Why Are There No Biological Tests in Psychiatry?

[LiberalEsto]

2. Back in 1971 my mother was hospitalized with symptoms resembling schizophrenia.

Luckily she went to a regular hospital with a psychiatric ward.
After several days there, the doctors discovered that her symptoms were being caused by uremic poisoning due to kidney failure.
In other words, her kidneys were no longer filtering the wastes from her blood stream.
She was given dialysis and gradually recovered her senses.

This happened immediately following a semester of abnormal psychology in college, during which I did field work at a state psychiatric institution. With the help of my professor, I fought my father to have my mother placed in a private medical hospital with a psychiatric ward. And it's a damned good thing I did. Had she been sent to Greystone, (in NJ), I believe she would probably never have been correctly diagnosed, but doped to the gills on thorazine like the patients I worked with at Marlboro. In all likelihood she would have died from kidney failure soon after being admitted.

Because she got an accurate medical diagnosis, my mother lived for four more years.

I strongly believe that people showing signs of psychiatric illness should be given complete medical workups to rule out underlying disorders.