Psychiatry Is Politics
Psychiatry is politics, it is politics in the way that running for office is politics. It is not a science, it is not even close to science, it is much closer to politics.
A doctor makes a diagnosis of a patient and writes it down on the chart. If it were science, then I should be able to evaluate the patient myself and come up with the same diagnosis. If it is a science but not an exact science, I should be able to come up with the same diagnosis most of the time, and the other times where I disagree I should be able to see why the other person thought what he thought.
But if I can guess the diagnosis without actually seeing the patient at all—but by knowing the doctor—then we do not have science, we have politics.
If you are watching the TV news with the sound turned down, and a Republican senator is talking, and the caption reads, “Tax Breaks for the Rich?” you can guess his position. In fact, the actual issue doesn’t matter—what matters is his party affiliation. Everything follows from there. Not always, certainly, but enough times that you don’t bother to turn the sound back up on the TV.
Psychiatry is the same way. It is very easy to determine who is considered a “great” psychiatrist, or a “thought leader in psychiatry” based on who is making the evaluation, and not on any merits of the psychiatrist himself. Down one hallway Freud is lauded; down the other he is villified; Kay Redfield Jameson is the hero. But their value, of course, is not at all dependent on what they did—it is dependent on who you are. Ronald Reagan was either a god or a devil depending on who you are, not who he was. It doesn’t seem to matter that most people can’t name one specific thing he did in office, what wars and battles he presided over, what he did or did not do to taxes. Ronald Reagan isn’t a person, he is a sign.
It’s even possible for me to guess the medications a patient is taking based solely on who prescribed them, and not on the symptoms of the patient. Importantly, the possible medications vary widely from doctor to doctor; it is wrong to think my predictive accuracy is based on any fundamental logic or science to medication selection that should be true across all psychiatrists. It's just his regular, unthinking, habit. "I like Risperdal." Are you an idiot? Are there internists saying, "I like insulin?"
Let me be clear: I’m not talking about doctors having unique insights into which medication might benefit a certain patient. (“I think Geodon could work really well here.”) I’m talking about each doctor having a set of drugs he prescribes with such regularity that I can guess them.
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It stems from a lack of appreciation that mental illness is not a genetic disease, or even primarily a biological one, or even, surprisingly, a psychological one. It is a social disruption. On a desert island, no one can tell you are insane.
The key evidence against my position is that biology is so obviously relevant. There is a hereditary component to many mental illnesses; twins raised apart still often have higher concordance rates than non-twins. But this misses the point of the problem entirely. Consider diabetes: it is obviously a biological disease, with a heritable component. Much more biological than any mental disorder, because you can point to the dysfunctional biology in diabetes, but you can’t do that in bipolar disorder. But despite this biology, the environment is so massively important as to often overwhelm this biological component.
We can consider even further the actual relevance of genetics. Things that we assume are simple genetic outcomes are often more complicated than they seem. Eye color is every 7th grader’s primer for Mendelian genetics. But—surprise—there is no gene for eye color. There are in fact three genes for eye color, and the color is determined by the interplay of all three. So while you can guess eye color based on the parents, you are not always right—because each parent is giving three different genes.
It may be, in fact, true, that bipolar disorder is genetic. Perhaps overwhelmingly genetic, let’s say 40%. We go wrong because we consider genetics a “fixed variable”—we think we can only affect the other 60% of the factors. Right? Wrong; genetics is not fixed. Having a gene may be a fixed, but whether you express this gene or not is most certainly under outside control. Consider gender; absolutely genetic, correct? Not much one can do about it? But lizards can alter the sex of the progeny by changing the incubation temperature of the egg. Think about this. Now, is it not probable that the expression of the genes for bipolar have a lot to do with how you are raised? And we already know that environment affects gene expression, so I’m not speculating here.
November 3, 2006 12:12 PM | Posted by : | Reply
So what's your point here?
If I go crazy, stay away from me; I want a psychiatrist who isn't a cynic. Yup, there's not a whole lot known about mental illness, lots of theories, different schools of thought, most are idealized by their followers while other ideologies are villified. It's still about doing your best to help the patients while we all flounder looking for answers. So what if one doc likes Geodon. You think one internist doesn't "like" Toprol while another prefers to start with Lisinopril? Your insulin example was irrelevant because there are no options here (what: "I don't like insulin so I let the folks who need it die" ?).
December 4, 2006 6:51 PM | Posted by : | Reply
"It stems from a lack of appreciation that mental illness is not a genetic disease, or even primarily a biological one, or even, surprisingly, a psychological one. It is a social disruption. On a desert island, no one can tell you are insane."
Excellent.
January 10, 2007 11:52 PM | Posted by : | Reply
Hi. Due to an overly assertive spam filter, your (and everyone else's) comments went to the junk folder; so I never saw this:
It's still about doing your best to help the patients while we all flounder looking for answers. So what if one doc likes Geodon. You think one internist doesn't "like" Toprol while another prefers to start with Lisinopril?
My point about the preferences docs have for meds was not that they were making mistakes or doing bad treatment necessarily, but that in picking a favorite it can be at the expense of future learning. Take your example of toprol vs. Lisinopril. Lisinopril prolongs survival in hypertension associated with diabetes (not to mention is kidney protective even in the absence of hypertension), while toprol is #1 for any cardiac ischemia related issues (again, even in the absence of hypertension.) So to have a favorite that ignores these findings is, in this case, inferior treatment (though hardly negligent.)
All I'm trying to do here is reveal to psychiatrists that learning has to be continuous. At no point do we have the luxury of saying, "well, I'm just going to do it this way." Would you want your brain surgeon to say that?
June 1, 2012 10:14 AM | Posted, in reply to , by : | Reply
Congrats- You already are. Go pick up your prescription.
August 8, 2012 11:52 PM | Posted by : | Reply
Question, why do drugs always have such unpronounceable names?
August 9, 2012 5:49 PM | Posted by : | Reply
Ronald Reagan isn’t a person, he is a sign.
That is a great passage!
August 11, 2012 1:25 AM | Posted by : | Reply
"It stems from a lack of appreciation that mental illness is not a genetic disease, or even primarily a biological one, or even, surprisingly, a psychological one. It is a social disruption. On a desert island, no one can tell you are insane."
Alone, how far do you have to get into _The History of Madness_ before your head stops hurting? It's brilliant, but damn.
Also, how familiar are you with Wilhelm Reich? I've read a couple of biographies and have just started on _Character Analysis_, and his ideas seem very relevant, if perhaps tangential, to the themes of this blog.
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