The MindFields College Blog

I agree wholeheartedly with Experimental Chimp as he writes eloquently on the difficulties of classifying mental illness by what they look like, rather than how they are caused:

“Problems occur when people try to use a 19th century classification as if it were 21st century. Classifications are only as useful as the use they’re put to. Strict diagnostic criteria for malignant melanomas are a good thing. They can look like warts, but a quick application of salicylic acid isn’t going to help. Nor would you want chemotherapy for a verucca. Strict diagnostic criteria for mental disorders are nonsensical: They aren’t informed by the kind of knowledge that can distinguish between conditions that look the same, but present differently. Putting elaborate structures in place to hide this fact isn’t helpful: It informs neither diagnosis nor treatment.

To put it simply: All depressed people are probably not depressed in the same way. We cannot generalise about how depressed people should be treated because when we say “depression” we’re probably referring to a class of diseases that look the same, but have different causes. The same applies to every other mental illness. Most treatments for depression are only slightly effective when measured across a random sample of depressed people; one type of treatment may work for one depressed person, but not another. That’s hardly suprising if they’re different diseases that look the same. No drug is going to be very effective if it’s only targetted at a subset of the people that you think it’s targetted at.

This is why psychiatric treatment is so hit and miss. There’s plenty of psychiatrists who are fully aware of the limitations of their particular branch of medicine, but there’s plenty who aren’t. Diagnosis is fairly subjective, and focusing on sorting people into their correct categories so that you can follow a treatment protocol is useless. The process should be exploratory, like putting a jigsaw together in the dark. You can only feel the edges of the disease based on how it presents: You have to try to fit the edge pieces together to build up a picture of what you’re dealing with and intuit how to treat it.” - Read the whole post here

The Human Givens Approach provides the organising idea and insight needed to understand and treat mental illness from a “21st Century” perspective.
Posted by: Eleanor