A patient of mine recently observed that the increasing use of the the term “psychopath” in popular media is really a disguised way of criticizing selfishness. Dressing up selfishness as an odd and frightening clinical disorder — slapping a diagnostic label on it — makes for catchy news copy, and grants pundits emotional distance between […]
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There’s a lot of sloppy thinking in my field. This troubles me. While psychiatry inevitably deals with the speculative and poorly understood, this surely cannot excuse faulty logic and intellectual laziness. Worse yet, this laxity of thought extends across the field, from biological psychiatry to psychotherapy, and from the general to the specific. My next […] Several recent articles, blogs, and even my participation in HealthTap (discussed in my last two posts) have led me to think about how psychiatry, and mental health treatment generally, are increasingly viewed as commodities. In the language of economics, a commodity is a physical good, such as food, grain, or metal, which is interchangeable with […] The following post is an adaptation of an argument I presented on Sacramento Street Psychiatry, my blog on the Psychology Today website. As usual, I welcome your comments. Western medicine’s great strides are largely due to understanding etiology (the biological basis of disease), defining a nosology (a system of categorizing diseases), and testing treatments aimed […] This post was inspired by an article in the May 30th issue of The New Yorker, “God Knows Where I Am” by Rachel Aviv. Full-text online is only available by subscription, but a free abstract is available here. In the process of telling a riveting and ultimately very sad story, the author discusses psychiatric insight. […] I always get troubled looks from psychiatry residents when I point out that our field is the domain of the uncertain and the not-well-understood — and that it will always remain so. As soon as the cause of a disease is known, it automatically leaves psychiatry for another specialty. General paresis (advanced syphilis), once identified […] Earlier this year a reader asked me: “I would be very interested to hear your thoughts on patients becoming too focused on diagnoses. […] While I was in an RTC as a teenager, and recently in the hospital as an adult, I have found that people almost treat their diagnoses as a competition. I was […] |
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