So you see that, you're saying - the psychiatric industry are pursuing drugs too much, like way too much, too much everywhere? I don't know, just seems like medical malpractice to prescribe drugs the doctor knows likely won't work - or is that the point, too many psychiatrists genuinely are too all in with prescription drugs to treat psychological maladies? I guess that falls under "mistake", but even errors are malpractice if the doctor is "supposed to know better". You're saying they don't know better?
That's a difficult question. Do they know better? It's hard to say exactly what they know.
To not get too epistemological, even the "hardest" of "hard science" does not assert itself as "certain." So, I'm not sure what they answer is, honestly. It is my thought that biology and drugs are "too often" a go-to. That doesn't mean none of them work, or that none of them are helpful. To proscribe something one knows would not work would indeed seem like malpractice. But what about the case where professional training informs your decision that in the case of X, give Y? In this sense, you would likely surmise that Y will help with X, why would you question it?
It's rather complicated, honestly, because what we would want is hard, empirical data that tells us the
exact quantitative results. But we don't really have that, and we might not be able to get that.
Here is another passage from the book, as far as I am in:
Meanwhile Bleuler’s new term for dementia praecox, schizophrenia, spread, its appeal heightened because it seemed to convey a less desperate, fatalistic course than dementia praecox had done. By the 1910s, American alienists were beginning to use the new word, and by the 1920s, the term dementia praecox was on its way to becoming archaic.
What largely failed to travel to the United States, though, was Bleuler’s insistence that schizophrenia was best understood through a double lens: both neurobiologically and psychoanalytically. Instead, views on the disorder fractured. On the one side were those who assumed that schizophrenia was best understood in strictly biological terms, even as they disagreed over what those terms should be. On the other side were clinicians who were more interested in the degree to which the disorder resulted from bad experiences, bad habits, and bad upbringing. As early as 1914, the Harvard pathologist Elmer Southard referred to these two camps as the “brain spot men” and the “mind twist men.”