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SSC Journal Club: Mental Disorders As Networks | Slate Star Codex

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Suppose you have sniffles, fatigue, muscle aches, and headache. You go to the doctor, who diagnoses you with influenza and gives you some Tamiflu. There’s some complicated statistics going on here. Your doctor has noticed some observable variables (sniffles, fatigue, etc) – and inferred the presence of an invisible latent variable (influenza). Then, instead of treating the symptoms with eg aspirin for the headache, she treats the latent variable itself, expecting its effects to disappear along with it. Psychiatry tries to use the same model. You get some symptoms – depressed mood, insomnia, fatigue, feelings of worthlessness, suicidality. You go to the psychiatrist, who diagnoses you with depression and gives you an antidepressant. The psychiatrist is implicitly assuming that the causal structure of her field matches the causal structure of better-understood diseases like influenza. Generations of psychiatrists have noticed that different symptoms all tend to show up together and follo

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