I think I like many people consider psychiatry a pseudoscience however I differ from szasz and bentall as to why it is a pseudoscience.
It isn't because of the flaws except for the fundamental one. Psychiatry applies science to human types but makes a judgement of pathologisation before it does so.
The methods of science are used to apply the biomedical paradigm but the process starts with a perjoratisation. It usually only looks at negative aspects too, and the negative valuation is subjective. Science isn't subjective except when it is a poor science, or a pseudoscience.
I don't know if I'm capable of communicating the point well. Let me try by talking about language.
I often use the term "the human condition" to describe what mental health and illness cover. The reason is I'm trying to remove all subjective valuations. I want the term for mental health to mean the same thing as colour. Colours like red or blue or black or purple or whatever are not judged positive or negative. They're just colours and all are useful when painting a picture.
This is true of many things. this is what science demands as much as anything else. True objectivity. So many of the methods - for example placebo controlled experiments - are all about seeking objective truths, truths which last the generations.
Psychiatric science doesn't last and neither do some of the diagnoses. Concepts fundamentally change and this evolution is uncontrolled. It is a drunkard's stumble through a maze rather than the more focused path of true scientific endeavour. The temporary subjective influences of every generation colour the science.
Scientific methods have never had a greater challenge than understanding the human condition. Reading psychiatric literature is enough to see there's so much more to be known.
There is value to difficult life experiences and there is value to unwanted or outcast people. Too much psychiatric science seeks to understand the individual rather than the circumstances. The science sees the effect of what it pathologises and sees the individual as the cause of the effect.
Let me explain this badly and be unscientific. It is 50-50. Individuals are the cause of their life circumstance, their behaviour and actions and choices and lifestyle and being and....everything within the human condition. Everything pathologised by the one word mental illness or psychiatry and everything valued by the small and not termed or thought of in this way...psychosanology which is the study of wellness of people and types and the mind - the antithesis of what psychiatry represents in part. It is the new antipsychiatry. They call it well being...this isn't the word for it...it is positive mental health, the thing which psychiatry and psychology have historically failed to achieve success in bettering or understanding.
This is is stuff which science applied well could begin to unravel and chisel away to find the objective truth. This pursuit is why scientific methods are used and valued. Artistic or creative methods have other purposes. Religion broke as the dominant dogma of truth because science offers practical working solutions and answers.
The pure methods of science can find the objective truth but when the tools of comprehension and understanding and application aren't there then...its fucking bullshit.
Bad experiences can be good or useful for development. Good experiences can lead to bad outcomes in later life....or be associated with it at least because true causality is a damn hard thing to nail down properly.
There are things which are intuitive to me and things I've seen and experience which might or might not be true. They are subjective experiences to everyone else but I experience them as true because I feel and sense and experience them as real.
Be it life change, be it a person's journey, be it the things which are called madness. Be it whatever aspect of the human condition gets evaluated by science or labelled by someone as good or bad or ill or not...science would be objective about it.
Put it this way. The very first step any scientist has to make is to learn to be autistic....that is...any good scientist. Obessive compulsive might help but first of all a good scientist trying to understand humans must eschew the standard human judgements, the bias of the status quo of cultural or consensus thinking, and see with a clarity unique in humans: objectivity about people.
Scratch that last sentence. I don't know enough about autism. The point of this last paragraph was to try to see positive qualities - positive in the sense of value and utility rather than value out of compassionate reasons - brought about by objective thinking about stigmatised concepts by seeing positive in something which is negative.
The part I am missing in my communication of this is the seeing value through objectivity thing isn't correctly expressed. Objectivity is a state of lack of judgement.
Fuck it. I've had enough this evening. I feel like thinking about something else while I drink myself into a stupor this evening in the park.
Long johns are an amazing invention. I have two on. Several other layers. I also have a smartphone with a proper hardware qwerty keyboard. And internet access.
This blog is my notepad. All of this month I've been writing for nano wrimo, drunk. A lot of it has been in the park.
Sent from my smartphone
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