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This a psychiatric (medical) matter not a psychological one.
Even if it was just psychology.....plenty of parts of the field have evidence base and predict the world. Some parts don't.
Do you feel qualified to assess if this specific thing is something that has well validated data or not?
One can look at the sweep of psychiatric theories over the last 100 years and find the field wanting. And bad science. Tons of bad science.
Can you point to something in the last 40 years that is clear and obvious bad science or a bad psychiatric theory?
These are probably more mixed examples than you'd think. To my understanding repressed memory theory was a longstanding vestigium from the old days of psychiatry, once the field became more scientific, medicine got more tools, and we learned how memory worked it did get deprecated. This is science working as we'd hope with people making adjustment when more data is available. As you note it did take awhile.
This specific issue (especially on the satantic panic end) and the transgenderism issue that someone else posted are also examples of medical authority being coopted for politics, which is a problem, a known fail state, probably most famously known in COVID but also famously a problem in authoritarian states (ex: Sluggish Schizophrenia). This is absolutely a fair criticism but isn't a reason to toss out the whole thing.
The SSRI studies are part of a wider conversation which is complicated and confusing and hard to summarize here.
There are fads despite whatever the current 'evidence-based' approach is. The Trans thing is a recent one to have gone political.
The homosexuals protested until they were removed from the DSM, but that was outside the 40 year window you set.
How secure are all the diagnosis of ADD / ADHD in active boys?
Michelle Remembers by psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder was published in 1980. How far back are the longstanding vestigium from the old days of psychiatry?
Do you remember all the dissociative identity disorder diagnoses, DID in the '90's? Previously rare suddenly tens of thousands.
Throw out the whole thing, maybe not. It's not like we've better solutions. But increased circumspection and less deference. Especially in medico-legal areas. This is how Constance Fisher murdered 3 children in 1954 and then 3 more in 1967.
The trans issue is complicated because while their are certainly elements of classic medical-fads, it's more of a religious preoccupation of the majority of people involved in healthcare that's shared in their cultural milieu, even with that being said (and I'm 100% a trans-skeptic) the jury is still out and we will probably find it's a mixture of legitimate pathology that responds well to treatment and misdiagnosed social contagion. The legal and social environment needs to clear before we can find out but it's not like medicine is leading the charge on trans issues, it's following instructions from the poltico-religious mothership.
I actually don't think homosexuality counts even if I expanded my time window, deviance is a cultural context, increase cultural acceptance changes it from pathology to accepted behavior. Commonly discussed around here is the age of consent. Legal and social changes make something more or less pathological.
People like to complain about ADHD/Autism over-dx but the field's understanding of the situation is just fine. You see individual and organization malfeasance for profit but even more common than that is patient's lying to seek secondary gain. Neither of these are problems with diagnostic criteria. The field is also constantly trying to calibrate to assess for pathologizing normal human behavior.
Re: memory, as I stated elsewhere we were just discovering how memory works in the 70s and as that was investigated adjustments needed to made. Good science involves adjusting frameworks as we learn more. For instance modern understanding of memory posits that recall is like taking a book of a shelf, reading, and writing a new book before putting it back (instead of reading a book and then putting it back). A world in which you do have that insight has a very different relationship with repressed memories.
My understanding of the DID craze is that it was basically just one guy and his followers evangelizing the idea and it got really popular in the lay-world because it's a cool idea and sounds like a neat illness to have. You'll always have individual cranks and sometimes they do some limited persuasion (see: Vitamin C and sepsis, which I have bitched about before).
This doesn't sound much like the science people doing science.
I suspect many in the trans-skeptic / anti-trans crowd would still agree that in many cases there's still a pathology involved, the disagreement would be that surgery, puberty blockers, or hormones, getting the world to use their desired pronouns and having them live a sad simulacra is treatment. This treatment is being provided / pushed by the science people. It wasn't politicians leading the call for surgeries and drugs, that was 'science', once the 'treatments' were established the politicians do what they do. I didn't see medical boards swing into action to threaten licenses here they same way they did for anti-vax or COVID misinformation.
The acceptance of deviance because continued opprobrium has become inconvenient doesn't sound much like science either. It wasn't deviant behavior because it was unaccepted. It was deviant because it failed to produce good outcomes.
This is a little bit of having it both ways, one of the ways the field attempts to manage issues with overs-diagnosis is by putting things in cultural context, for instance a core part of what makes something a psychiatric illness "does it negatively effect your life."
The line between a healthy person, a neurotic person, someone with obsessive compulsive personality disorder, and obsessive compulsive disorder is in part of how maladaptive it is and how you feel about it.
This is also how you attempt to make sure ADHD, Anxiety, and Depression aren't over diagnosed. Feeling sad sometimes is part of the human experience. Feeling anxious to some extent is adaptive. Not being able to work and live your life because of sadness is pathology.
With homosexuality - if being gay means you are executed, it's much more fair to say that it is pathology adjacent, especially if that unlocks resources for support.
Pedophilia is also an example of something that is overwhelmingly the subject of cultural scorn, but it's wrongness is less to do with obvious organic brain injury and more to do with the fact that nobody thinks it is acceptable. In a different society (like the pederasty ancient societies) it's not pathology. Here and now it's a disease and acknowledging that allows people to get treatment and for the legal system to do its thing when people act.
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