I'm a psychiatrist, and I disagree with much of your post. I see below you mentioned going to a psychiatry conference many times, but if it was with the same docs why did you expect a higher level of scientific discourse? It's true that there are crummy psychiatrists, but please don't throw the rest of us under a bus. At our patient conferences, not being to cite articles to back up your treatment plan would be considered an embarrassment.

I think this article puts psychiatry's dilemma into some good perspective: http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/dsm-5-and-the-fight-for-...

I do think that it's interesting how people conceive of psychiatry. We cannot really objectively measure or test pain. There's no blood test or scan that confirms it. But as everyone has experienced it, nobody doubts it exists. There's migraine headaches, which are, like psychiatric illness, diagnosed based on history and symptoms. It's pretty uncontroversial. Yet, as everyone believes themselves to be an expert in behavior, if they have not experienced or known someone with mental illness, it's suddenly all invented.