There are two kinds of failure. The failure of ambitious dreams that maybe we'll see in china. And the never ending failure of the miserable cynical bastards in the west who never open their mouths but to whine about how terrible everything is. People so fundamentally opposed to a better world tomorrow that the highest political ambition is austerity (both economic and environmental).

You want to talk about rotten infrastructure and social unrest? Let's see where another ten years of politicians "saving money" get's you.

Psychopathy is a complicated social phenomena. It's not something that can be reduced to a simple correlation with the shapes of the structure of someone's brain.

Not to mention that brain imaging is incredibly limited in what it can tell you and a huge amount of the published science that uses it is pretty terrible quality.

I'll really never understand the appeal of this reductive nonsense.

The principle of first do no harm comes into play. If someone in a position of medical authority is going to offer you a treatment we need good evidence that the benefits of that treatment outweigh the harms.

This is almost impossible to do if the very definitions you have of mental illness aren't meaningful. And the evidence that backs the DSM is very very weak.

I'm sorry, your rambling statement doesn't appear to be scientific.

"In other words, chlorpromazine actually worked so well that the psychiatrists no longer had to resort to ECT, brain surgery, or screwing with the patient's sugar and insulin levels."
You'd have to be a complete moron to claim that that is proof chlorpromazine works.

The problem with the mental health field is that it's almost impossible to rigorously define an actual illness the way we can with physical illness. This makes diagnosis and measuring the efficacy of treatment incredibly difficult. Hell even defining what it means for a schizophrenic to be "well" is hard.

It's undeniable that people suffer from mental illness and the psychologists in the article are just as guilty of terrible science as the psychiatrists they criticise, but there are huge problems in this entire field and we're going to see spats like this go on and on until someone can produce some coherent scientific evidence that tells us anything at all about mental health.