More scientific research is definitely needed.
To which degree are you...Sad? Have trouble getting things done? Don't find joy in the things that used to make you happy? Thinking about death? Feel any emotions at all? Afraid that something terrible is about to happen? Thinking about killing yourself? Planning to kill yourself? Etc.
It's not an exact science the way physics is, but we are only in the dark ages of mental illness in the sense that a lot of uninformed people don't have any idea how these illnesses are treated by professionals.
Running through a form of questions and ticking off boxes doesn't seem very "advanced" to me. In fact it seems like the very definition of backwards.
Why aren't we aiming for a physics level of understanding in psychology?
But mood disorders aren't in the same ballpark as physical ailments. I mean, even a common infection can be impossible to diagnose unambiguously from a simple blood test, and mood disorders usually interact with who you are as a person. You can't just make a machine that solves this.
I doubt you're the kind of person to be convinced by an anecdote, but I suffered recurring depression and anxiety for a period of five years and was almost completely cured by a combination of SSRIs and CBT. What seemed to make me get these recurring depressive episodes was a combination of unhealthy thought patterns and behaviors. Holding myself to impossibly high standards, having a habit of disregarding my accomplishments, working very hard with no long breaks, being overly critical in social settings and a lot of other small things that were very much part of my personality (and incidentally, very common in the tech community). No one would have classified these behaviors as excessively weird or pathological, but they turned out manifest in long-lasting and serious depressive symptoms. The question is, how are you going to measure behaviors and thought patterns like this with a machine or a physical measurement?
Maybe you could just say that "okay, so the depression or anxiety isn't a symptom of something that's wrong, it's a problem in itself, which we could somehow fix physically or chemically". But then you're moving into some pretty dodgy philosophical territory.
Mood disorders simply can't be a hard science with the degree of understanding we can hope to get in the near future. And although there's plenty of research to be done, the methods we use are pretty good.
I disagree. We know everything we need to know about the halting problem: the halting decision procedure cannot and will not ever exist. There's certainly a lot more we can and will discover about the workings of the brain.
We call that neuroscience. On a related note, Henry Markram just got $1.3 billion EUR for whole brain emulation. So there's that.
I say the real problem is that it's hard to treat.
When you see a close family member or friend suffering, you can't force them to go the doctors, where depression would certainly be diagnosed, and many often just don't go.
The standard set of medication for depression usually takes a couple of weeks to kick in. It's common to see symptoms worsen before they get better during this timeframe. It's gut wrenching to watch if you have personal experience with it.
Effective therapies require effort from the sufferer. If you're feeling really low, it's hard to the put the effort into anything - drops in personal hygiene standards are not rare.
It sucks we don't have a test for it like we have for physical disease but I think a bigger problem is treatment, which is done in a "see what works" manner if the first line of defence doesn't work, which is really damaging when you consider the above.
Is it not possible? I'd like scientific research to say that it is impossible.
I think the answer to both lies in the same area though, since the source of depression is not clear in the brain (I believe there was a study that shown SSRIs have an immediate effect on serotonin re-uptake yet takes a number of weeks to ease depression - implying serotonin doesn't play such a direct role as once believed).
The main issue I have is that people think our understanding of mental illness / psychiatry is as good as say pathology.
My main point is that, from my own person experiences through the whole system, treatment seems the most broken aspect. Diagnosis of depression is possible without a blood-test, as are other physical illnesses, the signs are obvious. The treatment is not as trivial, you won't do well to "let it run it's course", the drugs are gruelling and may not even work and therapy requires drive a depressed person hasn't got.
Are the diagnostic methods pretty good? Both accurate and precise with very low false positive rates?
Is the medication proven to work for depression?
Sorry but I think a lot of that can be argued that we are still shooting in the dark. I want a test for depression like I test for strep throat. AND I want the "cure" to be repeatable.
Yes we are still in the dark ages.
Yes: "Overall sensitivity was 84% (95% CI, 79% to 89%); overall specificity was 72% (CI, 67% to 77%)" (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7755226)
Is the medication proven to work for depression?
There's no such thing as proof in science. A recent meta-analysis: "Most patients treated with serotonergic antidepressants showed a clinical trajectory over time that is superior to that of placebo-treated patients. However, some patients receiving these medications did more poorly than patients receiving placebo. These data highlight the importance of ongoing monitoring of medication risks and benefits during serotonergic antidepressant treatment" (http://archpsyc.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=11074...)
https://www.dropbox.com/s/3uz18obebxavgff/Gueorguieva-et-al....