If psychiatry has constantly had misstep after misstep (Humorism,

>>8505327
Because they are recurring sets of qualitative, observable symptoms. We knew people had AIDS before we knew why.

>>8505327

Perhaps the paradigm of our social climate brings the 'issues' discovered by scientists like Freud to light, only for them to be scrutinized and labeled as different.

I feel as though the vastly growing prevalence of these cases is simply an evolutionary mechanism in which we've had no past experience with.

>>8505327

Just realised that this issue is actually remarkably close to the debate about whether race is a real thing.

The answer biologists give is that there is genetic variability across the world however this is continuous and so it cannot categorize groups in a scientific way without being genetically arbitrary or even inconsistent.

The same goes for psychiatric illnesses and our personality/behavioural/cognitive phenotypes. These lie on a continuum and some of them are considered pathological. Because it is a continuum, it is difficult to define them without being arbitrary and this leads to "errors" or difficulties in diagnosis due to continuous variability in pathology.

For both of these issues, we have categories that aren't necessarily objectively valid. This doesn't mean that differences don't exist though.
So that's something to think about.

>>8505345
OP here. Thanks for this response.

>>8505345
have a (((you)))

>>8505327
Freud wasn't entirely wrong, he was just describing his time, which obviously isn't ours.

Still, his theories about unconscious and subconscious were actually useful, not to mention his contribution to philosophy.

>>8505369
If you'd had looked at the reply count before posting that you'd have known that it wasn't a samefag

>>8505349

Also just one more thing, ill say that due to how psychological traits are organized in a continuous way this also makes it difficult to objectively or non-arbitrarily define what is a mental illness and if you look more into psychology, you'll see that there are big difficulties in objectively defining what is a mental illness and there are always inconsistencies... behaviours which people think should be considered a mental disorder when they aren't or vice versa (big controversy could be gender dysphoria as an example)

You'll see in this article one guys attempt to make a new definition while evaluating alternatives (which was subsequently criticised and never got ground)

http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic625827.files/Wakefield%20-%20harmful%20dysfunction.pdf

This second one is an example of someone who (tongue-in-cheek) lays out a semi-logical way of saying how happiness could be a mental disorder.

http://jme.bmj.com/content/18/2/94.full.pdf


Obviously though, this doesnt mean that variation in behaviour doesn't exist nor that it can cause suffering or personal difficulties.

Our ways of diagnosis which is relatively subjective and lacks the benefit of knowledge about etiology or pathogenesis aggravates things as well.