My paternal grandfather was a doctor, a physician specializing in psychiatry. However, he always thought of himself as a neurologist, that subsection of medicine dealing with the nervous system. HUGE difference between the two practices.
At its core all psychiatry is a collection of theories expressed by humans who still cannot define the ‘psyche’, ‘mind’ or what it to be ‘human’. Even the cult founder of psychiatry, Schlomo Freud (you probably know him by name of Dr. Sigmund Freud who died as a cocaine addict), acknowledged that since ‘mind’ cannot be examined by collecting and codifying all human behavior - - except by means of classifying the subject in question as being either ‘sane’ or 'mentally ill’.
Granddad never believed in that controverial psychiatric distinction. My father’s older brother, also a M.D. physician, but who called himself a psychiatrist, did. Different generation and different belief system.
This so-called ‘science’ known as psychiatry is based on criteria listed in the widely used “Diagnostic and Statistical Manuals of Mental Disorders”. In other words, criteria made up by the psychiatrists themselves that has generated much criticism, including the National Institute of Medical Health, which argued that the DSM is both unscientific and subjective. A good example of this is to be found in term “Attention Deficit Syndrome”, otherwise known as plain old inattention by those of us who habitually looked out of the school windows day-dreaming during boring classroom lectures. Today you get the prescription medication called Ritalin for that.
Both Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak who invented Apple Computers, along with a bright guy named Einstein, were dreamers ... and none of them were forced to take Ritalin back then. Oh wait a minute, “Attention Deficit Syndrome” had not been invented by the psychiatrists yet. Hmm-mmm, ‘Nuff said?
