How the DSM developed—the ‘statistical’ part of the name may suggest that the classification of mental disorders is based on the distribution and clustering of dyfunctional behaviours in the general population. No quite...it’s more about ‘inter-rater reliability’, which is if multiple psychiatrists agree that someone has something, then that something exists. This thing, is of course a label learned from psychiatry teachers, back till the psychodynamic days of psychiatry. This changed when the feighner criteria came along which was current to the research at the time, but we’ve learned a lot about psychiatry in around 40 years. Today, we’re still waiting on the NIH to kick start a new domain of discuss based on biological aetiology. At least on LessWrong, we could, perhaps, start using the research domains the NIH is proposing, instead of to-be-dated terms like ‘depression’ or ‘schizophrenia’ or ‘anxiety’ cause we’re on the bleeding edge of things like that. Luckily before I submitted this I had a quick look at the original criterion paper. Based on its citations and references, I retract my statement about it being based on evidence—it seems like it’s just a formalism of clinical judgement inherited in most cases. Even though there are quantiative studies of clinical observation, they are of a particular kind of patient (e.g. manic-depressive) so they have already been selected in a biased way for the expected behaviour). In addition. the highest sample size for any of these papers is 100, and all obviously from a single place in America. That’s the origin of the way psychiatric classification works. It’s a shame that psychiatrists and psychometricians are in charge of psychiatric classification, and not public health researchers or economists. Maybe we’d get classifications with tie-ins to disability or subjective self-reports.
The DSM developed at a time where different psychologists had different ideas about what causes mental illnesses and was specifically made to be agnotistic and not favor a specific school.
No quite...it’s more about ‘inter-rater reliability’,
It doesn’t even do that job well. They didn’t run any studies for the DSM-V that investigated the inter-rater reliability of their new proposed categories.
At least on LessWrong, we could, perhaps, start using the research domains the NIH is proposing, instead of to-be-dated terms like ‘depression’ or ‘schizophrenia’ or ‘anxiety’ cause we’re on the bleeding edge of things like that.
If you use a term like depression and use it correctly you can refer to a huge amount of existing papers on the subject that provide knowledge. Terms like autism to frequently get abused on LW.
Using labels because they are bleeding edge often leads to not really understanding the labels one uses.
How the DSM developed—the ‘statistical’ part of the name may suggest that the classification of mental disorders is based on the distribution and clustering of dyfunctional behaviours in the general population. No quite...it’s more about ‘inter-rater reliability’, which is if multiple psychiatrists agree that someone has something, then that something exists. This thing, is of course a label learned from psychiatry teachers, back till the psychodynamic days of psychiatry. This changed when the feighner criteria came along which was current to the research at the time, but we’ve learned a lot about psychiatry in around 40 years. Today, we’re still waiting on the NIH to kick start a new domain of discuss based on biological aetiology. At least on LessWrong, we could, perhaps, start using the research domains the NIH is proposing, instead of to-be-dated terms like ‘depression’ or ‘schizophrenia’ or ‘anxiety’ cause we’re on the bleeding edge of things like that. Luckily before I submitted this I had a quick look at the original criterion paper. Based on its citations and references, I retract my statement about it being based on evidence—it seems like it’s just a formalism of clinical judgement inherited in most cases. Even though there are quantiative studies of clinical observation, they are of a particular kind of patient (e.g. manic-depressive) so they have already been selected in a biased way for the expected behaviour). In addition. the highest sample size for any of these papers is 100, and all obviously from a single place in America. That’s the origin of the way psychiatric classification works. It’s a shame that psychiatrists and psychometricians are in charge of psychiatric classification, and not public health researchers or economists. Maybe we’d get classifications with tie-ins to disability or subjective self-reports.
The DSM developed at a time where different psychologists had different ideas about what causes mental illnesses and was specifically made to be agnotistic and not favor a specific school.
It doesn’t even do that job well. They didn’t run any studies for the DSM-V that investigated the inter-rater reliability of their new proposed categories.
If you use a term like depression and use it correctly you can refer to a huge amount of existing papers on the subject that provide knowledge. Terms like autism to frequently get abused on LW.
Using labels because they are bleeding edge often leads to not really understanding the labels one uses.