Is psychiatry a medical field?

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Psychiatry is a medical field

Pro

• Argument for Psychiatry is officially recognized as such. (E.g. by NHS.) Inconclusive but suggestive.
  • Objection Inconclusive and uninteresting: we know that psychiatry is officially so recognized but the question is whether this is analytically correct.
• Argument for Psychiatry uses medical interventions: pharmaceuticals.
  • Objection By that logic, law enforcement could use chemical restraints to pacify unruly prison inmates and claim to be therefore part of medicine.
  • Objection The psychiatric pharmaceutical interventions do not treat anything but merely mask symptoms. For instance, the so-called "antipsychotics" do not treat psychosis but merely greatly reduce the activity of the brain.
    • Objection That is debatable and cannot be stated as well-recognized fact.
• Argument for Psychiatric diseases are diseases of the brain, and diseases of the brain are analogues of diseases of other organs such as heart or liver. The concept of the disease and the identification of the diseased organ bring other medical specialties and psychiatry under the same umbrella, that of medicine. (For instance, per psychiatry.org, "Schizophrenia is a chronic brain disorder [...]")
  • Objection The brain disease hypothesis has never been proven. The chemical imbalance theory (whether as for serotonin or dopamine) is as well peddled by psychiatry as it is unproven.

Con

• Argument against Psychiatric diagnosis is entirely behavioral, not resembling medical diagnosis in any way. It stands in contrast to medical imaging (X-rays, CT, MRI), blood tests, laboratory sputum analysis, etc. The only non-behavioral tests are made to rule out a non-psychiatric cause.
  • Objection Medical diagnosis is often done based on tool-unaided observations without use of specialized highly technological tests, and yet it is medical diagnosis.
  • Objection Expanding on the above, 19th century Western medicine did not have all the medical technology from 20th and 21th centuries, yet was still medicine.
• Argument against Expanding on the above, the language used to describe the allegedly pathological patient behavior is highly subjective and unscientific.
  • Objection Part of the language is reasonably objective, e.g. "the patient does not respond to questions".
    • Objection Fair enough. However, the above behavior cannot be objectively described as pathological but rather as an exercise of liberty.
• Argument against Psychology, including clinical psychology, is not considered a medical specialty, yet the sign-and-symptom language and observational interface of psychology (concerning human behavior) does not fundamentally differ from that of psychiatry. (The language of psychiatric diagnostic categories is not a sign-and-symptom one.)
  • Objection Psychologists are not qualified to prescribe medication; it is at least the treatment mode that makes psychiatrists medical doctors.

Further reading

• The medical model-why psychiatry is a branch of medicine by P R Joyce, 1980, nih.gov