What does it tell us about the state of psychiatry when some of the biggest names in the psychiatric establishment are distancing themselves from psychiatry’s diagnostic system and its treatments?
In 2013, National Institute Mental Health (NIMH) director Thomas Insel, citing the lack of scientific validity of psychiatry’s official diagnostic manual, the DSM, stated that the “NIMH will be re-orienting its research away from DSM categories.” In response, Robert Whitaker, investigative reporter and author of Anatomy of an Epidemic, observed, “This is like the King of Psychiatry saying that the discipline has no clothes.”
“When Insel states that the disorders haven’t been validated,” Whitaker points out, “he is stating that the entire edifice that modern psychiatry is built upon is flawed, and unsupported by science. . . If the public loses faith in the DSM, and comes to see it as unscientific, then psychiatry has a real credibility problem on its hands.”
Other establishment psychiatrists are also distancing themselves from psychiatry’s diagnostic manual. Psychiatrist Allen Frances, the former chair of the DSM-4 task force, now writes about how the DSM is a money machine for drug companies (“Last Plea To DSM-5: Save Grief From the Drug Companies”).
Frances, emeritus professor of psychiatry at Duke University, was until recently among the most inside of insider psychiatrists. However, in an April 11, 2014 New York Times article (“Idea of New Attention Disorder Spurs Research, and Debate”) about “sluggish cognitive tempo,” which would add 2 million more children to the already 6 million diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), Frances stated, “Just as ADHD has been the diagnosis du jour for 15 years or so, this is the beginning of another. This is a public health experiment on millions of kids.”
Public health experiment on millions of kids—that’s the kind of language that once so marginalized mental health professionals critical of establishment psychiatry that we were not quoted in the New York Times or any other mainstream media.
NIMH director Insel has also increasingly been distancing himself from standard psychiatry drug treatments. In 2009, Insel wrote: “For too many people, antipsychotics and antidepressants are not effective, and even when they are helpful, they reduce symptoms without eliciting recovery.”
The sad fact is that treatment resistant depression is increasing, and there is a great deal of evidence that the reason for this increase is long-term use of antidepressants. A review of the research in 2011 in the journal Medical Hypotheses concluded: “Depressed patients who ultimately become treatment resistant frequently have had a positive initial response to antidepressants and invariably have received these agents for prolonged time periods at high doses.”
In 2013, Insel announced that the latest research shows that psychiatry’s standard drug treatment for people diagnosed with schizophrenia and other psychoses needs to change. In February 2014, the New York Times published a feature story on Insel, noting that his questioning the long-term use of antipsychotics caused a major stir in psychiatry.
But while politically astute establishment psychiatrists such as Insel, Frances, and others are calling for reform, the institution of psychiatry may well be so damaged by a generation of drug company corruption that it cannot be reformed in any meaningful way.
Too Corrupt
The DSM is published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA), and according to the journal PLOS Medicine, “69% of the DSM –5 task force members report having ties to the pharmaceutical industry.” The corruption of the APA by Big Pharma is nothing new. In 2008, the New York Times reported the following about APA: “In 2006, the latest year for which numbers are available, the drug industry accounted for about 30 percent of the association’s $62.5 million in financing.” Congressional investigators in 2008 also discovered that then president-elect of the APA (Alan Schatzberg of Stanford University) had $4.8 million stock holdings in a drug development company.
Perhaps Big Pharma’s biggest bang for their buck has come through “thought leader” psychiatrists who popularize new diagnoses and drug treatments. One of psychiatry’s most influential thought leaders is Harvard’s Joseph Biederman who put pediatric bipolar disorder on the map. Due in great part to Biederman’s influence, the number of American children and adolescents treated for bipolar disorder increased 40-fold from 1994 to 2003.
Biederman’s financial relationships with drug companies was discovered by the public in 2008, when Congressional investigations revealed that he was on the take for $1.6 million in consulting fees from drug makers from 2000 to 2007. As part of legal proceedings, Biederman was forced to provide documents about his interactions with Johnson & Johnson, the giant pharmaceutical company; Biederman pitched Johnson & Johnson that his proposed research studies on its antipsychotic drug Risperdal would turn out favorably for Johnson & Johnson—and then Biederman delivered the goods.
Biederman is not alone among psychiatrists lining their pockets with drug company money. The New York Times (“Top Psychiatrist Didn’t Report Drug Makers’ Pay”) reporting on the 2008 Congressional investigation of psychiatry, stated this about Charles Nemeroff: “One of the nation’s most influential psychiatrists earned more than $2.8 million in consulting arrangements with drug makers from 2000 to 2007.”
While psychiatrists have grabbed the big money from drug companies, a few thought leader psychologists are picking up Big Pharma loose change. A major popularizer of sluggish cognitive tempo (SCT) is psychologist Russell Barkley. The New York Times recently reported Barkley saying that “SCT is a newly recognized disorder” and that Barkley received $118,000 from 2009 to 2012 from Eli Lilly for consulting and speaking engagements, and that Barkley has stated that Lilly’s drug Strattera’s performance on SCT symptoms was “an exciting finding.”
Psychiatrists routinely dominate ProPublica’s “Dollars for Docs” list of large payments from pharmaceutical companies. And being on the take from Big Pharma affects prescribing practices. The New York Times reported in 2007, “Psychiatrists who took the most money from makers of antipsychotic drugs tended to prescribe the drugs to children the most often.” A 2007 analysis of Minnesota psychiatrists revealed that psychiatrists who received at least $5,000 from makers of newer-generation antipsychotic drugs wrote, on average, three times as many prescriptions to children for these drugs as psychiatrists who received less money or none.
In her book The Truth about the Drug Companies (2004), Marcia Angell, physician and former editor in chief of The New England Journal of Medicine, documents the corruption of medicine by Big Pharma, with some of the most egregious examples being in psychiatry. Angell details how the head of the psychiatry department at Brown University Medical School made over $500,000 in one year consulting for drug companies that make antidepressants; Angell remarked, “When The New England Journal of Medicine, under my editorship, published a study by him and his colleagues of an antidepressant agent, there wasn’t enough room to print all the authors’ conflict-of-interest disclosures. The full list had to be put on the website.” In Surviving America’s Depression Epidemic, I document several areas in which Big Pharma has corrupted psychiatry, including funding university psychiatry departments (for example, Harvard Medical School’s psychiatry department at Massachusetts General Hospital received $6.5 million from four drug companies).
Insane and Ridiculous
The Oxford dictionary defines insane as “a state of mind that prevents normal perception, behavior, or social interaction; seriously mentally ill.” Has the institution of psychiatry become insane, and is that why politically astute psychiatrists are trying to distance themselves from it?
Besides drug company payoffs, another way that psychiatry as an institution has been prevented from having “normal perceptions” is that most psychiatrists no longer talk to their patients to discover the context of why they are behaving as they do. Robert Spitzer, perhaps the most inside of all insider psychiatrists in the 1980s and the chair of the DSM-3 task force, is now critical of the DSM’s inattention to context that results in the medicalizing of normal reactions.
In 2011, the New York Times (“Talk Doesn’t Pay, So Psychiatry Turns Instead to Drug Therapy”) reported, “A 2005 government survey found that just 11 percent of psychiatrists provided talk therapy to all patients.” As the article points out, psychiatrists can make far more money primarily providing “medication management.” A typical medication management session consists of checking symptoms and updating prescriptions, and patients are usually in and out with a new prescription in five or ten minutes.
When Big Pharma is paying thought leader psychiatrists who invent and popularize “illnesses” such as pediatric bipolar disorder, and when most psychiatrists are only conducting medication managements, tragically insane treatments become the “standard of care.” The high-profile case of Tufts-New England Medical Center (a bastion of the psychiatric establishment) and Rebecca Riley, covered by “60 Minutes” reveals that standard of care in psychiatry has become insane.
When Rebecca Riley was 28 months old, based primarily on the complaints of her mother that she was “hyper” and had difficulty sleeping, psychiatrist Kayoko Kifuji diagnosed Rebecca with ADHD. Kifuji prescribed clonidine, a drug with significant sedating properties, a drug that Kifuji also prescribed to Rebecca’s older sister and brother. The goal of the Riley parents—obvious to many people in their community and later to juries—was to attain psychiatric diagnoses for their children that would qualify them for disability payments and to sedate their children making them easy to manage. But apparently this was not obvious to Kifuji who, when Rebecca was three years old, added a bipolar disorder diagnosis and prescribed two additional heavily sedating drugs, the antipsychotic Seroquel and the anticonvulsant Depakote. At the age of four, Rebecca died due to the toxicity of these drugs. After Rebecca’s death, Tufts-New England Medical Center, Kifuji’s employer, told “60 Minutes,” “The care we provided was appropriate and within responsible professional standards.”
Psychiatry has a long history of ridiculous and invalid disorders and insane and dehumanizing treatments. Until the early 1970s, homosexuality was an official DSM mental illness and was treated with aversive conditioning, which included electro-shocking same-sex attraction.
Since 1980, the DSM has pathologized stubborn, rebellious, and noncompliant young people, diagnosing them with opposition defiant disorder (ODD); symptoms include “often actively defies or refuses to comply with adult requests or rules” and “often argues with adults.” And once again, a ridiculous and invalid “illness” has a dehumanizing and insane treatment. In December 2012, the Archives of General Psychiatry reported that, between 1993-2009, there was a seven-fold increase of children 13 years and younger being prescribed antipsychotic drugs, and that “disruptive behavior disorders”—which includes ODD—were the most common diagnoses in children medicated with antipsychotics, accounting for 63% of those medicated.
In the 1970s, before Big Pharma corrupted and virtually annexed psychiatry, and when most psychiatrists learned something about their patients’ lives, it was not all that radical for psychiatrists to make connections between emotional suffering and societal problems. With Big Pharma corruption of psychiatry, a denial of the importance of society, politics, and culture to our emotional well being has ensued.
As I described in 2013 (“What’s Behind ‘Substantial Increases’ in Suicide Rate for Middle-Aged Americans? Bad Economy Is Likely Culprit”), the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reported on May 3, 2013 that the suicide rate among Americans age 35–64 years increased 28.4 percent between 1999-2010. The Lancet estimates that the three-year recessionary period from 2008 thru 2010 was a source in the United States for “4,750 excess suicide deaths.” But how much has the American public heard from psychiatry that suicide and depression are related to a crappy economy and societal misery?
A generation ago, the institution of psychiatry, with the backing of Big Pharma, began to exclusively focus on patients’ symptoms, and stopped focusing on anything but superficial aspects of their patients’ lives, while at the same time self-promoting its progress in diagnostics, research, and the prescribing of drugs. Today, as Robert Whitaker puts it, “We see that its diagnostics are being dismissed as invalid; its research has failed to identify the biology of mental disorders to validate its diagnostics; and its drug treatments are increasingly being seen as not very effective or even harmful. That is the story of a profession that has reason to feel insecure about its place in the marketplace.”
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Dear Bruce
The ‘Psychiatrists’ are not just insane, they are insane and dangerous to society. Its not surprising that Spokesmen are getting cautious, as permanent drug damage is showing up in the general population.
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Thank you, Bruce, for speaking the truth. I literally had my entire life declared a “credible fictional story” by a psychiatrist, because he’d never listened to a word I said, and majorly tranquilized me based upon documented lies from the people who abused my children. According to my family’s medical records, concerns of child abuse, with medical evidence, is “bipolar.”
How sad it took the words of an oral surgeon, “concerns of child abuse aren’t cured with antipsychotics” to wake up / embarrass my FIFTH psychiatrist, so I could finally be weaned off drugs that were all “Foul ups” for me. But the psychiatrists were also covering up the easily recognized “bad fix” on a broken bone of mine and the bad drug cocktail mandated to cover up the “bad fix,” including a dangerous “safe smoking cessation med” / dangerous antidepressant. It trust me, dealing with the complete lack of ethics and decency of mainstream psychiatry is definitely insanity, in practice.
The top psychiatrists should be embarrassed by what’s going on, as should all of mainstream medicine. Thank you for being one of the decent.
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Hmmm… i really should read this more thoroughly and will — but my impulsive suspicion as to why the head of NIMH and others would make such bold progressive-sounding statements is that they see the need for damage control, and so would rather take the initiative themselves rather than leave these obvious vulnerabilities and absurdities of their profession to others to expose, in the process stripping the mental illness industry of any remaining facade of credibility. (But we will anyway.)
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They likely just realised that they’re likely to face serious mainstream opposition if they continue in this direction so they are trying to tone it down. Actually, in a perverse kid of way the madness of DSM5 is a good thing but we can’t just let it be “fixed” by the same people who control the system now to make it a bit more acceptable for the general public. There has to be some paradigm change not just getting rid of the two most outrageously sounding disorders.
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Hi Bruce,
Thank you for organizing and presenting this article. You have captured much of what so many of us sense.
Thanks again,
Cindy
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The underlying common denominator in all these articles is Big Pharma. And I agree. I saw first hand what these drugs did to my son. So, my question is, when are we going to mount a large scale, concerted assault against the pharmaceutical companies in this country. I want all their dirty laundry laid bare. Their has been way too much ‘collateral damage’ done all in the name of ever-increasing, never-ending profits.
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I like the video clip of the kind and seasoned family MD. (from Mayberry perhaps)
“You know, the more you talk about your problems, the easier they are to solve. Bottling things up inside is bad”.
A good pediatrician is gold.
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Thank you for stating the truth in such a compelling and articulate way! The problem is deeper than the corruption of Big Pharma and mainstream psychiatry. It also extends to our elected representatives (bought and paid for by Big Pharma contributions), the media (not about to take a pass on the advertising dollars), and, most tragically, NAMI, which became a Pharma lapdog and is part of the problem. In a way, NAMI is aptly named. We should think about forming a competing organization —National Association for Mental HEALTH, to educate the public and those NAMI families who are educable. Politicians will not listen until they are confronted with a political force and pressure and that can only come from a groundswell of informed and passionate voices.
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On the highjacking of politicians by big money there are people who are targeting this specific problem right now in US:
http://www.wolf-pac.com/
Support them in any way possible, at least sign a petition – they’re trying to call for a constitutional convention to add an amendment preventing the big money lobbying in politics (which would overturn Citizens United etc.). They had some victories already and it makes sense to help them – money in politics is also our problem and anyone trying to solve it is an ally. More details on how they want to do it exactly in the link.
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I think that this is the most urgent issue of our time…and related to many other areas where our government is no longer a democracy, but the lapdog of multi-national corporations. We need to prevent corporations from having the same rights as human beings and get moneyed interests out of our political process…
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Recently Northwestern and Princeton Universities released a study that concluded the USA was an oligarchy and not a democracy. The article said that this would be taught in classes at these two universities. So probably in others as well. Thus, the military has been making the world safe for oligarchy. That matches the facts.
My observation is the USA is making its citizens sick. It is impossible now to find anyone who is either not on a psychiatric medication or who does not have a friend or relative using them. My neighborhood could be viewed as an asylum were it not for the Hispanics who seem more immune to mental illness. Lots of bi-polar and alcoholism.
The Bundy Ranch is a good example of taking a stand against the oligarchy. When the whole nation decides to be a Bundy Ranch then the oligarchy will recede–though that element never entirely goes away.
Bringing down the psychiatrists is a good start . . . next the pharmaceuticals . . . then the medical world needs a real revolution . . . then the schools . . . our food supply . . . our water and air . . . the nuclear power plants need to go . . . the military budget needs a major cut . . . we need office holders who can make friends with other nations and not enemies . . . it can be done.
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Although Big Pharma corruption is most prevalent and visible in psychiatry, all the other specialties in medicine are also being influenced. I have a young GP who only wants to prescribe the latest and most expensive of drugs when there are other cheaper alternatives available for the problems I experience. He acts as if he’s never heard of the word generic. And if I question him about what he’s prescribing he becomes angry and arrogant and calls me noncompliant. Big Pharma corruption flows over into all areas of medicine.
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Why do you patronize this GP? Why even have a GP, as opposed to an Internist? Do you live in an underserved area with no doctors? No one should ever be arrogant, least of all this guy, for reasons too numerous to mention!
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Hi Stephen,
Even arrogant doctors usually understand the issue of cost. How about saying to him that you really want to work with him to become compliant but if you can’t afford the treatment he is suggesting, that goal will not unfortunately be achieved.
If I remember correctly, you don’t have the option of switching, right?
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Right. I’m stuck with him right now until I can perhaps make other arrangements. I think I’ll take your advice and try the “oh, I so want to be compliant” route and see what happens.
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Stephen, Everything is gone generic over here in the UK. I checked the prices with the pharmacist, and the NHS actually makes a profit on my prescription (but, not much).
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When he’s getting paid to treat you, HE is obligated to YOU. People diagnosed with mental illness, people suffering obesity, and people who doctors think are beneath them suffer medical neglect unnecessarily, regularly, and inexcusably.
An obstetrician tried to charge me $800 dollars for dropping by uninvited after the stillbirth delivery of my daughter, perching on my bed, putting his hand on mine, and saying, “You should use birth control.”
I called and asked what I was paying for when I got the bill, then told him what I would pay him. I paid what he said he paid the intern who did the delivery. Later, after I had moved to another state, I got a check for fifty dollars from him. Guess he got honest with himself.
My V.A. doctors do not even think of talking to me the way that doctor talked to you. He might be under pressure from management people who have a high school diploma and no other education higher, to write scrips for patented medicine to make more money for the HMO, but that doesn’t excuse the attitude that you should be unconditionally compliant to his every whim. That’s medical abuse.
Get this story— an Asian woman who was having difficulty with her blood sugar and symptoms of low blood sugar, was told by her doctor to “stop eating rice with everything.” Not long after that insult, she passed out while driving, totalled her car, and then it was discovered that she had tumors on her pancreas.
Grrrr. Maybe we should pay for working class people to get degrees in medicine so we don’t have to be at the mercy of so many prima donnas.
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Artist Creates Self-Portraits On Different Drugs
http://elitedaily.com/envision/artist-creates-self-portraits-on-different-drugs-and-the-results-are-insane-photos/
This man has done an incredible job of capturing the essence of what these drugs do. They are both humorous and frightening by turns. Imagine them lining the walls of a medical school where psychiatry is taught or even better a pharmacy. While you wait in line you get a powerful candid portrait painted of a man on your drug!!!!
I hope these will circulate widely as they tell what is beyond words.
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Oldest trick in the books, check out this guy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanis%C5%82aw_Ignacy_Witkiewicz
(the Polish site actually describes his style of painting and drugs related to it in more detail – ha had a whole system).
He painted pictures on different drugs and would always sign the canvas with names of substances he was on at the time. That may be the one useful thing for the drugs to help you with…
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Thanks for the link, AgniYoga. I’m a fine artist, also, and my work collectively visually tells the story of painting iatrogenic bipolar. A picture paints a thousand words, is right. After I get my anger out, I’ll write the story to market my work. It’s not the story I had been planning on telling with my artwork, but it’s a socially relevant one, at least. Since psychiatrists tend to target artists, I’m guessing we’ll be seeing a lot of artwork addressing the over-medicalization of America. And, we already are, I went to a show recently and would say about 30% of the work related to pharmaceuticals.
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wow! thnx
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The worst thing: there is no accountability for any deaths or injury. It’s difficult enough to find a “regular” doctor guilty of medical error or misconduct. To prosecute the psychiatrist borders on impossible.
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So true, it is the injustice that kills me, too. But maybe Dante was right in his epic poem, Dante’s Inferno, and the hypocrites will land in the lowest depths of hell?
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That only helps you if you believe heaven and hell. I personally don’t. It’s all in our hands to change the system…
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I agree, we have to point out the problems to help the system change. Personally, I believe it is our souls that do or do not deserve eternal life, and some day we’ll all be judged. As to whether there’s a heaven and hell, I don’t personally know.
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On the list of Doctors taking money from Pharma Co. do not forget Dr Goodwin who earned at least $1.3 million from 2000 to 2007. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/22/health/22radio.html
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From the video , 40 000 statistically probable manic persons from 4%. Horrific events will induce anger, fear and sadness in the public, so more drugs will be issued. The worship of the tiny molecule God came from the discovery of penicillin and the creation of the birth control pill. April 1967 http://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19670407,00.html
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Very well written article making entirely valid points, thanks. I wish I could write like this.
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Thank you for posting this, I will send this on to many professionals I know.
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Excellent Bruce. Since its origins in the eugenics movement that came to captivate NAZI thinking, psychiatry has been based on a series of unscientifically supported delusions, disguised as science. This in itself qualifies the profession as “insane.”
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Yes, psychiatry is insane. And we know based upon it’s history that their goal was to take eugenic belief control to America, to take it over, and they seemingly have. And we know the former German eugenics believers did come to America.
But in reality, the psychiatric drugs cause the psychiatric symptoms of the serious “mental illnesses,” and it’s now been proven they have nothing to do with genetics. Psychiatry is now nothing more than a fraudulent “science” used as “social control” to cover up things like “bad fixes” on broken bones for incompetent doctors and sodomy for sicko pastors.
Absolute power should never be given to any profession, it results in absolute corruption. And that is what has happened to psychiatry.
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Actually, Someone, Hitler was inspired by U.S. eugenicists who had been sterilizing people since the early years of the 20th Century. Those Germans coming here after WW II were just reporting back to the mother-ship.
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You are correct, Wiley.
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Someone Else
It is true that the DSM as the Bible of Psychiatry is a good example of group madness. I’ve noticed as well, on an individual basis that quite a few psychiatrists have the overall appearance of mental unwellness, along with ‘out of touch’ institutionalised thinking. Many are so obsessed with strange ideas that their judgement is bound to be unreliable. These are the people given the absolute power.
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I agree, Fiachra, and it’s nuts to give any group, especially one that is so misguided as to believe in a “lacking in validity” “bible,” absolute power.
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I saw a psychiatrist for two sessions who spent an inordinate amount of time attending his fussy collection of pens with nibs, while I was talking about spending six minutes in DefCon 2 with no reason to believe that we were not seeing a decapitating first strike by the Soviet Union. I was telling him about the negative association I had with computers and how, when I went to college with the money I earned from my service, I used the old card system instead of the computer because they used the same IBM keyboards we used in missile warning. He asked, “So you thought the world would blow up if you touched the keyboard?”
Idiot.
Evidentially, everything about PTSD has now been forgotten since it is now “a disease” caused by a lack of “resilience” that is probably genetic. He appeared to think that my experience in nuclear forces had made me completely ignorant of the processes that were required in order to “blow up the world” and thought I was the one who was confused about “triggers”.
Double idiot.
I saw a woman at the Vet center who had a Prozac mask and looked at her nails while I talked about my fears of total global annihilation. I understand the risk of vicarious trauma, but is it too much to ask that they be fully present and listen while they’re getting paid ten times what I get paid to give my caregiving clients my undivided attention?
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After some decent doctors and nurses in my PCP’s practice finally realized I was being poisoned by my neurologist, and my PCP was encouraging this, they handed over my family’s medical records and told me to find a new family physician. I read the medical records, found the medical evidence of the sexual abuse of my child, and realized the neurologist was completely delusional – he’d been drugging me based on a list of lies from the child molesters. I confronted the neurologist with his delusions. He freaked, and literally declared my entire life a “credible fictional story” in his medical records.
Complete idiot
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“PTSD has now been forgotten since it is now “a disease” caused by a lack of “resilience” that is probably genetic.”
Well, in this day and age if your emotional response to anything, let alone serious trauma, is anything else than that of a total sociopath you are lacking resilience.
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Dear B, You’re right there. Its an attempt to medicalise human experience. If in basic psychotherapy I learn to stop worrying, then I am coming to terms with past trauma. Its not about lack of resilience or genetics, its about someone helping me to improve my approach to life.
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My friend’s description of a psychiatrist in the acute ward:
“He looked like a crazy doctor from a movie. Do they all have the crazy psychiatrist’s smile like that?”
Just to clarify: she wasn’t the patient, just an outside observer. I could write stories about people I met, not one I’d trust with sweeping the pavement in front of my house, let alone my mental health.
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Dear B
I think a lot of psychiatrists could be considered mentally unwell on the grounds of strange behavior and strange ideas. Its nearly as if they choose the job as a cover.
I would give them jobs feeding the lions at the zoo.
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Exactly.
German psychiatrists were the ones who came up with the gas chambers and the ovens, not the Nazis. The German psychiatrists even instructed the Nazis on the use of these things when Hitler realized that they could be put to use in his Final Solution. German psychiatrists were emptying their psychiatric institutions right and left, not by good treatment but my the process of murder. They stopped the gasing of patients during the latter part of WWII but then murdered the people left in the institutions by starving them to death. American soldiers talked about finding bodies and dying people when they went into these institutions when the Allies took over Germany.
Many American psychiatrists supported what the German psychiatrist did as evidenced by the speech of the keynote speaker at the APA’s annual convention in 1941. This doctor advocated a “good death” for the “mentally ill and the feeble minded!” Only two doctors stood up to oppose what he said.
Of course, all of this is carefully hidden now and psychiatrists get angry if you talk about it, but this is all factual. There are a couple of books written about the Nazi doctors and how they implemented their process of murder. A lawyer by the name of James McHaney, from Little Rock, Arkansas, was intrumental in prosecuting many of these psychiatrists at Nuremburg(sp) after the war. Many of them were hanged.
I believe that it’s very dangerous to allow psychiatry to hold the power that it does at this point in time. Many will say that this couldn’t happen in the United States but as someone points out here, American psychiatrists were sterilizing “mental patients” against their will in the 1920’s. This is how German psychiatry started out, which then led to the gas chambers and ovens. Wily Witch makes a very good observation when she states that the German psychiatrists and doctors who came to America after WWII were just reporting back to the mother ship!
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That video, Dr. Levine, was very gratifying to watch. No matter how convinced I am, I still need to hear it over and over again, and still have not developed a way to convince those who are sold on the biological model to reconsider it.
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Where do people locate themselves? Where is the “me” located; and is the “me” any different than the “I”? Some people at least speak about their inner life. Or someone might say, what do you feel or see when you look within yourself? Where is that within? I am sure a person does not mean their liver or lungs or their brain. But there is a space, a private space occupied by the I or the me or the I-me.
Now the psychiatrist does not bother with these “metaphors”. Science dispenses with folk language. The psychiatrist has photos of the functioning brain in color. He hopes to prove something, but he is not a neurologist. Nor a pharmacist. But he uses pills.
Soon he will have a machine that he will hook you up to. The machine will have a program and stimulate various areas of the brain depending on the diagnosis which the machine will make first. Like the most modern vehicles that can be tested diagnostically with a computer. Eliminate human error.
Perhaps later the psychiatrist will be replaced with a very advanced robot. This robot will read brain scans and micro expressions. It will know you like you have never been known. It will read your body completely. Even your DNA.
It will have you implanted with a chip so that it can be with you always. It will be your secret second self. You will never be alone or inconsolable. It will be the God you never had.
This sounds like science fiction. Science has a realm. That which exits is the subject matter of science; that which is quantifiable. Souls can not be measured–so souls do not exist. Bodies can be quantified so they exist. Logical positivism. But it is not really logical as it is based on an assumption. The senses give us the only real knowledge. That can not be proved. Christians actually support empiricism. They are very attached to the body that will be resurrected. I am not sure what they need a soul for? They have the body.
Psychiatry belongs to this misguided confusion about what is real. What is real? What is the closest to you? Your body, your thoughts, your feelings, the part of you that witnesses you? If you are the witness then by scientific definition you are not real. Sorry. The Witness can not be perceived because that which sees can not be seen. You are not a thing. Even a soul would be a subtle thing.
So the psychiatrist stands on a position that denies you exist. He does not deny that there is an animated body across from him. But the real you is non existent for him. No wonder that he flounders around. He can only treat the real. That means the body. You have to be the body and nothing more. But you may not oblige him. And that is where the crux of the problem is. The psychiatrist thinks that you are a naturally occurring robot. He can not define or grasp the essence of Consciousness/Life.
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Hi AgniYoga, the research psychiatrist is bluffing, while he’s doing all this he’s got his other hand out to the drug company. Its the chemical imbalance in the brain fraud extended.
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I agree with what you might to be suggesting regarding spirituality: I think Deepak Chopra rates distress as attachment to the external life and image (body included).
The Christians themselves have different viewpoints depending on where they’re at, some might be very spiritual as well.
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The giant pharmaceuticals are so financially powerful that they are too bog to fail. They control all manner of things behind closed doors and not only drugs and many within the medical profession.
‘Global Pharmaceutical Giants have made Criminal Activity and the Fines a part of their Drug Costs’ – http://worldinnovationfoundation.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/global-pharmaceutical-giants-have-made.html
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Hi. This blog seems to do a great job of articulating the maddening effect of psychiatry. I’m looking for articulation of the maddening effect of other mental health providers as well, particularly regarding dehumanizing degradation & lack of basic common sense awareness about interacting with those of us on the autistic spectrum. I’m not talking about the need for formal education, although that would be nice. I’m talking about the need to simply listen to us on suicide lines, in community & peer mental health organizations, and in counseling offices.
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