Not if he is giving the standard advice everyone in the industry gives. There are lots of conditions where the standard expectation is that "people like you don't really get well" and "symptom management is the name of the game." It would be considered malpractice to even tell people with certain diagnoses that you will shoot for curing them.

But if you don't even try to get someone well, if you only shoot for muddling through, don't you think that has bearing on the kind of results you get? If actually getting them well isn't even a goal, no, of course, you won't get them well.

This is not a fair summary of your previous point. You previously implied that a psychiatrist will maliciously give information they know to be against the patient's interests purely to continue a financial relationship.

In this second post, you have walked back your irrational and ridiculous claim from "a psychiatrist will give you bad advice so you pay them forever to" "a psychiatrist will offer you evidence and science based advice that doesn't lie to you about your condition or future and instead seeks to give you the best options or advice that evidence teaches us can help"

Sure, that sounds great to me. That's why you trust an expert.

Now you seem to be mostly upset that a specific mental illness or condition isn't curable and may be permanent as the result of damage or pathology, and are blaming humanity's best experts for not having a panacea for your troubles.

It's probably best for me to walk away at this point. Most of the remarks here do not strike me as good faith engagement.

"Professionals tend to act based on financial motives" is among these. You seem to think it's just human nature, and don't even expect anything different. Yet ask any psychologist, and they'll react as the would to an accusation of murder.

That's because in their job, intentional deviations from the standard-of-care can quite easily turn into murder (or manslaughter/negligent homicide to be more precise).

Very similar: accusations against journalists that they are acting on behalf of some publication-wide agenda, take money from the subjects they cover, or write/don't write certain articles with an eye towards the sector's financial future ("The Times studiously avoids mentioning adblockers")

Cf. https://xkcd.com/1984/

The fact that you created an account just moments before taking a dig at me only reinforces the idea that this is absolutely not a good faith comment by you.

There are lots of things that can cause a conversation to go sideways. It's really common for the group to then blame the person at the center. It only serves to compound and entrench the problem.

... any more than psychiatrists are stupid and malicious for acting in accordance with the norms of their profession.

In both cases, people can be wrong without being stupid/malicious, and likewise, people can be wrong whilst adhering firmly to the status quo.

That's only a deterrent to the extent you can prove it, which is zero.

> frankly it's ludacris!

Nearly every professional I've ever been in a position to independently assess has "rounded in their own favor," often quite heavily, frequently egregiously, and always with a firm rationalization in hand. Psychiatry has especially blurry lines to round -- but you expect me to believe that psychiatrists buck this trend? Frankly, that's ludicrous.

The fact that someone is an expert makes them an authority figure. Whether or not they are effective is an independent question. In some areas it does. In others it doesn't. As long as that person follows the standards of practice for their profession.

Believe it or not, a significant fraction of medical treatments offered have no quantifiable evidence saying whether or not they work. Admittedly a lot fewer than used to be the case since the movement towards insisting on evidence-based approaches in medicine started in the 1990s. But it has not reached all areas of medicine yet.

In particular there is no evidence that talk-based therapy is better than a placebo (such as acupuncture) at treating basic conditions like depression. See http://theconversation.com/counselling-doesnt-work-in-the-lo... for a random link verifying this.

Now if this shocks you, then reflect on the fact that within my lifetime, therapy gave large numbers of people false memory of abuse that didn't happen, psychiatry subjected large numbers of people to electroshock therapy despite a lack of evidence that it worked. If you go back just a little further, to my parent's lifetime, tens of thousands of people had their brains very literally scrambled in frontal lobotomies (usually with an ice pick inserted through the eye socket).

So here is the problem. There are lots of experts who you really should listen to. If you have cancer, don't be like Steve Jobs. But there are also plenty of professions whose practitioners who can be safely disregarded even though by all outwards appearances they are are just as expert. In a situation like this, can you blame people for identifying the wrong professions as ignorable?

Unfortunately for your argument, available experimental evidence indicates that the example that you're responding to is one of the ones that actually IS ignorable.

Yet you didn’t actually explain where it falls apart.

Valid malpractice claims are reasonably common in other much more measurable types of medicine.

It’s often a good idea to get a second or third opinion when you see a normal doctor.

To be wary of a branch of medicine like psychiatry with its far fewer checks and balances seems prudent.

Is that the accusation? My understanding is the parent was trying to say that incentives can bias a professionals decision making.