Stumbled Across

[dukealien]

I'm not sure I'd chuck the entire field, especially considering that nearly every mental illness defined today has a measure of brain inflammation associated with it, in addition to measurable, repeatable changes in structure. So there is something there and that something appears to be connected to an inflammatory process of some kind in the brain. What triggers it is the question remaining unanswered. Is it autoimmune? Stress-induced? Dietary? Genetic? Epigenetic? Much left to unravel.

That would be very useful, if it holds up.  The problem is that "mental illness" today is still based on observed/patient-produced behaviors, so the types defined are ways the subject acts, never anything the patient could *not* produce if so disposed.

Where we seem to be is, here's an abnormal behavior.  If we give this drug and make sure the subject takes it, the behavior stops.  Therefore, whatever that drug affects must have been the cause of the behavior.  This ignores the likelihood that the drug simply makes the subject feel worse, possibly in conjunction with whatever coercion is necessary to make him take it, so he quits the behavior.    "Off his meds" with the behavior back implies the coercion is also off, as well as the compelled worse feelings; subjects often complain that they don't take their meds because they feel bad while on them. (In other words, the drug could be a more subtle analogue of shock/torture therapy.)

Without detectable lesions that reliably predict a specific behavior, the above deduction of a drug fixing an unwanted behavior loses its cause-and-effect direction and dissolves, logically, into "A witch is made of wood!"

Reading Thomas Szasz can be unpleasant, like that other Thomas (Hobbes):  it's not much fun to think of people as vicious in the state of nature, or comprehensively lying to each other for numinous or ignoble personal benefit.  Yet some persist.