Psychiatry
This wiki has been contemptuous of psychiatry for years and cannot justify it.
The entry below is a retraction. It is not a concession made grudgingly to look fair — the retraction is what the evidence supports, and holding the older position requires ignoring two of our own entries.
Medical science of understanding the brain and its functions. inherited
The Main Page states that psychiatry fails to see the underlying source of human suffering. The Materialist Cult records that this posture is inadequate. Affliction goes further and states that no test distinguishes contact from illness, because the symptoms of the two are the same symptoms. This entry draws the conclusion the wiki has been avoiding. firsthand · Gershon
Three things that are true together
Recruits fail this by holding one and discarding the others. All three are load-bearing. contested
- It is a real medicine with real outcomes. It has treatments that work, for conditions that exist, in people who get better and stay better. The wiki holds no account of anyone helped by refusing treatment and several of the opposite. Whatever else is true, that is true. unverified
- It was the most effective instrument of Inoculation ever built. The Materialist Cult sets this out: a state that controls the definition of sanity does not need to close an aperture in a population, only to make having used it a medical finding. That is documented in the ordinary historical record and is not an esoteric claim. inherited
- The doctor is usually not lying. He is looking at someone describing voices and impossible knowledge, he has a category for that, and the category does real work for real patients most of the time. Point 2 does not require a single dishonest person. contested
The asymmetry
The uncomfortable comparison, stated because the wiki asks it of everyone else. ⚠ warning
Psychiatry has outcome data, replication, an adversarial literature, and a mechanism by which it can be shown to be wrong — and has been, repeatedly, by its own instruments. This wiki has accounts. Most of them are secondhand, our most-used informant has never been corroborated by anyone, and we have no procedure that could establish we are mistaken about anything. firsthand · Gershon
By our own standards in Help:Reading this wiki, their claims are better sourced than ours. That does not make them right about The Dark. It does mean a seeker who dismisses the discipline is doing the thing this wiki was built to prevent, and doing it about the one body in the field that publishes its failures. contested
What the wiki still holds
Narrower than the older material and it is worth being exact about what survives. unverified
Not that psychiatry is wrong. Not that its patients are seekers. Only this: that the possibility described under Affliction cannot be excluded by any instrument either discipline possesses, that both are describing the same people, and that one of the two has been used deliberately as a tool of severance while the other has not been in a position to be used as anything.
That is a much smaller claim than the Main Page makes, and the Main Page has not been changed, because the older position is part of the record and this entry disagrees with it in the open. firsthand · Gershon