On drug therapy: nothing in the DSM mandates or identifies appropriate treatments for a specific disorder. In fact, many of the disorders identified in the DSM are commonly and effectively treated using psychological rather than pharmacological interventions. I don't see how the existence of this diagnostic manual encourages drug therapy in particular.
> No, this is not the case at all. Psychoanalysts - at least most modern ones
> - don't claim that they have absolute knowledge of reality. What they claim
> is that they have specialised knowledge of what type of structures of
> thinking constitute psychosis and what type constitute neurosis/normality.
> Thus they can predict - usually with reasonable accuracy - whether someone
> will, in the future have a psychotic episode or not and they will cater
> their treatment accordingly.
Yeah, the "specialized" knowledge of psychoanalysts and three bucks will
get you a latte at Starbucks. Clinicians are notoriously bad at
predicting human behavior and treatment outcomes; there is a veritable
mountain of research on this. One example: Prior to doing his famous
obedience studies, Milgram described the procedure to some clinical
psychologists and psychiatrists and asked them to predict how many
people would go to the top of the shock panel because they were
instructed to do so by the researcher. These clinicians confidently
predicted that only a small number of people with serious mental illness
(e.g., sociopaths) would apply the maximum shock level. In fact, about
2/3 of the participants obeyed the researcher and applied the maximum
shock level. Moral: prudently ignore any predictions that clinicians
make. They're typically claims based on authority rather than
systematic evidence.
Miles
Miles