I don't think you actually understand modern clinical practice. We are surely better than where we were at in the middle ages with leaches and stuff, but there is still a lot of practice and experimentation to see what works and what doesn't, just evidence without hard proof.
> the utility of diagnosis itself is taken for granted rather than actually proven.
Given the topic of autism, I'm not sure if you are trying to be sarcastic or not.
>We are surely better than where we were at in the middle ages with leaches and stuff, but there is still a lot of practice and experimentation to see what works and what doesn't, just evidence without hard proof.
Here's a question for you. When is the last time mental health outcomes improved in a way which could not simply be the result of reporting differences?
I would say the last time was around the year 2000, when suicide and drug addiction were at all time lows. Every single chance since then, on aggregate, has been useless and the entire field of mental health has completely failed to produce any evidence it has advance an inch this millennium which is absolutely fucking scandalous. I don't know how much oncology improved in the same period of time. Also if you include reported mental health data, people report WORSE mental health now than they did in the past.
Given that, I see pretty much zero reason why the status quo today does a lick to improve people mental health better than the status quo back then. I am just dead stupidly sceptical of diagnosis (at least beyond 2000/DSM-IV levels) as being a source of mental health because not only is it not proven people don't even attempt to prove this.
When the DSM-V was released, the director of the NIMH started the RDOC for research which was nominally supposed to do studies based less on categories like "autism" and more on underlying biological phenomenon, trashed the idea of symptom based diagnosis pointing out it has largely been depreciated elsewhere in medicine, and suggested we might have to get rid of the words schizophrenia and depression because they were confusing things. I think about such things occasionally and wonder if the entire diagnostic nosology we have is basically a fatally flawed system.
So my essential objection is, why medicalise people's identities if there's no evidence it's improving people's outcomes?
> So my essential objection is, why medicalise people's identities if there's no evidence it's improving people's outcomes?
20 years in a time of massive social changes? Would it really happen all so quickly? There are million things that could be making things worse. Heck, it could be case that without these treatments it'd be even worse. I don't know if that's true or not, but I'm saying consider the wider environment in which this is all happening.
It's impossible to really be sure either way. Maybe it's all garbage, maybe not. but make sure you're at least trying to look at the whole picture.
> the utility of diagnosis itself is taken for granted rather than actually proven.
Given the topic of autism, I'm not sure if you are trying to be sarcastic or not.