
Cutting-edge science could make mental illness less of a guessing game - zeristor
http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2016/02/19/brain-hacking-the-minds-biology/
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astazangasta
As a cancer biologist I feel that the reliance on biomarkers as indicators of
biology is a poor way to do science. Biology is about complex, interacting
networks; models that attempt to reduce it to a few controlling variables is
almost always wrong (as in, the model is insufficiently predictive), and
moreover misses the point: we need to understand biology in all of its rich
interactions, not pare it down to the math we can handle. Biology is not
physics; two or three factor models won't cut it.

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Xcelerate
What would you say is the optimal path for research in psychiatry/psychology?

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astazangasta
Probably not the best person to ask. I have a limited understanding of
psychiatry but still tend to take a dim view of it. I think the brain is
substantially more complicated than psychiatric theory suggests, and so I
think that the modern science is far away from useful and accurate models.
fMRI, for example, is a very gross way of examining brain function and seems
to me rather like trying to read source code by examining the number of bits
of entropy in a file.

I think that psychology is more useful for understanding the human mind, but
even here I wish they would eschew the ersatz methods of science (stats,
p-values, controlled studies) and go back to more qualitative descriptions of
the psyche; we're not even close to successfully bridging between psychology
and biology.

But this is all a lay understanding of the field and probably no better an
insight than yours.

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zeristor
An interesting article however where are the numbers?

A few anecdotes of how it helped some people does really tell us that much.

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blennon
I'm not sure why this comment is being down voted. This comment is spot on. As
a neuroscientist reading this article I asked the same question.

It is so easy in clinical research to be fooled by randomness and the placebo
effect.

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zeristor
Perhaps it was my poor grammar.

"does" => "doesn't" does rather flip an argument doesn't it

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KerryJones
The DSM that Psychiatrists use is completely a guessing game. Not "partially"
\-- there is nothing that has ever been proven that any mental "illness"
exists -- this is important when they tell you that a drug can fix the
problem. They say by changing these "chemical imbalances" with a drug, we will
solve a problem. But nothing has proven those chemical imbalances are there to
begin with.

All we know is that the symptoms are real -- there are other non
Psychiatry/Psychology methods for dealing with them -- I would see CCHR for
more data.

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stan_rogers
CCHR??? The Scientology front group??? Yeah, _that 's_ a good idea.

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KerryJones
So, because you disagree with a connection of the group the data is false?

 _That 's_ a great idea. It's also known as _ad hominem_ and is a logical
fallacy.

