Bringing Psyche Back to Psychiatry with Paul Minot MD
Whatever happened to the mind?
After 40 years of clinical practice, I've become disillusioned with my profession's half-baked model of care. I'm not advocating abandonment of psychiatric treatment, but modern psychiatry is functioning in a dream world of half-baked science--utterly ignorant of how thought is generation, how memories are stored, and what constitutes the mind.
We have deluded ourselves with contrived diagnoses concocted by our trade association, and have dismissed the likelihood that many of our patient's complaints are the result of restless minds wrestling with real world problems. Many of them could benefit greatly from exploration of those issues, and the consideration of psychological remedies. But none of this will happen as long as we pretend that the mind doesn't even exist.
I've formulated a hypothetical model explaining the existence of thought and mind, proposing that the brain utilizes our nucleic acids (DNA and RNA) to store digital memory and execute thought in a manner much like our computers do. If this model is valid, it means that psychiatry is using hardware interventions to treat software problems. We wouldn't do that with our favorite laptop--why do that with our precious brain-mind?
In this podcast I explore the flawed science, misconceptions, and failures of psychiatry's reigning biological model of treatment. I will apply education, common sense reasoning, occasional rant, and some well-deserved mockery to debunk psychiatry's myths, and to educate the public on our need for a more holistic approach to treatment--one that will take full stock of the wonder that is our mind, rather than neglecting its existence.
Bringing Psyche Back to Psychiatry with Paul Minot MD
Artificial Afterglow: How SSRIs Might Actually Work!
The modern biological era of psychiatry began with the 1987 release of Prozac--the first selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, or SSRI. Other popular SSRIs have followed, including Zoloft, Paxil, Celexa, and Lexapro, and they remain the most commonly used class of antidepressants. You might think that they work by "correcting a chemical imbalance," right? Well, no such chemical imbalance has been proven to exist--and nowadays there are psychiatrists on Twitter arguing that psychiatrists never made that claim! Dr. Minot is old enough to remember when they most certainly did--and shares his own hypothesis as to how these drugs might really work....