They outperform by the metrics that matter for a clinical diagnosis and the West is so quick to jump to the conclusion that they're "under diagnosed", it's a uniquely Western and especially American conclusion.

It's something that persistently prevents someone from living a "normal" life, which is also defined far too narrowly.

You're absolutely insistent that virtually any amount of "negative effects" is sufficient for diagnosis and pharmacological intervention which is absolutely not the case.

Nobody is saying it's easy or the discomfort and difficulties aren't real.

People were constantly bombarded with death, disease, things like starvation were near term risks, violence was everywhere, etc.

You're also overestimating the prevalence of alcoholism. Alcohol consumption was largely driven by safety and necessity, not abuse. Alcoholism was arguably more of a social stigma historically than it was today, certainly with harsher criminal penalties in many societies.

You're leaving out the part about being "well studied" paired with your conclusions is almost exclusively in American and Western European populations, things are significantly less clear in other populations and cultures.

Exact quote from second article

"Furthermore, the SSRIs were accorded a rock-star status as effective antidepressants that they did not deserve. Most troubling from the standpoint of misleading the general public, pharmaceutical companies heavily promoted the “chemical imbalance” trope in their direct-to-consumer advertising."

There second article admits the overuse of the term while trying to defend psychiatry for never officially adopting it, but everyone who's been on them knows that's exactly what they were told about their effectiveness, so whether the trope originated with the pharmaceutical companies (my assertion) or not, they were still way over prescribed and there's no statistically significant evidence they actually work when controlling for confounders, as the first meta analysis clearly demonstrates.

"Quality" is an arbitrary definition that means nothing, that's one of the problems we're talking about in psychiatry. The OP clearly mentioned that there was minimal impact on academic, professional, or social functioning other than internal discomfort, for example, yet was prescribed anyway.

>False, regarding CBT

Wow it's almost like the replication crisis is a real thing and we have no idea what we're talking about. Look at these completely disparate results when examining a different population group.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01651...

Why do you think that is?

To pretend that humans are hedonic beasts incapable of cognitive adaption is ridiculous. We do not operate purely on impulse save for pharmaceutical intervention. We can force ourselves to give things more or less importance regardless of the actual stakes.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-022-01661-0

https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/debunking-two-chemical...

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/insight-therapy/2022...

I bet if you knew your house would burn down if you didn't do "normal" things you would have done them no problem.

Stimulants make otherwise unenjoyable things enjoyable? Who would have thought? Do you think people that do "normal" things enjoy them? Is it necessary to enjoy everything all the time?

When you do not have an objective metric to measure, prove, or hypothesize (as in physics, chemistry, etc), you're basically doing statistics on whatever arbitrary populations and bounds you choose with immeasurable confounders. That's why the replication crisis and p hacking are intrinsic properties of the social sciences

One of the biggest problems with psychiatry is that every diagnosis is a spectrum, and over time it's become more and more obvious that the boundaries for what is considered "neurotypical" are way too narrow.

Depression being a chemical imbalance was a complete lie to sell more medication, and how prolific this type of occurrence is within the industry is not hard to see.

At the very least, a plurality of phycological diagnoses are manifestations of physical behavior: diet, exercise, exposure to sunlight, etc

We're so overprescribed on medications to try to feel a certain way within far too narrow of a spectrum.

Why do you presume that there has to be an equivalent to a sprained ankle? Maybe the answer to your question is yes, only the catastrophic is worth addressing.

https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...

The argument posited was that Europeans during the "Dark Ages" were inferior economically and culturally to the Native Americans. There's virtually no point in history in which this was true.

>Could you share some source to support that, where people can read more?

The Iron Age

Prolific Written Language

Interstate Commerce

Sophisticated Art, particularly music

Prolific Agrarian societies

Prolific complex architecture

That's just a few examples. There's no single source, it's self evident when surveying the Early Middle Ages.

https://web.mit.edu/rsi/www/2013/files/MiniSamples/MontyHall...