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Monday, December 6, 2021

Psychopharmacology And the Mystery of Mental Illness

Over the last thirty years, [psychiatrists] have constructed a reliable system for diagnosing mental disorders, and we have created medications that work well to treat a range of psychological symptoms. But these very successes have had unpredictable consequences. As psychiatrists have become enthralled with diagnosis and medication, we have given up the essence of our profession--understanding the mind. We have become obsessed with psychopharmacology and its endless process of tinkering with medications, adjusting dosages, and piling on more medications to treat the side effects of the drugs we started with. We have convinced ourselves that we have developed cures for mental illness...when in fact we know so little about the underlying neurobiology of their causes that our treatments are often a series of trials and errors.

Dr. David J. Carlat, Unhinged: The Trouble With Psychiatry, 2010

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