Psychiatry is still a very basic science

This thought comes from thinking about exogenous and endogenous
depression. These concepts aren't embound in either diagnostic criteria
but I can't think why. Perhaps the medicalisation meant that all that
was required for doctors was knowledge of the outcome or the symptoms
rather than the cause, and all cause was treated by medication as
psychiatry became less of a pseudo-science.

But then I think of adjustment disorders. These are often misdiagnosed
by GPs as depression. I don't know enough about this area to understand
how a doctor would differentiate between reactive depression and
adjustment disorders. My internet connection's a bit ropey at the moment
so a google search for "adjustment disorder differential diagnosis" will
have to wait.

The mental health system that's represented by psychiatric and medical
practice is driven by treatment of symptoms rather than cause. Cause is
best explained in a simple sense by the biopsychosocial model of mental
health however this understanding of cause has little value in practice
because there is very little depth of understanding in a scientific
sense. There is no system I'm aware of that can identify the causes of
mental ill health with any degree of precision. The -social part of the
biopsychosocial model is least understood by doctors and researched
into, i.e. questions are rarely asked about society and its influence on
mental health. It's in this last area where mental health is shown to be
a pseudoscience nad more complex than anyone could imagine.

The results showing presentation of symptoms changed when Westernised
ideas of anoerixa were published in the Hong Kong media, the effect the
introduction of television (and perhaps the influence of the research
itself) showing an increase in eating disorders and body image related
anxieties in a Fijian youngsters and the studies that show people with a
diagnosis of schizophrenia do better in developing world countries are
illustrative of just how many effects interplay on mental health from
society and culture.

It is my perception that eventually there will be a period table of
elements or a genome established for the mind. I think it was mendelev
who came up with the idea of the periodic table (I can't google it to
check). It described the individual, irreductible (in chemistry terms)
elements that combine to make the diverse solids, liquids and gases that
may up the entire universe. There are millions and perhaps billions of
combinations of elements that make up the universe (or 99.99999% -
there's blacvk holes, neutron stars, dark matter, Bose-Einstein
condenstate, plasma and other things too).

Those millions of combinations of elements took centuries to cataloguse
without any understanding that they were made of a small number of
irreductible elements. When psychiatry has the capability to understand
the elements it will become a true science. For now it languishes in the
doldrums of pseudoscience, evermore studying the mad man's mind from the
outside.