Yes -- as true now as it was then. But moving away from talk therapy toward symptomatic drug treatment moves neither toward nor away from science.
Also, by "the good old days" I was referring to the medical practice of first identifying a disease's cause, then designing a cure. Most mental illnesses don't have this property, which open them up to exploitation by Big Pharma.
Of course scientists are trying to identify the underlying causes of mental illnesses. They're even making a lot of progress, but the brain is just unbelievably complex.
In the meantime, treatments are found by trial and error. Testing whether a drug treats a disease's symptoms can be scientific even if you don't know how the drug actually works.
Agree that things haven't progressed much toward an ideal of rigorous science, but the process you're lauding of first identifying a cause and then designing a cure doesn't mean much when you're just making up stories for both things, which is essentially what those good old days were.
Also, by "the good old days" I was referring to the medical practice of first identifying a disease's cause, then designing a cure. Most mental illnesses don't have this property, which open them up to exploitation by Big Pharma.