctor is a quack if he makes a diagnosis of paralysis. However, pathology is not always related to tissue damage that can be scanned, there may be nerve connectivity problems or signaling problems, that does not mean the MD is a quack or is making the illness up, it just means it is a difficult problem to diagnose.

Thanks for the link. I read it with interest, but felt your comment that low gamma-band synchrony in the PFC is "indicative" of schizophrenia highly unwarranted, and much more bold than what the authors dared to state. In fact, what they said definitively was that schizophrenics can’t concentrate very well and they’re not sure why: “Cognitive control impairments in schizophrenia are consistently linked to specific disturbances in prefrontal cortical functioning, but the underlying neurophysiologic mechanisms are not yet well characterized.” Once again, if “biological psychiatry” had any validity it would merely be a branch of neurology, a science that uses Popperian falsifiability of hypotheses to test data sets. No such controls exist in the wild and wooly landscape of psychiatry in the same way that they don’t exist in astrology or palm reading. Not that there is no place for these things in entertainment or philosophy, it’s just that it’s junk science.
Like marijuana prohibition (until recently), “mental illness” has been too taboo a subject to attack in the mainstream, since there is a lot of vested interest involved from diverse sectors loathe to give up their free ride.

@Superuntouchable - EEG scans with decreased gamma synchrony in the PFC are indicative of schizophrenia [link] but there are many different kinds of schizophrenia. The problem with schizophrenia is that it is poorly defined and may actually be a syndrome as opposed to a single factor illness. Updating the DSM doesn't always solve these problems, the DSM does have some cultural biases and weak spots, but each issue gets a bit better I think.

How about abolishing the DSM completely? My thought disorder tells me that the emperor wears no clothes. When they can provide a reliable brain scan for schizophrenia then we can talk. Otherwise they should get honest work.