refill_request
Please let's you and I spend some time together in the emergency department. Last week we had a patient there who'd been brought in against his will by the police, and who claimed that the chip implanted in their brain was telling him to remove his eyes and everyone else's eyes with the spoon he carried in his back pocket.
He'd already removed his left eye, with the spoon he carried in his back pocket.
Please tell us your plan. I'm sorry that I can't find a throat swab to assist us.
Or perhaps we could have lunch down at the dementia care facility, where the neurologists would love you to tell them they're not legitimate medical doctors because they don't have a throat swab for dementia yet, and because they "lock up" dementia sufferers with a few signatures at the request of dementia-sufferer families so they, the dementia patients, don't walk onto the freeway. They actually lock people up protectively before "the crime" of actually walking onto the freeway.
Imagine that.
Aren't a few signatures (even sans diagnosis) all that's needed to place children in what in effect is protective custody?
Please. Give us your plan for relief of suffering while we sit around twiddling our thumbs waiting because "the science isn't there."
The history of the entire field of medicine (including psychiatry, which is as much science and medicine as any other medical specialty) is a march from partial understanding based on classification of symptoms to other measures. The brain, hidden away behind bone and blood-brain barrier, has been called the most complex object in the known universe.
That machine and it's foibles is a little more complicated than finding a buffer overrun or swabbing your throat for strep.
Nobody is locked up simply because they are diagnosed with a "mental illness" which is what you apparently want people to believe - you edited your parent comment, where you claimed that a diagnosis of schizophrenia was grounds for 5150. It's not.
2) No, there is no opinion about "good or bad" in diagnosing mental illness. The almost ubiquitous criteria is significant impairment - which almost always is an impairment the patient themselves identify (not someone else) and are seeking help for.
1) Medical doctors (including psychiatrists), police, social workers, judges, and other trained personnel all can lock someone up for a brief time (and with all sorts of legal protections and due process) if:
a) They are a danger to themselves or others.
b) They are unable to care for themselves.
Please tell us your alternative plan for dealing with those issues.
2) I'd love to be drill a hole in your well-protected cranium and stick a needle in your brain to obtain a sample to diagnose major depression, schizophrenia, or PTSD. Just a small sample, ok?. Let me know if you're ok with that. And if you think there are "objective biological tests" for most common illnesses that are diagnosed and treated, day in and day out, by physicians, I'd invite you to accompany me to clinic where, off the top of my head" we'll see tons of upper respiratory infections, real chronic pain without any demonstrable pathology, "ear infections", etc. This is the bread-and-butter of primary care physicians, and we don't order "objective biological tests" in order to diagnose and treat "medical illnesses" - in many cases because the tests simply don't exist, or are too expensive or too invasive.
But perhaps you'd care to explain to the sufferers and their families that we can do nothing for them without your "objective biological tests".