Psychiatry lacks hard proof and thus a change in the way it is practiced is warranted

This is a serious question and not meant to be offensive: do psychiatrists and non-psychiatrists here believe that psychiatry represents medicine that is on the same level as other specialties which provide greater levels of objective proof (labs, pathology, imaging, etc.)?

In my opinion it would be better if organized psychiatry were to come out ‘front and center’ and state to the public something to the effect of:

“Psychiatry at this time is a proto-specialty which offers no hard proof of any conditions treated to be true biological/pathological conditions. As such we provide educated guesses about pathological behavior and its origins. Therefore our therapies may or may not help you, depending on the strength of symptoms/clinical presentation. If you don’t feel you are being helped you may choose to stop medical therapy anytime and we will start a safe wean of medication under our supervision.”

There ideally would be a general consent form at the onset of therapy stating similar points and a requirement to discuss this with all elective adult patients, as well as parents or other guardians of child or otherwise disabled patients, on their level in a way that they can understand as much as possible.

Does anyone see this as a bad thing and if so, why? I see it as potentially a very good thing for psychiatry all around - perhaps not in the immediate short run, but potentially in the long run as a greater percentage of patients feel that psychiatrists can be trusted more.

As you all may (or may not) realize, there is a sizable percentage of the psychiatric patient base that is very unhappy with psychiatry. I don’t know what exact percentage that is, but it is likely to be much greater than the percent dissatisfied with any other branch of medicine. And that is all likely due to the fact that there is no objective proof associated with psychiatry, the DSM notwithstanding.

Thoughts?