3 Troubling Reasons Psychiatry Retains Power Despite Lost Scientific Credibility

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“What’s a guy gotta do around here to lose a little credibility?” asked ProPublica reporter Jesse Eisinger in a 2012 piece about top Wall Street executives who created the financial meltdown but who remain top Wall Street executives, continue to sit on corporate and nonprofit boards, serve as regulators, and whose opinions are sought out by prominent op-ed pages and talk shows. Wall Street is not the only arena that one can be completely wrong and still retain powerful influence.

Influential “thought leader” psychiatrists and major psychiatry institutions, by their own recent admissions, have been repeatedly wrong about illness/disorder validity, biochemical causes, and drug treatments; and also, in several cases, have been discovered to be on the take from drug companies—yet continue to be taken seriously by the mainstream media.

While Big Pharma financial backing is one reason that psychiatry is able to retain its clout, this is not the only reason. More insidiously, psychiatry retains influence because of the needs of the larger power structure that rules us. And perhaps most troubling, psychiatry retains influence because of us—and our increasing fears that have resulted in our expanding needs for coercion.

But before discussing these three reasons, some documentation of psychiatry’s lost scientific credibility in several critical areas.

Psychiatry’s Lost Scientific Credibility

DSM Invalidity. In 2013, the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic bible, the DSM, was slammed by the pillars of the psychiatry establishment. Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)—the highest U.S. governmental mental health official—offered a harsh rebuke of the DSM, announcing that the DSM’s diagnostic categories lack validity, and he stated that “NIMH will be re-orienting its research away from DSM categories.” Also in 2013, Allen Frances, the former chair of the DSM-4 taskforce, published his book, Saving Normal: An Insider’s Revolt against Out-of-Control Psychiatric Diagnosis, DSM-5, Big Pharma, and the Medicalization of Ordinary Life.

Biochemical Imbalance Theory Debunked. It was a great surprise for NPR reporter Alix Spiegel in 2012 to discover that the psychiatric establishment now claims that it has always known that the biochemical imbalance theory of depression was not true. Ronald Pies, editor-in-chief emeritus of the Psychiatric Times stated in 2011, “In truth, the ‘chemical imbalance’ notion was always a kind of urban legend—never a theory seriously propounded by well-informed psychiatrists.” NIMH director Insel had already told Newsweek in 2007 that depression is not caused by low levels of neurotransmitters such as serotonin. However, psychiatry made no serious attempt to publicize the fact that the research had rejected this chemical imbalance theory, a theory effectively used in commercials to sell antidepressants as correcting this chemical imbalance—an imbalance which psychiatry knew did not exist.

Rethinking the Effectiveness of Antipsychotic and Antidepressant Drug Treatments. In 2013, NIMH director Insel also announced that psychiatry’s standard treatment for people diagnosed with schizophrenia and other psychoses has not been helpful to many people and needs to change so as to better reflect the diversity in this population. Citing long-term treatment studies, Insel concluded that in the long-term, many individuals who have been diagnosed with psychosis actually do better without antipsychotic medication. With respect to antidepressants, “60 Minutes” in 2012 reported on what antidepressant researchers have long known: placebos do almost as well as antidepressants even in drug-company studies that are biased in favor of the antidepressants. The “60 Minutes” report focused on research psychologist Irving Kirsch who used the Freedom of Information Act to study published and nonpublished drug company studies involving 6,944 patients from the FDA database trials of the six most popular antidepressants (Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, Effexor, Celexa, and Serzone).

Psychiatric Treatments May Cause Increased SuicideThe FDA —despite protests by the psychiatric establishment—has issued “black box warnings” about the potential for increased suicidality for patients under the age of 25 who use antidepressants. In 2014, AlterNet reported “Research Suggests That Psychiatric Interventions Like Admission to a Mental Facility Could Increase Suicide Risk” about a University of Copenhagen study comparing Danish individuals who committed suicide to matched controls between the years 1996 and 2009. The researchers found that taking psychiatric medications in a prior year was linked to a 5.8 times increase in suicide; contact with a psychiatric outpatient clinic was associated with an 8.2 times increase; visiting a psychiatric emergency room was linked to a 27.9 times increase; and admission to a psychiatric hospital was linked to a 44.3 times increase in suicide.

While correlation by itself does not necessarily mean causation, an accompanying editorial in the same journal where the article was published pointed out that associations with the features detailed in this particular study indicate a good possibility of a causal relationship. Among the reasons why psychiatric treatment could well cause increased suicide, besides the adverse effects of medication, is the stigma and trauma of treatment, as the editorial authors state: “It is therefore entirely plausible that the stigma and trauma inherent in (particularly involuntary) psychiatric treatment might, in already vulnerable individuals, contribute to some suicides.”

Creating Stigma with Biochemical Defect Theories. In the psychiatry establishment, it has long been proclaimed that framing mental illness as a brain disease or a biochemical defect would result in less stigmatization. But the Canadian Health Services Research Foundation (CHSRF), in a review of the research titled “Myth: Reframing Mental Illness as a ‘Brain Disease’ Reduces Stigma” reported in 2012: “Despite good intentions, evidence actually shows that anti-stigma campaigns emphasizing the biological nature of mental illness have not been effective, and have often made the problem worse.” One example is a 2010 study in Psychiatry Research that reported for the general public, the acceptance of the “biogenetic model of mental illness” was associated with a desire for a greater social distance from the mentally ill. The CHSRF review states: “The evidence shows us that while the public may assign less blame to individuals for their biologically-determined mental illness, the very idea that their actions may be beyond their conscious control can create fear of their unpredictability and thus the perception that those with mental illnesses are dangerous. . . leading to avoidance.”

Corruption of Psychiatry by Big PharmaBig pharma heavily funds university psychiatry departments, sponsors conferences and continuing education for psychiatrists, advertises in their professional journals, and pays well-known clinicians and researchers to be speakers and consultants. I documented in Surviving America’s Depression Epidemic in 2007 and updated in Truthout in 2012 how virtually every way the public and doctors get information about mental health has been corrupted by drug company dollars. In 2008, Congressional investigations of psychiatry revealed that major psychiatry institutions such as the American Psychiatric Association and several “thought leader” psychiatrists, including Harvard psychiatrist Joseph Biederman, were on the take from drug companies, creating obvious conflicts of interest and further damaging psychiatry’s credibility.

The New York Times reported the following about Biederman: “A world-renowned Harvard child psychiatrist whose work has helped fuel an explosion in the use of powerful antipsychotic medicines in children earned at least $1.6 million in consulting fees from drug makers from 2000 to 2007”; and the Times later reported that Biederman had pitched Johnson & Johnson that his proposed research studies on its antipsychotic drug Risperdal would turn out favorably for Johnson & Johnson—and then delivered the goods. Biederman was only one of several thought leader psychiatrists exposed by Congressional investigations. The DSM diagnostic manual 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.”

Why Psychiatry Retains Power Despite Lost Credibility

Drug companies need the general public to take psychiatric drug prescribers seriously, and so Big Pharma financially support psychiatry institutions and thought leaders. And Big Pharma has huge clout over the mainstream media via the mainstream media’s dependency on Big Pharma’s advertising dollars. While Big Pharma is the most obvious reason that psychiatry retains power despite a loss of scientific credibility, it may not be the most important reason. Psychiatry serves the needs of the power structure in general. And in our increasingly fear-based society, psychiatry meets our own increasing needs for coercion.

Meeting the Coercion Needs of the Power Structure

Ruling elites and power structures—from monarchies to military dictatorships to the U.S. corporatocracy —have routinely used “professionals” to control the population from rebelling against economic inequalities and social injustices so as to maintain the status quo. Power structures routinely rely on police and clergy, and today the U.S. power structure also uses mental health professionals. Medication and behavior modification “treatments” have been utilized to subvert resistance to a dehumanizing status quo, be it in a family or in the larger society. The following are a few examples of how both psychiatry and psychology have met the needs of the power structure in return for status and money.

MKULTRA: A piece of American history sounds like the rant of a crackpot conspiracy theorist but ultimately was confirmed decades later by the U.S. Congress’s Church Committee investigations, acknowledged by the U.S. Supreme Court, and documented in The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate”: The CIA and Mind Control: The Secret History of the Behavioral Sciences by former State Department officer John Marks. Ewen Cameron, president of the American Psychiatric Association in 1953, sought powerful ways to break down patient resistance, and he experimented with LSD as well as with electroshock and sensory deprivation. The CIA, under a project code-named MKULTRA, eager to learn more about Cameron’s techniques, funded him as well as other renowned psychiatrists in the 1950s and 1960s to conduct brainwashing experiments.

Assistance in Interrogation/Torture: Shortly after the tragic events of September 11, 2001, the American Psychological Association (APA) made high-level efforts to nurture relationships with the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and other government agencies. As Truthout reported in 2014, the APA aimed “to position psychology and behavioral scientists as key players in U.S. counterterrorism and counterintelligence activities.” The APA not only condoned but actually applauded psychologists’ assistance in interrogation/torture in Guantánamo and elsewhere.

Subverting Resistance by U.S. Soldiers: Psychiatrists and psychologists have subverting resistance by U.S. soldiers in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan via psychiatric drug “treatments” and behavioral manipulations. According to the Navy Times in 2010, one in six U.S. armed service members were taking at least one psychiatric drug, many of these medicated soldiers in combat zones. Martin Seligman, a former president of the American Psychological Association, has consulted with the U.S. Army’s Comprehensive Soldier Fitness positive psychology program (as I reported in AlterNet in 2010). Seligman achieved not only “social position and rank” for himself but several million dollars for his University of Pennsylvania Positive Psychology Center, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, which quoted Seligman saying, “We’re after creating an indomitable military.”

Pathologizing and Medicating Noncompliance: Both psychiatrists and psychologists pathologize and medicate anti-authoritarianism and noncompliance, which I described in AlterNet in 2012. Many individuals diagnosed with mental disorders are essentially anti-authoritarians, and a potentially large army of anti-authoritarian activists are being kept off democracy battlefields by mental health professionals who have pathologized and depoliticized their pain.

Meeting Our Needs for Coercion

“It seems to me that this coercive function is what society and most people actually appreciate most about psychiatry. . . . Psychiatry has never ever needed scientific evidence to spread its ideas and practices, and possibly never will.” —David Cohen, researcher, UCLA professor of social welfare, practicing clinical social worker, and co-author of Mad Science.

Early in my career for two years, I worked as a psychiatry emergency room therapist. I observed countless instances of police dragging agitated people into the E.R. who were then forcibly placed in restraints. Some of those police remained in the E.R. to watch—in both admiration and envy—as to how quickly an injection of Haldol or some other antipsychotic drug could calm the person.

All societies, communities, and families coerce and control members who frighten them. However, the kinds of behavior that frightens people vary enormously, and thus what is permissible to control and coerce varies enormously. So, while it would be fairly universal for a society to coerce and control someone who is physically attacking another of its members, it is quite historically exceptional—as is done in U.S. society—to use antipsychotic drugs to subdue a bored seven-year old who is resisting classroom controls. In December 2012, the Archives of General Psychiatry (renamed JAMA Psychiatry) reported that, between 1993-2009, there was a seven-fold increase of children 13 years and younger being prescribed antipsychotic drugs, and that nonpsychotic conditions such as “disruptive behavior disorders” were the most common diagnoses in children medicated with antipsychotics, accounting for 63% of those medicated.

The dramatic growth of antipsychotic drugs in the United States is largely about ever-increasing societal acceptance of using drugs to control unwanted behaviors. Antipsychotics grossed over $18 billion a year in the United States by 2011, and by 2013 one antipsychotic drug, Abilify, was the highest grossing of all drugs in the United States with nearly $6.5 billion in sales. In addition to children—especially foster children—the burgeoning U.S. antipsychotic market includes the elderly in nursing homes and inmates in prisons and jails, where antipsychotic drugs are a relatively inexpensive way to subdue and more easily manage these populations.

In a 2014 article, “It’s the Coercion, Stupid!” David Cohen, in the tradition of Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization, updates how the societal need for psychiatry’s “extra-legal police function” compels society to be blind to psychiatry’s complete lack of scientific validity. Cohen notes: “Society’s appreciation for psychiatric coercion subtly, but radically, imbalances the playing field. Because of psychiatric coercion, society gives psychiatric theories a free pass. These theories never need to pass any rigorously devised tests (as we expect other important scientific theories to pass), they only need to be asserted.”

Thus, journalists’ continued exposure of psychiatry’s lack of science and its corruption by Big Pharma has had virtually no impact on reducing psychiatry’s influence. Substantive mental health reform will not come about unless society itself is reformed to be less fearful and less in need of controls and coercions. For example, if society could return to the idea that there are many extremely intelligent adolescents who are not “academics” and who do not need extended standard schooling but some other form of education to succeed in many occupations, then adolescent rebellion against standard schooling would not be so frightening for parents—and the compulsion to coerce and control via behavioral manipulations and psychiatric medications would disappear.

Cohen concludes, “Let’s face it: No one cares that psychiatric research of the past 50 years failed to turn up one finding of use for a scientific clinical psychiatry.”

Of course Cohen cares and so do all genuine scientists, but Cohen is right that as long as society needs the “extra-legal” coercion that psychiatry provides, society needs to remain in denial about the scientific illegitimacy of psychiatry. Without a decreased societal demand for coercion, psychiatry abolitionists should beware that if psychiatry ever does lose its clout, another coercive institution would likely fill the vacuum.

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Mad in America hosts blogs by a diverse group of writers. These posts are designed to serve as a public forum for a discussion—broadly speaking—of psychiatry and its treatments. The opinions expressed are the writers’ own.

35 COMMENTS

  1. A great article. Thanks, Bruce.

    In Hannah Arendt’s “Totalitarianism,” she says that, at the root of any totalitarian regime, there is always a camp. I thought about it a lot at the time, but I think it’s pretty fair to say that the rapidly expanding psychiatric base now fills the bill. Drugging is a camp on its own with layers of camps beneath, including the school system, prison system, and old folks homes.

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  2. In Ohio, there is a young man, John Rohrer, being held on civil commitment in state hospital and who was forcibly medicated because he “lacked capacity.” Here is actual words from a transcript of a hearing to determine whether to continue the confinement and forced medication. The psychiatrist testifies in an interesting Catch-22. It’s sort of like, “Why is he crazy?” “Because he won’t talk to me.” “And, why won’t he talk to you?” “Because he’s crazy.” Bruce Levine talks about why psychiatry retains its power. It’s because they (psychiatrists and the larger system) remain blind to their own arrogance and ignorance.

    John Rohrer’s Attorney Dye: You based your opinion on the reports of others, correct?
    Prosecuting Attorney’s Expert Psychiatrist John Hamill of Appalachian Behavioral Health in Athens, Ohio: For the capacity assessment? No, the main thing is when we were talking is his refusal to talk to me, probably the principal reason.
    Dye: Okay. And did he tell you specifically that he was refusing on advise of counsel?
    Hamill: He just said it was his right to refuse. That’s what I recall.
    Dye: And it is his right.
    Hamill: Yes, and I acknowledged that.
    Dye: But because he exercised a fundamental right in refusing to talk to you, you believed that that gives the state the right to force him to take medicines?
    Hamill: We have to assume that he lacks capacity because if somebody with capacity would argue that, given an extreme example if I’m in a hospital talking to somebody who refuses to talk to me because they are in a coma, I can’t assume they have the capacity to make that decision. I have to assume based on what they are telling me, somebody doesn’t tell me there’s no reasonable options then to assume they don’t have capacity.
    Dye: So when somebody exercises their right to refuse to speak with you, you make the jump, the assumption.
    Hamill: I would make the assumption and then it would be up to him to get another person to evaluate him. But yeah, if he doesn’t agree to any capacity assessment evaluation, then the assumption has to be they lack capacity.
    Dye: And would you agree then if that if he did have that second evaluation from somebody he did talk with that would be in a better position to decide whether or not he had the capacity to refuse or not?
    Hamill: If he had one, yes. If he was actually willing to talk to somebody about the medications and about treatment options, that would be a good one. Of course the question would be why didn’t he cooperate with me? And reflects either paranoia or lack of insight. People with insight for capacity assessment, we explain to them what’s going on, and people who are really on top of it will say I understand this and they want to have the conversation, they want to tell me their side of things, and really the best ones can say I understand where you’re coming from doctor, they can explain my side to me and explain their side and why they disagree.
    Dye: Following your assumption a little but further then, if he had had this independent examination done, and that person would be in a better position to make this incapacity decision.
    Hamill: Perhaps, yes, but there would still be the question of why he didn’t cooperate with me.
    Dye: How about because maybe he already had capacity evaluation already done by somebody else and didn’t see a reason to do another one.
    Hamill: He did not mention that to me, but okay. I’d be interested to see that.
    Dye: Would that be a valid reason to, or at least get a (inaudible) assumption of incapacity?
    Hamill: Yeah, that would help, it would help, but I would still be suspicious as to why he … again, most people, most reasonable people are usually willing to talk to me, if they disagree with it then they would get another evaluator.

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    • Thanks for this article. I admire this man for not speaking.

      I found that it is impossible to make calm objection under the law. You can speak, but, immediately afterwards, the ‘mental health’ professionals continue in exactly the same course. You can sue, but the judge rushes to receive his or her cues from the attorneys of the ‘mental health’ group.

      The only ones to even be embarrassed by the farce are the police. In their defence, I have seen them trying to bridge the gap with what is obviously a complete disregard for civil rights in the ‘mental health’ community. But, of course, even the police know that ‘doctors’ know best.

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        • Oops, I meant to say expunged court documents, which, of course, proved my legal right to a lawyer was illegally taken away. All the doctors have to do is forge the signatures of well insured patients to defraud insurance companies out of tens of thousands of dollar for unneeded “medical care” / torture.

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      • Rosentheim experiment sums it all – the moment they consider you crazy everything you say, do or not say or do is interpreted in terms of this narrative.

        “The only ones to even be embarrassed by the farce are the police.”
        Actually I totally agree. Not that there are no arrogant or abusive cops but for most part they are appalled by being forced to deliver people to torture chambers for minor public nuisances (if even that occurred). I had two police officers trying to convince me in a moment of crisis that I don’t want to go to the hospital under no circumstances (not threatening – more like “please, re-think this girl”) and I was a real pain to them.

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      • Exactly.

        But the psychiatrist keeps going back to the fact that the man refused to talk WITH HIM, so obviously the man has no capacity! How did people in the courtroom sit there without coming unglued and causing a ruckus since it’s so obvious to anyone reading this as to who exactly had the problem. The psychiatrist was like a dog that can’t turn loose of a bone!

        Talk about arrogance and ignorance wrapped up in one horrible package. And this psychiatrist was the so-called “expert psychiatric expert”!

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      • “‘Catch-22’ – a defining principal of psychiatry.” So true, and all the doctors know it. The doctor who finally got my PCP to step aside, since she was overseeing massive major drug interaction poisoning by a neurologist, apparently wanted to hide his identity, in case of a lawsuit. My medical records state his name is “Dr. #22.”

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  3. Thank you, Bruce, for this important blog. And I agree, those at the top feel a need to control people for their own purposes. And absolutely, the unjust psychiatric stigmatization, tranquilization, and poisoning of people is a much easier way for the religions to cover up their child molestation issues; it’s a much easier way for the incompetent doctors to cover up their easily recognized iatrogenesis; and it even makes stealing home equity away from the middle class families with fraudulent mortgage schemes much easier.

    Although this easy way of controlling people does lead to a disgustingly unjust and criminal society, since of course, it takes away the civil rights of those being unjustly controlled by the greed mongers. The U.S. used to be a society “of the people, for the people.” I wish we would go back to a society where it was understood that properly addressing crimes meant doing so in a court of law.

    And, of course, claiming psychiatric “care” is medical care, rather than honestly confessing it to be social control for the unethical and greedy criminals within our society, is fraud.

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      • Well, I was actually drugged up, then had all my money stolen. If you can believe it, my family was party to nine different corporate greed inspired class actions suits between 2008 and 2011, including one where my husband was fired due to age discrimination.

        And I was forced to sell my home at the very bottom of the housing crisis, via threats of foreclosure, but the bank didn’t have the original mortgage papers, assignment, nor even the date the mortgage was assigned to them. And I eventually was sent documentation by the mortgage company who I had refinanced with, imply they still had my mortgage. Unfortunately, according to the many lawyers I spoke to, “the Kane county judges were bought out by the banks.”

        Corporate thievery and fascism seems to be the game we’re playing.

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  4. The dramatic growth of antipsychotic drugs in the United States is largely about ever-increasing societal acceptance of using drugs to control unwanted behaviors.

    You can’t “pathologize non-compliance” without also suppressing critical thinking. Remember Yuppie? He/she is still very much with us, and in such a corrupt fashion. We’ve been, for some time, creating a nation of yes men and yes women. We reward them with perks, comforts, and whopping salaries as well as the contrast with the coercion and privations that results from saying, “no”.

    Coercion has gotten increasingly popular these days and, as such, it has also gotten much more subtle and sophisticated.

    Terrrific post, Bruce.

    I know it’s bad. I guess the question becomes, what do we do?

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  5. Great article.
    “Without a decreased societal demand for coercion, psychiatry abolitionists should beware that if psychiatry ever does lose its clout, another coercive institution would likely fill the vacuum.”
    That is sadly true. IT almost feel like human civilization is in a permanent battle between the good and the evil and it feels like right now the evils of society are winning.

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  6. But your assessment ignores the fact that a strong case can be made that using neuroleptic drugs on children like this is child abuse, especially since it causes permanent brain damage. Most people in this country are of the opinion that these drugs are safe and cause no such damage. Even if behavioral modification were still deemed necessary by society for these children, the use of neuroleptic drugs could and probably would be banned if people knew just what was really happening to the brains and subsequent futures of those children.

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  7. Bruce

    This was one of most important posts at MIA in a long time.

    You have added significant substance and depth to some of the same themes I have echoed here at MIA.

    I would only quibble with your use of one word. You said:

    “Substantive mental health reform will not come about unless society itself is REFORMED (emphasis added) to be less fearful and less in need of controls and coercions.”

    I don’t believe either system (the mental health system contained within the larger capitalist system) can be “reformed.” They both will have to be dismantled and replaced.

    Bruce, I love your writing and the depth of your political and social critique; keep writing – we need you.

    Richard

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    • oo – er

      To the Barricades!

      Unfortunately I suspect you are right.

      However when I made this argument to some service users recently who thought they were campaigning for better services they got so upset they asked me to stop talking to them.

      Must try to be more……conciliatory?……….. Even handed? ………. Understanding of other people?……………….

      Ah what the hell – I’m getting the superglue out and glueing myself to the local psyche hospital pharmace and never mind the consequences

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  8. Yes indeed, we do need to connect all the dots! The very fine documentary Doctors of the Dark Side https://www.doctorsofthedarkside.com/ describes in disillusioning detail the complicity of psychologists and other medical professionals in the use of torture by the Bush-Cheney Regime and the website includes other additional source material, including the 2013 Task Force Report Ethics Abandoned http://www.imapny.org/wp-content/themes/imapny/File%20Library/Documents/IMAP-EthicsTextFinal2.pdf . Taken together with America’s number 1 rank as having the highest per capita rate of imprisonment, the Snowden revelations about the ever-expanding surveillance state, the shocking numbers of children and adolescents (and especially those more vulnerable who are living in foster care settings) who are being “behaviorally managed” with neuroleptic drugs, the increasing militarization of local police forces and college campuses, the outsourcing of military functions to private security corporations, the hostile climate against whistleblowers and investigative journalists, the growing animosity against the poor and the unemployed… (to name but a few trends, as the list is very long!) and one can see psychiatry as but one of many building blocks towards an ever-expanding coercive system. The society that we are creating is one that even Richard Nixon and his thuggish buddies couldn’t have imagined and one that even former Stasi members could wet their pants over!
    Thanks Bruce. I am definitely pessimistic and certainly paranoid about the future, but does that make me clinically depressed or crazy??!

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  9. 3 troubling reasons psychiatry retains power despite lost scientific credibility.

    Thanks for this much needed and well reasoned post.

    What about a 4th more then troubling reason. The only type of credibility marker today that flies is ” how much money does it make and for how long can I keep the cash flow coming in and while my pile grows nothing is broke so don’t fix it and if the collateral damage gets bad we’ll manage it. Pseudo science and subterfuge in most every endeavor is the big money maker in America today . And of course with the money comes the power to bend others to their will. So much for freedom and justice for all. Our lives have turned into some kind of Kafka novel , for too many just a short story.
    The main precedent for the psychiatry cult is modern medicine itself. Look at these life robbing pseudo scientific procedures that have been flying for decades and longer some of which even the most well reasoning among us have unknowingly subjected our own children to. Vaccinations, flu shots, silver amalgam dental fillings ( actually 53% mercury) chemo , radiation , fluoride. Actually the only thing they are good at is physical trauma . About 2/3 of what they do either does no good or causes damage. It’s no wonder that the psychiatry cult is so bold in their pseudo scientific coercion , modern medicine set the precedent right from it’s own inception. Medical schools funded by robber barons create humongous coercive “collateral damage “on populations of the world.
    To these robber barons the people are like a herd of buffalo that they are taking pot shots at from the safety of a moving train .

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    • “The only type of credibility marker today that flies is ” how much money does it make and for how long can I keep the cash flow coming in and while my pile grows nothing is broke so don’t fix it and if the collateral damage gets bad we’ll manage it.”
      You hit the nail on the head.

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  10. Nothing will change until the people who were abused and exploited by psychiatry speak out against it. Otherwise you can’t really expect the public to take sides in the issue. As long as people are being persecuted by ‘voices in their head’ and unnamed forces in the ‘government’ then I think they are somewhat complicit in psychiatry’s game (it takes 2 to tango) and who am I to speak out against it?

    On the other hand, victims of the 12 Step cults are starting to speak out, and this is making a difference in ‘addiction treatment’. I am happy to help ensure that their voices are heard and respected.

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  11. I like your position and I understand that in this system, which naked corruption, the need to create the market is essential and the patient is the market, the medication create money as the deaths. The Systems sells us their grand views and methods as the elixir of fact truth and hope: pure in light deadly as Hemlock;

    The media’s the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power. Because they control the minds of the masses.
    Malcolm X

    Essentially it is racket, a money making deal with few of the good caught in the hell. In the current world order of truth: Megalomaniacs are Saints though they now propose nuclear war with Russia and have sacked the nation economically, environmentally and intellectually. These men we worship and honor: a billion lives lost is no issue to them.

    Past this we have the Zealots and God talkers and others who formulated a world of hell, and all in the name of the lord.

    Sainty in an insane world, would mean you are nuts. In world now, where the TV and its Apologist control the conscience spheres:
    Argument Two–The Colonization of Experience

    “It is no accident that television has been dominated by a handful of corporate powers. Neither is it accidental that television has been used to re-create human beings into a new form that matches the artificial, commercial environment. A conspiracy of technological and economic factors made this inevitable and continue to do so.” Book (Four Arguments for the Elimination of TV)

    Sanity, has been ruled defunct, empathy a moral weakness, compassion a fools game and love a worthless feeling in light, of the: Worship of Authority, Money and Pleasure. In this game we have the Mind Doctors — running their rackets and they need lots fresh blood to suck off of. Paradise lost, maybe the moment we forgot the meaning of ( helping, sharing and relating)

    Normality:

    Normality highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100, 000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty
    RD Lang

    I have suffered under Bureaucratic Psychologists and the system is immoral, unethical and no laws apply to the victims, but I have as well met the gifted the honest and well meaning. They are as rare as anything in the universe and now almost extinct or left the system for not wishing to be Sadists.

    Current human State is primal and some 100 men rule the world with Malice that Would Make the Romans either Smile or blush:

    http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article40867.htm

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  12. Another voice here in praise of this post and other posts written by Bruce Levin, Ph.D. Sometimes you need to hear or read someone else say and mean what you have been thinking, especially after experiencing communication suppressing/distorting environments which are presented as the only normal. When I read your posts, I’m feel I am on familiar ideological ground: a great deal of good horse sense, good observations and connecting the dots, and some good ideas on what to do about it.

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  13. MIA has a wealth of old-but-completely-relevant material. Exploring always turns up gems like this article by Bruce Levin.

    I came across a Quora question which I’m sure was a form of baited sarcastic joke, but nonetheless it was taken seriously by several psychiatrists who asserted their power rather blatantly and un-ironically.

    I was shocked at the knee-jerk defence of their guild power and corresponding lack of insight in relation to coercion, which surely they would have reflected on as a matter of academic discourse at the very least.

    The question was:

    I prevented my psychiatrist from exiting my room by blocking the door.
    He said that was coercion, and I had to let him out. What if I didn’t?

    https://www.quora.com/I-prevented-my-psychiatrist-from-exiting-my-room-by-blocking-the-door-He-said-that-was-coercion-and-I-had-to-let-him-out-What-if-I-didn-t

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