Comment by eatitraw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eatitraw | Hacker News Reader

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> 2 - Okay all psychiatric disorders use checklist and interviewing, but that may reflective of a problem with modern psychology.

And this problem being what exactly?

> It's very hard to say with any objectivity how much happiness, calmness, or attention is proper when your life situation may be bad, stressful, or boring.

And your solution is what exactly? Do nothing?

The reality is that it's not easy, but certainly not as hard as you make it to be. Most psychiatric diagnoses (including ADHD) have decent inter-rater reliability. They are certainly going to produce some amount of false positives and false negatives. But the moment humanity invent magic test for depression/anxiety/ADHD/etc, psychiatry is switching to it.

> So even if there is a biological condition that stems from brain differences, what is the R^2 between professional diagnoses of ADHD and actual biological cases of it?

Like I mentioned, brain scans are not really used for diagnosing (yet), because they are not sensitive enough to be used for diagnosis. How would you compute R^2 in this situation?

> And this problem being what exactly?

The point is just establishing condition X exists doesn't establish that most people diagnosed with X actually have X (and those who don't, don't).

The burden of proof on the psychiatric community is greater than to prove a condition exists in a biological sense. It is:

1. Prove condition exists. Identify if it is a specific illness or just an extreme on a range

2. Prove that they have a reliable and accurate way to diagnose it and that most physicians in the field agree on their diagnoses (i.e. interviewer intereliability > 90%). In so doing, prove this diagnoses is independent of self-image (e.g. a kid who's told they are distracting all the time may answer that they "can't focus" on a questionnaire because that's what adults tell them).

3. Prove that whatever solutions they are offering are statistically effective at helping the condition described in 2. Administer a post-test on each person receiving treatment to verify that they are indeed helped by whatever drug they are purchasing.

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The community doesn't meet this standard. And therefore we are right to be skeptical of it, it's half-assed with peoples mental health. I'm more rigorous with my software than they are with mental health.

To answer your question - You'd do a research study on "Brain ADDness" based on size of brain structures. Then you'd give a traditional ADD test to these people. And you'd look at the correlation.

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