zlacker

Generally these diagnoses require the symptoms to persist for 6 months plus be so severe they disrupt your life.

And they are basically defined by clustering of symptoms. This is driven by welfare/insurance reasons. You need a diagnosis to get benefits.

And while they often can't treat the underlying problem for schizophrenia and other diseases, they can definitely treat the symptoms. So if you have some of the same symptoms by some other unique variant of the disease, the treatment may still by useful.

>>unisha+(OP)

    And while they often can't treat the underlying problem 
    for schizophrenia and other diseases, they can 
    definitely treat the symptoms.

Yes. Let's not throw the baby out along with the bath water!

Psychiatry is far, far from perfect. It is a discipline that is still taking its tiniest of baby steps into the realm of actual usefulness.

I think any psychiatrist would be willing to openly admit this; that the mind is still largely a mystery to us and we have probably centuries of learning to do, due to the extreme difficulty of studying a living mind, much less performing repeatable experiments upon them.

And yet criticism of psychiatry so often misses the point! The medicines are sometimes hugely beneficial. Sometimes not. But I know lives that have been transformed for the better thanks to them.