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Not exactly.

I look at what the practice of medicine is. Regular old internal medicine (not surgery).

It could almost be done by computer.

What does the budding young doctor learn?
Lists and lists of symptoms.
The symptoms are name labels of specific things.
"clubbing of the fingers", "non-productive cough".
Certain symptoms are dead giveaways for the word label of the illness.
Example: a red, raised ring of irritation on the flesh with a whitish interior: "ringworm".

The doctor learns volumes of symptoms, and learns to assort them and eliminate and focus, based on the symptoms, with the word name of the illness. That's the diagnosis.

Next, take the diagnosis and cross reference that named illness in the Physician's Desk Reference to see which parts of the pharmacopea are indicated for the treatment of that drug.

And voila!
Symptom identification.
Diagnosis based on the matrix of symptoms.
Prescription based on the diagnosis.

Nobody can pretend that learning all of that is easy, but what the lion's share of it is, is taxonomy. (The same thing is true in law and most other things in life: education is the process of getting the right word label for the sight picture.)

Now let's move over to psychiatry.
Same thing.
But here is where it differs, and it is crucial.
With internal medicine, there is an organic problem. Some material thing is breaking down, causing a material failure of an organ that leads to degraded performance of a mechanical mechanism. An internist is a very sophisticated plumber of a very sophisticated system of pipes, and there is an OBJECTIVE norm. Broken arm doesn't work, and there's a bone sticking through the skin and blood going everywhere. Patient is howling in pain. Need to fix the bone, stanch the bleeding, anesthetize the pain.

But with psychiatry, while there may (or may not) be an organic breakdown (it is assumed that there is, but that is an assumption only), that which constitutes a SYMPTOM of an AILMENT - both things are subjectively defined.

What is a mental ILLNESS? What is it that DEFINES "illness" when it comes to thoughts and the mind?
Nothing objective.
Rather, the subjective values of the evaluator.
So, is an adult male lusting after adult females a mental ILLNESS? No?
What if the females are aged 16?
It might be criminal to act on that impulse, but is it a mental ILLNESS?
No.
What if the female is age 13?
Hmmmm...that starts to depend on how mature the female looks, doesn't it? If she looks 20, it's not a mental illness, though acting on the impulse can land the guy in prison for 15 to 20.
What if the female is 6?
That's a mental illness.
Why?
Because we think it's disgusting.
Same thing if it's a 6 year old boy.
What if it's a 15 year old boy?
We are markedly more inclined to conclude "Mental illness" (and be completely unsympathetic).
Now, what if our male patient lusts for 35 year old men.
20 years ago, he was diagnosed with the mental illness of homosexuality.
Today, that is not a mental illness at all.
Why?
Changing social mores. We have decided, as a society, that is ok, therefore to want to do that is not a mental illness. But if the boy is 15, it is.

What exactly is "Attention Deficit Disorder" in a boy?
Is it a mental illness?
Or is it called "Being a boy?" Especially "Being a boy who had Count Chocula for breakfast and is wired on sugar."
Well, our psychiatrists, pressed along no doubt by societal mores that want silent children in class, have decided that being a high-energy boy is a SYMPTOM, that the ILLNESS is ADD, and that the treatment in the pharmacopea is Ritalin.

And because they are PROFESSIONALS, with degrees, for someone not so diplomated to say "You are medicating something that is not illness, and defining normality as a symptom of something" is met with a handwave and a sneer.

The medical science of psychiatry is dangerously like politics through medication.

But, what about true screaming schizophrenics...people who see things, hear voices, talk to spirits, that sort of thing. People like ME, for instance.
I am not crazy. There are spirits. (Religions have been telling you this all your life.) I do not need to be MEDICATED. It is not a SYMPTOM that I can hear angels and the doctor can't, any more than it is a SYMPTOM that he can read Latin and I can't. People who hear spirits and drown their children are not mentally ill for hearing the spirits. There are demons enough in this world. The problem is that they do not have the spiritual anchoring to be able to run for help to people who will help them fend off the demons.

Manson admits that he's no Satanist and never heard any voices. He just found himself with followers and pressed it. No doubt he lost all control because of drugs and brain damage letting his evil impulses fly, and others followed him off the cliff because of his charisma and their own lack of formation. We treat crimes as illnesses (except when we're really mad at the criminal, then we don't).

That is a long and meandering answer to say that psychiatrists serve two functions: for minor things, they are the dispensers of medication to club down the more spirited into political correctness, and for major things they are the modern substitute for an exorcist. Of course, in the latter case medication is just masking a symptom. Nothing wrong with that, if the alternative is mayhem.

Boys don't need Ritalin. They need a diet change and exercise.
That woman who drowned all of her children didn't need Prozac, she needed a close knit support group of friends and family around her a lot. Absent that, since people don't have the time for sane, normal, mammalian relationships that are expected and desired by our limbic brains, it is better to club down the symptoms of murderous depression with drugs than to bury the dead.
But it's just clubbing down a symptom, not treating the cause: a "dietary" lack of close human emotional contact, which we need like we need air itself, which opens the way for demons to enter.

There's an answer to hate in so many ways.