Paper Says Some Psychiatric Diagnoses “Scientifically Meaningless”

BY BRIGGSPOSTED ONJULY 10, 2019

The title is an understatement: Heterogeneity in psychiatric diagnostic classification. This is a paper in Psychiatry Research by Kate Allsopp, John Read, Rhiannon Corcoran, and Peter Kinderman.

Abstract (to which I added paragraphifications):

The theory and practice of psychiatric diagnosis are central yet contentious. This paper examines the heterogeneous nature of categories within the DSM-5, how this heterogeneity is expressed across diagnostic criteria, and its consequences for clinicians, clients, and the diagnostic model. Selected chapters of the DSM-5 were thematically analysed: schizophrenia spectrum and other psychotic disorders; bipolar and related disorders; depressive disorders; anxiety disorders; and trauma- and stressor-related disorders.

Themes identified heterogeneity in specific diagnostic criteria, including symptom comparators, duration of difficulties, indicators of severity, and perspective used to assess difficulties.

Wider variations across diagnostic categories examined symptom overlap across categories, and the role of trauma. Pragmatic criteria and difficulties that recur across multiple diagnostic categories offer flexibility for the clinician, but undermine the model of discrete categories of disorder.

This nevertheless has implications for the way cause is conceptualised, such as implying that trauma affects only a limited number of diagnoses despite increasing evidence to the contrary. Individual experiences and specific causal pathways within diagnostic categories may also be obscured. A pragmatic approach to psychiatric assessment, allowing for recognition of individual experience, may therefore be a more effective way of understanding distress than maintaining commitment to a disingenuous categorical system

Notice that they skipped the politically controversial subject of gender dysphoria. Had they tackled that, “activists” would have had a volcanic fit, and four professors would be out looking for a job. (Is there such a diagnosis of volcanic fit frenzy? I ask in earnestness.)

Now, that we all know this is true is also proof that psychiatric diagnoses, at least in politically controversial subjects, can be rank nonsense. If a psychiatrist fears to make a diagnosis which he believes is correct, then it is proof that outside motivating forces which should play no role in diagnosis do in fact influence decisions. Thus we don’t know what to believe—or who to trust.

This is particularly important in Tranny Madness situations, where young children are being physically and permanently mutilated by fee-charging surgeons. Surgeons who ply their dull knives using psychiatric diagnoses as their justification for getting rich. (See Saturday’s The Week In Doom, where this subject is tackled.)

It’s not only politics. It’s the the inherent uncertainty in mapping outward behavior with inward states.

…there are almost 24,000 possible symptom combinations for panic disorder in DSM-5, compared with just one possible combination for social phobia (Galatzer-Levy and Bryant, 2013). Olbert and colleagues (2014) also report considerable heterogeneity within the criteria of individual diagnoses, showing that in the majority of diagnoses in both DSM-IV-TR and DSM-5 (64% and 58.3% respectively), two people could receive the same diagnosis without sharing any common symptoms. Such ‘disjunctive’ categories have been described as scientifically meaningless. [My emphasis.]

Since science is what can be measured, a psychiatric illness that can’t be measured (reliably) isn’t science.

And, indeed, not all about our mental states is science. Read Introduction to the Science of Mental Health by Fr. Chad A. Ripperger for much insight. (Those men needing to get in shape can also use this book for a weight-lifting substitute.)

A scientist or psychiatrist who makes a judgment in an area which is not scientific, but which he thinks is, means he is substituting a prejudice. Now this prejudice may even be a good or true one, but that a scientist holds the prejudice doesn’t make it science. For instance, it is metaphysically impossible for a man to “transition into” a woman. This is a true proposition not known (exclusively) scientifically. A scientist or psychiatrist who thinks this impossibility can be accomplished is thus substituting a prejudice.

The limitations of madness are not fully limned. This paper proves it, but in only a handful of areas. Yet, somehow, “Mental health disorders on the rise globally” (original source).

What that headline means is that mental health diagnoses are on the rise. Whether people are truly becoming crazier has to be tackled on a malady-by-malady basis. People are certainly losing grasp on Reality in sexual matters, but that is not (for almost all) because of psychiatric disorders.

All we know for sure is that it is becoming easier to be diagnosed as nuts, and therefore to be in need of the paid services of doctors and pharmaceutical companies. To blame this only on doctors would be wrong. But it wouldn’t be very wrong

Freedom From Speech

Z Blog: The Party Of Hate

How to falsify a religion using scientific or historical evidence

WINTERY KNIGHT

Will the universe expand forever, or will it collapse and bounce?

(Image source)

What I often see among atheists is this tendency to set up expectations of how God would have acted and then complain that he doesn’t met those expectations. I don’t think that this is a good way to argue against a religion, because it’s subjective. God isn’t obligated to comport with atheist expectations. A much better way of evaluating religions is to test the claims each makes against evidence.

So in this post, I wanted to show how a reasonable person can evaluate and reject different worldviews using evidence.

Falsifying a religion using science

Consider this argument:

1. Hindu cosmology teaches that the universe cycles between creation and destruction, through infinite time.
2. The closest cosmological model conforming to Hindu Scriptures is the eternally “oscillating” model of the universe.
3. The “oscillating” model requires that the universe exist…

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HHS restores legal meaning of ‘sex’ — what will US Supreme Court, Congress do?

BY JOHN BURSCH, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR2,267

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In the very last year of Barack Obama’s presidency, the Department of Health and Human Services made a major change to his signature legislative achievement, the Affordable Care Act. Implemented six years after the ACA became law, the rule change redefined the department’s view of “sex” to include “gender identity,” defined as an internal sense of being “male, female, neither, or a combination of male and female.”

As you might imagine, the rule change—which also included an administrative double-down on a demand that medical professionals participate in abortion—was widely celebrated among many in the media and political class as President Obama rode a wave of accolades on his way out of Washington, D.C. But recently, the Trump administration announced it is reversing that decision, publishing a regulatory proposal that will go into effect after a 60-day waiting period.

Restoring the meaning of “sex” was the right thing to do. In medical settings, the decision to abandon “sex” as an objectively understood, biologically based reality hasn’t worked out very well. In fact, adopting a subjective, feelings-based ideology has created a variety of unpredictable situations for medical professionals to navigate, threatened the conscience rights of medical professionals who believe their oath to “do no harm” extends to divisive procedures like so-called sex-reassignment surgery, and placed many patients in harm’way.

Recently, for example, the New England Journal of Medicine told the story of a pregnant woman whose labor signs were ignored at a hospital, costing her baby’s life. What caused the hospital staff to miss the tell-tale indications that she was in labor? It’s because the patient arrived at the hospital identifying as a man rather than a biological woman.

Tragically, by the time nurses and doctors realized they had been dealing with a woman in labor pains rather than a man with unexplained cramping, it was too late to save the baby’s life. And some in the mainstream media blamed the hospital for not anticipating that a man could be in labor!
While this may sound like an extreme example, it’s this very collision between gender ideology and biological reality that caused HHS under President Trump to reverse the previous administration’s attempt to redefine “sex” under federal law.

We can’t expect to change the meaning of “sex” without causing big problems—especially for women and children. When their interests and those of “gender identity” collide—whether in women’s homeless shelters, high school restrooms, or in women’s sports—it’s women and girls who lose. That’s incredibly ironic, because laws like Title VII and Title IX were enacted to help women have equal opportunities.

Amazingly, the self-styled “champions of women” in the U.S. House of Representatives recently passed the so-called Equality Act, which would actually hurt women—biological females—because of someone else’s beliefs about their gender. The act would allow men who identify as women to sleep in overnight shelters next to women who have been abused or raped. And it would allow males who say they are female to take women’s places on athletic teams and award podiums.

The idea that men can be women based on their subjective beliefs also sets the stage for confusion and harm in the business sphere. In a case my organization, Alliance Defending Freedom, is set to argue before the U.S. Supreme Court this fall, a small Detroit-area funeral home owned and operated by the same family for over a century could be the latest of many casualties of federally imposed gender ideology.

When a male employee informed Harris Funeral Home owner Tom Rost that he believed he was a woman and would start dressing as one at work, contrary to the funeral home’s sex-specific dress code, Tom immediately became a pawn in the larger campaign to replace biological “sex” with “gender ideology.” Now, Tom’s only recourse to save his family’s 100-year-old business has been to plead his case before the Supreme Court.

No business owner should be punished for following existing laws, yet this is exactly what has happened to Tom. And it’s typical of the unpredictable environment we create by redefining “sex” to include “gender identity.”

Kudos to the Trump administration for this much-needed change. Let’s hope the U.S. Supreme Court and Congress realize the many harms to women and girls before similarly trying to change the meaning of sex.

John Bursch is vice president for Appellate Advocacy and senior counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom. He served as Michigan’s solicitor general from 2011 to 2013

The Putin G20 Interview

Two From Mosby

From the Library

MountainGuerrilla

World Made By Hand by James Howard Kunstler

This is the first in a series of novels by the author, set in upstate New York, some years in the future of what the author has described as “The Long Emergency,” in his nonfiction book of that title. In many ways, I am much of what Kunstler bemoans as the collapse of society (he views tattoos as a sign of resurgent barbarism….I’m strangely okay with that). On the other hand, I’m already doing a lot of what he believes is necessary to survive the Long Emergency, and maintain some kernel of culture in the process, so we might actually get along, despite his antipathy towards my tattoos.

I love this series of books. I’ve read them a few times, and it’s a great series, and an interesting concept—that I tend to agree with—on how things are progressing….or regressing, to use the…

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Campfire Chat

MountainGuerrilla

You need to find a tall Hill for short mountain that you can walk up to the top up and be by yourself, once you get there raise your hands or get down on your knees,however it is you pray to whatever you pray to and thank and praise IT for what some of us have never had…. Clan.

Every. Single. Day.

The Guerrilla Gunfighter is solid work. I have just skimmed the first few chapters and stopped and re-read a few things, but over all I am pretty satisfied at what I am reading and seeing so far… just like I was in your previous offerings… Keep up the good work man…

Thanks dude! I appreciate it.

easy to forget that the reaper does get us all in the end. In my mind I’m still 25, although the calendar says it’s more than twice that.

I deal…

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Sizing Solar

MountainGuerrilla

Entirely too often, when we start talking with the average “prepper” type, with their focus on some potential future singularity that will result in SHTF or TEOTWAWKI, we see an emphasis on trying to maintain the status quo as much as possible. This ranges from “I’m gonna stockpile enough fuel to run my BugOut Vehicle, because walking is for plebes” to “I need a 18.9 KWH stand-alone off-grid power system with PV panels and an automatic switchover diesel/propane/etc generator, because I want to run the same six televisions, four video game consoles, eighteen laptops and assorted other electronic devices, and I want to be able to leave the lights on all the time if I want.”

This is a ridiculous notion of course, and even though too many “preppers” unconsciously adhere to it, they still generally have the sense to at least verbalize, “Man, SHTF is gonna be rough,” even…

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