Instead there were a number of competing schools and subschools, most of them espousing one variant or another of Epicurean, Aristotelian, or Platonic theory. Each of the corresponding schools derived strength from its relation to some particular metaphysic, and each emphasised, as paradigmatic observations, the particular cluster of optical phenomena that its own theory could do most to explain. Everything Kuhn concluded from his historiographic survey of early optics surely applies to modern psychiatry.
Academic psychiatry has all but lost contact with the population it is supposed to serve.
It has become the province of industrious, often brilliant, people who accept without question that what they are doing constitutes the science of mental disorder. Criticism is, if not actively discouraged, then politely but very firmly ignored. The awful panoply of science is arrayed, not so much to stimulate critical discussion, as to quell it. My own experience has been that there are two standards applied in the publication of original psychiatric research. The great majorityof material is the uncontroversial application of whatever model happens to be in vogue.