diagnosisindustrialcomplex
In 2011, a psychologist named Daryl Bem published a paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology claiming to demonstrate precognition. Nine experiments, over a thousand participants, statistically significant results suggesting that human beings could perceive the future. The paper passed peer review at one of the most prestigious
diagnosisindustrialcomplex
Andrew Wakefield published a study in The Lancet in 1998 claiming a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. The study had twelve subjects. Twelve. It was a case series, not a controlled trial. It contained no statistical analysis. The subjects were referred by lawyers who were building a lawsuit
diagnosisindustrialcomplex
The United States has an ADHD diagnosis rate of approximately 11.4 percent among children aged 4 to 17, up from 7.8 percent in 2003. That is a 46 percent increase in roughly a decade. The rate is not uniform. It varies by state, by county, by school district,
diagnosisindustrialcomplex
The serotonin hypothesis of depression goes like this: depressed people have low serotonin levels in the brain. SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) increase available serotonin by blocking its reabsorption at the synapse. More serotonin, less depression. The hypothesis is clean, mechanistic, and satisfying. It gives patients a story about their
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There is no blood test for depression. There is no brain scan for anxiety. There is no biomarker for ADHD, no genetic panel for borderline personality disorder, no lab result that distinguishes bipolar II from major depressive disorder with mixed features. After more than a century of modern psychiatry and
diagnosisindustrialcomplex
On December 15, 1973, the Board of Trustees of the American Psychiatric Association voted to remove homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The vote was 13 to 0, with two abstentions. A disease that had been treated with electroshock therapy, chemical castration, aversion conditioning, and involuntary
diagnosisindustrialcomplex
Carl Jung believed in synchronicity, the collective unconscious, mandalas as psychic maps, and a shadow self that lived inside every human being like a feral twin. He thought personality could be divided into attitudes and functions that operated in paired opposites, and he laid this out in a 1921 book
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Sigmund Freud was a cocaine enthusiast who built an unfalsifiable theoretical system from a sample size of upper-class Viennese women, declared it a universal science of the mind, and spent the next four decades defending it against all comers with the ferocity of a man who knew, on some level,
diagnosisindustrialcomplex
Emil Kraepelin sat in an asylum in Dorpat, Estonia, in the 1880s, watching patients the way a botanist watches plants. He did not treat them. He did not analyze their dreams or excavate their childhoods. He watched them, recorded their symptoms, tracked the course of their illness over months and
diagnosisindustrialcomplex
Willow bark tea has been used for pain relief for at least 3,500 years. Sumerian clay tablets from around 2000 BCE reference it. The Ebers Papyrus from ancient Egypt prescribes it. Hippocrates recommended chewing willow bark for fever and pain in the fifth century BCE. The mechanism proposed by
diagnosisindustrialcomplex
The Babylonians sorted people by birth month. The Greeks sorted them by bodily fluid. The Indians sorted them by elemental constitution. The Chinese sorted them by birth year and celestial stem. The Maya sorted them by position in a 260-day sacred calendar. The Norse carved runes for infants based on
diagnosisindustrialcomplex
Scorpio season doesn’t make you intense. The planet Mercury has no opinion about your commute. The alignment of celestial bodies at the moment of birth exerts roughly the same gravitational influence on a newborn as the obstetrician standing three feet away. Astrology, as a causal mechanism, is nonsense. This