Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy said mental illness may be best treated using "faith-based approaches" as opposed to pharmaceuticals.
He gets so close-
Violent crime has risen over precisely the period we have shuttered these psychiatric institutions. And you know what? The number one psychiatric institution today is jail. It’s prison. And they don’t do a very good job. And now you then get the calls to clear the jails or to have commuting of sentences or shortening of sentences. People leave those jails in a worse psychiatric condition, often, than when they even entered.
Yes! Yes!
We can do this again learning from past mistakes without those abuses. I don’t think I want to be pumping psychiatric institutions with pharmaceuticals into people.
Seems reasonable.
Faith-based approaches – there are better ways to do this.
Oh for fuck's sake.
And, of course, the ironic thing is that Ramaswamy is a pharma bro.
It’s kind of like the joke “if alternative medicine worked, it would just be called medicine”.
A faith-based approach could also be called a hypothesis-based approach: the only thing that distinguishes it from a scientific approach is that it is a hypothesis that either hasn’t been tested or has failed the scientific method.
A hypothesis must be falsifiable, which anything faith-based is not (the whole point is belief without evidence), so it cannot be called a hypothesis-based approach. It's not that it has not been tested or has failed testing. It cannot be tested by definition.
I was thinking you could test whether a faith-based approach accomplishes what it is supposed to accomplish, but you’re right, my characterization of it as hypothesis-based, even though I meant it facetiously, ignores your important point