Maybe I don't understand your point. I thought you were saying that the problem with psychiatry is the interpretation of patients' subjective experiences as "symptoms," so that eg. a person with PTSD denying that they have bipolar disorder is paradoxically interpreted as a "symptom" of bipolar disorder. That just sounds like shitty medicine to me.

But yes also subjective experiences are the symptoms of psychiatric disorders and I don't see a way around this. It's the same in therapy... a counselor trained in CBT is going to challenge a depressed patient's automatic negative thoughts about themselves, recognizing those thoughts as symptoms rather than something completely valid and true.

And I still think that even in a socialist society you wouldn't be able to treat active psychosis, or mania with homicidal or suicidal ideation (to name a couple obvious examples) with talk therapy. You need someone who is trained in interpreting these symptoms within the framework of psychiatric disorders, and in treating them. Neurologists really don't ever prescribe medications for psych diseases.