I came to learn a lot about mental health and psychiatric science over the last half decade or so. I’ve read hundreds and perhaps thousands of studies as well as other sources to gain a wide angle perspective which informs the things I write and think about.
There’s so much bad science in psychiatry and it’s a tragedy because the public believe psychiatrists know what they’re doing. They really don’t. Professor Richard Bentall outlines the poor science of schizophrenia in his award-winning book Madness Explained. My own endeavour has found depression and schizophrenia research and practice to be poor. The public’s expectations aren’t met, the science used in clinical practice is weak and many practices clinicians don’t use the scientific reference diagnostic methods which means the answers provided in evidence based clinical guidance for things like depression is useless.
I’ll fully describe the deplorable science and specious paradigm of biomedical psychiatry another time. Instead I’d like to jump to talking about the right model. For me it’s the spirituobiopyschosocial model but in practice I’ll refer to just the biopsychosocial model of mental health. This is quite different from the biomedical model because it’s a theory of everyone. We’re all created by biological, psychological and social/environmental causes (and, if you want, god/s). Our personalities, preferences, thoughts, behaviours, emotions and any other mental quantity are all biopsychosocial be we criminally insane or unhumanly resilient, genius or fool, sensitive or shameless, priest or psychopath or prophet or paedophile.
These three elements need to be understood as does a person’s life history to truly make useful diagnosis and treatment decisions. Take it from me: psychiatric science and practice is totally shambolic in this respect. The science is so badly applied and the clinical tools are unsuitable. It is impossible to make a good mental health system using the typical doctor-patient relationship because there’s simple not enough time unless you’re rich enough to pay for private consultations and treatment. Even then, the massive amount of knowledge of a patient’s life would take a long time for a doctor to hear and psychiatric science in diagnosis relies on very little information so gathering more information doesn’t help make better evidence-based decisions.
Computers and machine intelligence however can handle masses of data and evermore real life information is becoming recorded in electronic form. From emails to the Internet of Things there’s a vast explosion in electronic real life data over the next few decades and Big Data is the technology which is making it feasible to analyse masses quantities of unstructured data. As more and more of real life becomes recorded it becomes possible to translate the current primitive mental health system into an advanced system made possible through innovative computing technology.
I’ve been ruminating but not publishing about this idea – an electronic engineer’s mental health system; a revolutionary mental health system made possible by advanced and ubiquitous computer technology – for a while. I added the category heading Mental Health 2.0 to my blog today and I expect to add more posts with my thoughts on this radically different mental health system both in terms of providing better, personalised, effective solutions and empowering basic human rights rather than take them away like the current system does.
We do big ideas 