attackfish

This is part of what drives me so crazy about psychiatry (horrible wordplay is horrible). In the rest of the medical field, there is at least lip service paid to causes. Even when there is no known cause of a specific set of symptoms, the rest of the medical field at least makes a note that it's idiopathic (though they often don't do anything beyond that, grr). Not so with psychiatry, which in my opinion contributes to sloppy treatment. If this treatment works for someone with an illness caused this way, it could do nothing for the same symptoms caused by something else. It also contributes to the way we deal with and treat mental illness (and more broadly, the brain as an organ) as separate from illnesses of the body. Neurology comes closer to the approach I like, but neurologists are far to willing to write off a condition as psychiatric, and thus they don't have to deal with it (yeah, that happened to me a lot as a kid) when, perhaps a neurological understanding of the mechanism behind psychiatric illnesses would be beneficial to treatment.