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Comment by gleenn

2 days ago

I agree, but will the money be made by the same people? Like, if a psychologists group stands to benefit from treating it they wouldn't reap the benefit of the pharma research. Kind of like how the alcohol industry lobbies against weed or other possible substitutes. Or the car companies buying out the rail roads and then shutting them down to prevent competition. There is just so much inefficiency from competing industries sabotaging each other. You are also making a leap that understanding the cause is physiological means that there is a drug you could sell and not cost billions of dollars to get to market without risk. I always wonder about the PReP drugs for treating AIDS was really the best outcome instead of aiming for the cure. Definitely tradeoffs with a lot of money one way or another.

The psychologist lobby is not as powerful as you seem to think. Pharmaceutical companies have brought numerous drugs to market that have proven to be more effective than talk therapy for certain serious chronic mental health conditions.

I think that's reasonable. I think there's definitely an economy-wide bias by vested interests against disruption, which gets us stuck in local maxima, sometimes for centuries.