During my lifetime I have witnessed the fall of Freudian psychiatry and the ascension of molecular psychiatry. Unfortunately, we have gone from the frying pan into the fire. I certainly do not subscribe to old-fashioned psychoanalytic ideas which had been beset by considerable problems throughout the years. Its practice suffered from dogmatic theories and miscast beliefs, which worked to the detriment of responsiveness to our patients. Although my own roots were in psychoanalytic psychotherapy, I moved on to develop the psychotherapy of character. It is a specialized form of human engagement that repairs the damage to one’s character by acting on the play of consciousness in the very way that it formed in the brain and consciousness in the first place. The psychotherapy of character is an art and a science that bridges the old divide between psychotherapy and the brain.
In today’s very small world, we have the presence of exciting, yet confusing and conflicting, deeply held belief systems — religious, ideological, political, scientific, and technological. Human belief systems have always served the human quest in its efforts to grapple with the mysteries of life. At the same time, they offer the allure of false security and leave us subject to the hubris of “belief” itself. False or outmoded beliefs may give us short-term comfort, but are destructive to our well-being. They make us susceptible to Pied Pipers who promise salvation as they lead their followers off the cliffs; or Chicken Littles who intimidate people by preaching that the sky is falling; or purveyors of false knowledge who offer false hope, quick fixes, and magical solutions while creating slavery and blindness. A new and inclusive paradigm that is consonant with new knowledge and old wisdom is so important for psychiatry and society at large.
I love and value the work of psychiatry. Nothing is more gratifying than helping people heal from painful experiences, and to fulfill their ability to love and recover their authenticity. I am proposing a new and different paradigm for psychiatry. It shows the biological adaptation of our personality and how it is formed. It shows how our temperament digests responsiveness, deprivation, and abuse, creating and elaborating, the ‘Play of Consciousness’ in the brain. We can see how and why it breaks down into psychiatric symptoms. And how recovery takes place through the psychotherapy of character. The processes of recovery turn out to be the very same forces that created our problematic plays in the first place. None of this takes place at the molecular level. I devote a blog to this – “There is a New Paradigm for Psychiatry – It is the ‘Play of Consciousness’, not molecular brain diseases.”
In this blog I will address my take on ‘molecular-biological’ psychiatry. ‘Biological psychiatry’ is the current incarnation of somatic psychiatry—insulin shock therapy, lobotomy, and electroconvulsive therapy—which views the cause of human suffering to be the brain itself, rather than the person. Unfortunately, the one thing we learn from history is that we don’t learn from history. This is never more pertinent than in the hidden story of somatic psychiatry. To fully appreciate the danger of its current incarnation, psychiatric drugs, we must take somatic psychiatry out of its state of amnesia. Its predecessors should serve as a reminder, a morality tale, for the excesses and depravity to which conventional psychiatric knowledge and practice can easily sink.
Its treatments have been to act directly on the brain—physically, electrically, or chemically. The current form of its doctrine is that problems come from genetic or developmental neurobiological disorders of the brain. And the prescribed treatments for its phantom brain diseases are psychoactive drugs. The cure for human struggle has been reduced to a pill, as if pharmaceuticals address the agency of human suffering. This has resulted in a destructive psychiatric drug epidemic, with psychiatric drug sales topping seventy billion dollars a year. Even worse, we are drugging a generation of our children with amphetamines and Prozac. ‘Biological’ depression and its Prozac cure are now so firmly embraced by psychiatry and our culture at large that it seems preposterous to even suggest that it is an urban myth. Yes there is depression. No, it is not ‘biological depression.’ The depth and scope of what it is to be human has been exiled by this dangerous and destructive practice. The source of human suffering—and our psychiatric conditions—is not now, nor has it ever been, a brain disease. Psychiatry is in crisis. And we, as a society, are in crisis. It is of the highest urgency to save psychiatry from itself and save society from today’s psychiatry.
Sad to say that one of the great culprits in the sorry history of somatic psychiatry has been faulty science itself. Its brain theories have been substantiated by the science of yesterday and today, validated in the professional journals. The truth is that no one has ever shown that there is a molecular basis in the brain that creates psychiatric symptoms in the first place. Today, it is completely believed that everything is caused by neurological-synaptic ‘imbalances’ where the neurotransmitters – serotonin, dopamine etc. generate psychiatric diseases.
What is lost here? We have thrown out the collective wisdom and mystery of the human condition, and relegated it to imaginary brain diseases. Psychiatry should encompass the contemporary science of the brain and consciousness, while honoring the wisdom of the past and its grasp of the depth and complexity of the human condition. Woven throughout world history and all cultures is a rich mosaic of wisdom about the mysteries of human nature and human struggle. It has been part of our enterprise since the dawn of humanity. It should be our enterprise today.
However, molecular mechanisms are not causal. They simply reflect the adaptations of the brain which operates on a much higher level of the mappings of consciousness. When individuals readapt in a less problematic way, this is also positively reflected molecularly. This is achieved by good psychotherapy. It happens spontaneously, all by itself.
The real history of ‘biological’ psychiatry shows the science to be faulty in method and fraudulent in its application. The multibillion dollar pharmaceutical industry and its influence peddling in academic psychiatry has been exposed as financially corrupted and manipulated. They have engaged in study suppression, falsification, strategic marketing, and financial incentives. Yet the methods and practices of this very deficient science are never questioned. Instead, it continues to get a free pass and remains the respected authority. Yet this science presumes to define what is considered scientific. We move right along.
Our sacrosanct science has continued over the past 75 years to validate that the next new and improved drug will cure what ails us. Most of those drugs are advertised to be efficacious, non-addictive, no side effects, no habituation, no drug tolerance, no high. But it never happens. Look at a partial list – bromides, chloral hydrate, Milltown, the barbiturates, the benzodiazepines – when Valium and Librium got discredited they were immediately replaced by a whole host of substitutes that are still touted as safe and efficacious, not so. They are all hugely addictive (worldwide sales of $21 billion dollars).
Then we have the list of sedatives and hypnotics. Then we come to the amphetamines. Speed was touted as an “up,” our first antidepressant, as well as an appetite suppressant for weight loss, with no need to diet or exercise. They were widely used by college kids for “all-nighters.” For the most part, they were used to get high, with massive addiction. Mental hospitals in the 1960s and 1970s were filled with amphetamine psychoses. Amphetamines were correctly discredited and pretty much disappeared from psychiatric and medical usage. But then a strange thing happened. A new medical-psychiatric genetic brain disease got invented: ADHD. And what was the treatment of choice? You guessed it. Suddenly, speed was safe again, non-addictive, no side effects, and it doesn’t generate psychoses anymore. I guess the significant percentage of inpatients suffering from amphetamine psychoses when I was a psychiatric resident was a figment of my imagination.
And then we come to the antidepressants; the old ones like Elavil, and the new ones, the SSRIs. Let me go into some detail here. Never mind that these psychoactive antidepressants barely perform better than placebo. Never mind that suppressed studies are finally coming out that show the antidepressants are proven to promote suicides and homicides in children as well as young adults. So many of the bizarre mass murders and tragic suicides of the last twenty years have occurred while taking antidepressants by adults as well as children. It is even hidden that Prozac is hugely addictive. Commonly, when someone tries to discontinue Prozac, he feels “depressed” again. The conventional thinking is that his “biological” depression returns, so he has to get back on the drug. And this is used to prove the efficacy and necessity of the treatment: Looks like our patient will have to stay on Prozac for his disease for the rest of his life.
What is actually happening is that the user has become habituated to the extra drug-induced supply of serotonin in his synapses. When the drug is discontinued, one’s natural ability to create serotonin is diminished and insufficient, due to biofeedback loops. Not only this, but users commonly have horrific withdrawal symptoms that are almost never publicized. An array of frightening neurological symptoms appear when trying to detox off this psycho-active brain drug—vertigo, lightheadedness, burning or tingling sensations in the skin, difficulty with gait and balance, blurred vision, tremors, twitches and restlessness. Sometimes there are hallucinations. Patients, understandingly, get terrified from these symptoms and conclude that something really is dangerously wrong with their brain. As a result they don’t dare to stop the Prozac. Thank God they are taking it in the first place and blocking these horrible neurological symptoms that are part of their brain disease. To discontinue an SSRI has to be done very slowly and carefully over the course of a year.
In fact, it is quite common that through drug tolerance, the serotonin-boosting effect attenuates, and its so-called anti-depressant effect diminishes. The expert pharmacological psychiatrists then add one or two more specially selected antidepressants into the mix, and an anti-anxiety pill for good measure, or maybe even an antipsychotic. Sometimes, we even have to shock some patients when their “disease” is deemed simply too pathological.
And the general public believes that we are operating out of firmly established evidence. Drug trials are performed where the standards are embarrassingly low – if 30% of an artificially established diagnosis is cured by placebo and the drug performs at 40%, this is considered proof of efficacy – 10% effectiveness. And these results are cherry picked since the host of failed trials are suppressed. 10% effectiveness, which is fraudulent, is not really a good standard for evidence. Our research in psychiatry should not replicate these criteria. These faulty conclusions generate a house of cards of fraudulent claims built on fraudulent claims, taken as truth. This is typical of ‘evidence-based’ psychiatry.
My final point regards the treatment for manic-depression and schizophrenia. Unlike all the other psychiatric conditions, there may well be a genetic, or epigenetic brain element. Drugs can be useful to contain the frightening disruption of the self, or of mania spinning out of control. However, drugs are not the treatment. Treatment is the human process of psychotherapy. Treatment is the human processes of care and respect. Treatment is community. Schizophrenia is a human problem. People are not things.
In the best tradition of science, one exception proves the rule. Once a theory is shown to be faulty, it is discarded. This never happens in the somatic psychiatry and pharmaceutical establishment. What kind of science can this be? How can the science be right when its outcomes are so wrong? A science that validates and promotes a lie is bad science.
History teaches that unless we learn from our experience, we are doomed to repeat it. The point here is that these practices are not only ineffective but harmful and destructive. We have a world on meds, and the proponents consider this a good thing. But it doesn’t have to be this way. There have always been good psychotherapists in all the professions. But never enough. And today, they have pretty much gone by the wayside. We need to renew the practice of psychotherapy. We need to understand in a clear way what the great human enterprise is all about, and give it our love and care.
I’m aware that people can be helped a great deal by an adept psychotherapist who knows how to hold a space neutrally and follow a client’s process with presence and attention; but at the same time, psychotherapy has caused insidious damage to unsuspecting, vulnerable people. If psychotherapy were to become the standard of care over medication, it would still require some exploration of the clinical relationship, for the safety of a client.
An irresponsible and emotionally un-evolved clinician can do so much harm in private 1:1 meetings, and many of them get through training and licensing without these issues coming to light in the process. I believe there needs to be stringent guidelines for what is safe and not safe for a client in a psycho-therapeutic setting. I feel this is a gray area which merits attention, for the safety of clients and clarity for clinicians.
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Leave it to licenses… credentials…frames…
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Yeah, that’s totally true. These are what create illusions, including these “fictitious [illness and] diseases.” Many other illusions, too, including a socially constructed hierarchy of power.
Where do we find expertise when it comes to human behavior, constructs of reality, what is ‘sick’ vs ‘well-being,’ what is madness vs. what is consciousness expansion, what is or is not mental illness, if it exists at all, etc.?
I imagine we each have and are entitled to have our own interpretation of these, whether with clarity or not. The answers to life don’t come in books, they come from experiencing first-hand the many dimensions of life, by living that about which we can later write or speak. That’s our best and most valuable education, our evolution, when we experience life over merely observing it.
I can’t imagine global agreement around any of these issues, ever, as I don’t feel there is a universal answer to ‘what is real or fiction’ or what is ‘illness vs awakening,’ these are interpreted on a very wide scale. Although I can see different communities/cultures coming together specifically over how they’d interpret these phenomena. Pretty much indicates core beliefs, and those vary from culture to culture. That would be diversity, to my mind.
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I know mental illness very well. It affects many of my loved ones. My poor brother was medicated at a very young age, 4 and diagnosed with ADHD. My brother was extreme in his illness, hurting me saying he was the devil sent to kill me at age 6. Lighting fires, violent, cutting, ect. Now he is 33 serving a life sentence due to his mental illness and I personally believe all the medications as a child made him this way. Our most recent event with my brother he removed his penis while NOT being medicated. His brain is unable to stabilize itself from the years of medication. Our sister who was not as extreme as our brother was never medicated and she thank goodness will never know the troubles our brother had to go through. There is a 13 year age gap between our brother and little sister. My mother knowing medications failed my brother refused to medicate my sister. I felt the pressure of having to medicate my daughter because of depression and her cutting herself once requiring 30 stitches, however she was on medication when she did this. I realize that standing up to experts in this field is risky since they can declare I am denying my daughter necessary medical treatment but I did so regardless. My daughter believes antidepressants are cures to depression and we fight many battles over this. I know this is long winded but many do not know that medication has consequences later, especially in children. Mental Illness is real, however, medications without knowing the exact cause in the brain is detrimental to the patients. Doctors took an oath to protect their patients and I feel that many do not know how and prescribe medications because that is acceptable in society without considering the consequences later for them.
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Your brother removed his own penis?
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This is not unusual behavior for people experiencing the conditions that Brandy’s brother has experienced from the toxic drugs. Going off of them cold turkey produces withdrawal, which psychiatry and the mental health system label “relapse”. There are all kinds of problems caused by these drugs which are mistakenly called “medicine” by psychiatry, the drug companies, and the American public in general. We are being led by the ring in our noses down a one way street by the drug companies and their shills, the psychiatrists.
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Dear Dr Berezin,
Thank you for promoting successful alternatives. My experience is that change is not easy, but the Psychotherapy itself doesn’t have to be too complicated. Life is not easy for the non schizophrenic either.
But I think you are far too generous to “molecular” psychiatry. To me “molecular” psychiatry is where all the defective medicals with serious personal problems gather together to survive.
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Dr. Berezin, you state “In the best tradition of science, one exception proves the rule.” I believe you meant to say “one exception disproves the rule.” But that does not advance your argument or help the cause of replacing the current, drug-based treatment paradigm with humane, non-coercive, healthy treatment options. Good psychotherapy has been a great blessing for some, perhaps many, but it has not worked for everyone. Not even the vaunted Chestnut Lodge healed every person. That, of course, does not invalidate psychotherapy; it just means that it may not be the answer in each case.
I am also puzzled by your distinction between schizophrenia/bipolar disorder on the one hand (which, you allow, may involve genetics or biology), and the other, lesser conditions, such as depression, anxiety or ADHD, on the other hand. What is the basis of this distinction, other than the fact that in the case of the more severe conditions, psychotherapy is more obviously ineffective? Why exclude the possibility that the various manifestations of mental distress are all part of one epigenetic continuum? I am in no way supporting the current, drug-based treatment paradigm. But I have seen psychotherapy not work at all, and I have also witnessed, in the case of the same individual, extraordinary healing delivered by nutrient (orhomolecular) therapy. Can’t we acknowledge the obvious, common-sense truth that everything matters, nature and nurture, our biology or the baggage that we come into the world with and our life experiences, as well as environmental influences, such as toxins, pesticides, diet and medications?
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Several things:
Oddly “In the best tradition of science, one exception proves the rule.” is the correct way to say it even though it would seem disproves would make more sense. The meaning of prove in this case is closer to ‘tests’…
I do entertain that schizophrenia has a possible genetic component. However, in my personal experience I have not found it harder regarding psychotherapy. In fact, such therapies have been very rewarding.
I would be the first person to recognize and honor nature and nurture.
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I like the way you put that “…schizophrenia has a possible genetic component. However, in my personal experience I have not found it harder regarding psychotherapy…” I myself, think “hereditary” is not relevant.
So how does a “schizophrenic” stop preoccupying or worrying? – He can’t, because someone might want to kill him and he needs to protect himself. – But he can if he stops worrying hour by hour and sees what happens. After a while he might be able to see things more neutrally and on the basis of evidence.
I had this problem when I stopped strong depot type medication, but being Irish I was more worried about what the neighbours might think of me, than whether they might murder me!
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Okay, Fiachra- Good to see you getting down to brass tacks.
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Thanks traillez-vous,
It is brass tacks.
Can “schizophrenia” exist without anxiety?
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I believe this is highly insightful, Dr. Berezin: “In today’s very small world, we have the presence of exciting, yet confusing and conflicting, deeply held belief systems—religious, ideological, political, scientific, and technological. Human belief systems have always served the human quest in its efforts to grapple with the mysteries of life. At the same time, they offer the allure of false security and leave us subject to the hubris of “belief” itself. False or outmoded beliefs may give us short-term comfort, but are destructive to our well-being. They make us susceptible to Pied Pipers who promise salvation as they lead their followers off the cliffs; or Chicken Little’s who intimidate people by preaching that the sky is falling; or purveyors of false knowledge who offer false hope, quick fixes, and magical solutions while creating slavery and blindness.”
I personally see the Pied Pipers as the psycho / medical / pharmaceutical industries. I’ll confess I’m a bit of a Chicken Little, however I’m not here to intimidate anyone. But I do feel I have a moral responsibility to confess to having a dream, an amazing lyrical libretto love story dream that resulted in Jesus calling judgement day – no idea if it could be prophetic or not, though. And I’d say the purveyors of false knowledge are those within the corporatocracies, especially those who’ve made a mockery of our financial / banking industries, and essentially handed over control of the US economy to the same central bankers our founding fathers’ warned us about.
“I love and value the work of psychiatry. Nothing is more gratifying than helping people heal from painful symptoms, and to fulfill their ability to love and recover their authenticity.” I’m glad you enjoy your work, and are working to change what’s going on in the bio-bio-bio psychiatric industry. However, my experience with the psychiatric industry was the opposite of healing from “painful symptoms, and to fulfill their ability to love and recover their authenticity.” I was a healthy person who dealt with doctors utilizing psych drugs to create “mental illnesses” to cover up a “bad fix” on a broken bone and medical evidence of the sexual abuse of my child for a pastor. I do think there is importance in a “play of consciousness,” or a person actually being allowed to (without drugs) mentally come to grips with the iatrogenesis she was subjected to, based upon the actual medical evidence. But I also had an enlightening, so to speak, to my subconscious dreams during my drug withdrawal as well. And it is an amazing and very hopeful story for humanity as a whole, although not for the unrepentant, hypocritical bio-bio-bio psychiatric industry itself.
” ‘Biological psychiatry’ is the current incarnation of somatic psychiatry … These faulty conclusions generate a house of cards of fraudulent claims built on fraudulent claims, taken as truth. This is typical of ‘evidence-based’ psychiatry.” As a person who had antidepressant withdrawal syndrome (the AD given for smoking cessation, not depression) misdiagnosed as “depression caused by self,” “paranoid schizophrenia,” and “bipolar,” within two weeks, and contrary to the DSM-IV-TR itself, I agree. ‘Biological psychiatry’ is a house of cards built on fraud.
And given the almost unfathomable number of DSM-IV-TR psychiatric misdiagnoses, especially of children, of the common ADRs of both the ADHD drugs and antidepressants as the “major mental illnesses,” I hope you will reconsider you’re view on so called manic depression (bipolar) and schizophrenia. “My final point regards the treatment for manic-depression and schizophrenia. Unlike all the other psychiatric conditions, there may well be a genetic, or epigenetic brain element.”
I doubt it. Robert Whitaker, and others, have pointed out the common iatrogenic pathways to a bipolar diagnosis, as I dealt with. And the antipsychotics / neuroleptics, themselves, are known to cause the schizophrenia symptoms. From drugs.com: “neuroleptics … may result in … the anticholinergic intoxication syndrome … Central symptoms may include memory loss, disorientation, incoherence, hallucinations, psychosis, delirium, hyperactivity, twitching or jerking movements, stereotypy, and seizures.”
As a grown adult, I was made “psychotic” on a child’s dose of Risperdal, .5mg, within two weeks of being put on it. So it’s highly likely that most manic depression (bipolar) and schizophrenia is also completely iatrogenic.
In real science “Once a theory is shown to be faulty, it is discarded. This never happens in the somatic psychiatry and pharmaceutical establishment. What kind of science can this be? How can the science be right when its outcomes are so wrong? A science that validates and promotes a lie is bad science.” And this goes all the way up to the bipolar and schizophrenia diagnoses, according to the real science, Dr. Berezin.
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Someone Else – About your dream, I relate to the story of having that doctor betray your trust upon hearing it. The best approach to dreams is not to make your interpretations final or or prophetic. Not that you can’t dream right about the future any less than you can dream a memory or the place you are sleeping in. Your dream just can’t limit you, and so it isn’t prophetic as that suggests “determining” but is more like getting self-addressed invitations to change. Maybe you see the value in considering the judgments of others as supposed to have been of greater value than those of the doctors who hurt you, and who were anything but blessed strangers, S. E.
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travailler-vous,
The awakening to my dreams occurred after I’d been weaned from the drugs, so I never discussed it with doctors, and I don’t know what to make of it, other than it’s an interesting story. So I’m working on a “credible fictional” book about my experience now. I fully agree, dreams are just dreams, although, oddly, mine do sometimes come true.
The “Christian dream specialist talk therapist” who betrayed me, did so for asking what a dream about being “moved by the Holy Spirit” meant – I made a query, with no interpretations at that time. She denied the Holy Spirit existed, and misdiagnosed the common symptoms of antidepressant withdrawal syndrome, based upon lies and gossip from the people who molested my child, and denied my other child a baptism, according to her medical records.
Then I was put on Risperdal by a Jewish psychiatrist who thought it impossible for God to inspire a story, according to his medical records. I still believe God can inspire artwork, drugs don’t change that viewpoint, and it is technically illegal in the US to torture people for belief in the Holy Spirit and God still. I hope the psychiatrists will some day learn to abide by the laws of this country, rather than drugging Christians for belief in the Holy Spirit and God.
I’m not certain why I have the judgement day story going on in my dreams, I wasn’t all that religious prior to being railroaded. And I wasn’t an eschatological theorist prior to being drugged either. Who knows?
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So I had forgot that wasn’t the doctor. Don’t let my pure atheism worry you, if you can help it. I sometimes study religions or see how Mass is doing, or take in something preachy. For me, the truth of the matter is found in the ancient saying, that if bulls and lions had gods, they would pray to bulls and lions. Similarly, the monotheistic big three are whoppingly phallocentric, and can’t seem to locate theological or ritual to work out their escape from that norm–Islam among them having no real interest in trying. At any rate, they take an awful long time getting around to doing anything for women besides keeping them in line behind their kids for familiar praises, usually. I figure that no one lives without faith in something or knows much more about life in this world in terms of their ability to reason than that they’re just somehow here.
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No one knows why some people have emotional or mental problems, while others don’t. Depression, OCD, anxiety disorders, schizophrenia… Take your pick. No one knows. This author doesn’t know, psychiatrists don’t know, drug companies don’t know, and I don’t know. It’s not likely that any of these problems have a single cause. Given that human brain is the most complex piece of matter in the known universe, with other animal brains not far behind, it might be a long time before we understand these important questions. It might be centuries, and maybe never.
What we do know is that some forms of “talk therapy” help to some degree, also depending on the diagnosis. In addition, some drugs help to some degree, also depending on the diagnosis. Drugs also harm, and talk therapy might also do harm, though that is likely. There is nothing wrong with providing forms of treatment that help more than they harm. In fact, it would be immoral to withhold such treatment, even if it is less than ideal.
Speaking of empirically supported treatments, tested in controlled clinical trials, psychoanalytic psychotherapy, the form of treatment supported by the author, generally doesn’t work much better than placebo treatment.
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I know people have reasons for behaving and feeling the way they do, not brain chemical imbalances.
Anyone who is selling ” No one knows”, does not want confrontation to take place, or responsibility to be assigned.
Is he/she preaching to himself? I bought it for a moment. We humans know microbiology and DNA.
Few want to be held accountable for their actions.
Criminals specially do not want to be held accountable.
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markps2 – You killed it.
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“I do entertain that schizophrenia has a possible genetic component.”
So did Hitler.
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Hitler was kind to animals, too. Does that mean we should abstain from kindness to animals? I think not. Warmac’s analogy is false and frivolous.
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warmacs analogy is true.
Like a homosexual is neither bad nor good, a schizophrenic is neither bad or good.
The homosexual/the schizo will be fixed because the doctor doesn’t like him/her , is not a medical treatment.
Behaviors are not diseases.
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I agree with Dr B. that there is no such thing as the disease of “schizophrenia”. We all suffer from anxiety and anyone can have a “breakdown”.
I think the complicated term “schizophrenia” is intentionally deceptive;
how can a person argue against it?
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It’s called critical thinking. Schizophrenia isn’t something you can put in a container. It defines a condition and yes you can argue against it. This is the very premise of this site.
You take a descriptive word like “schizophrenia” and you say it is genetic and then you give it power by saying this is what the Dr says, and you destroy the power of faith, hope and love.
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A_Psychologist:
I agree that the Hitler analogy is frivolous. Florence was Hitler’s favorite city and he was a vegetarian. Agreeing with him on those points does not make one a genocidal maniac.
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With all due respect pdoc. You are defining the state of someones mind and not the color of their skin or eyes. It is a shame that you have given up on your faith in the recovery model. Frivolous or delusional I thank you for the reflection.
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Play of consciousness. Interesting!
I have been conscious since before the universe began. Consciousness is not a product of the human brain. Consciousness is with the self (identity, id, i).
We are not these physical bodies. The human body is only a vehicle. The vehicle is temporary. The self is eternal.
Consciousness exists before the universe does. Everything exists, just not in physical form. It exists as information, thought, knowledge, memory.
From the blog,
“All of our suffering flows from our damaged plays of consciousness.” Not really, to be honest.
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Ahh…….yes, the One, Transcendent, Eternal Consciousness has always existed in the stillness of the void. Time is only a construct of the human mind, the only thing that we truly have and live in is the Present Moment, but most people don’t realize this. Most people believe that there is a past and a future but these too are just constructs of the mind and the ego. All of humanity and all of the world and all of the Universe only exists in the Present Moment. And each of us, no matter how insignificant we think about ourselves contains the entire Universe. This is why Hindus perform Namaste for those around them. They are not bowing so much to the individual but to the Universe that is that person in all regards.
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Thanks for this article. It’s astonishing how such faulty science is accepted by so many. Or perhaps not so astonishing, when one considers the motives involved.
Psychiatry today makes me think of me of the movie The Insider, which demonstrated how lies about tobacco were ferociously defended and the truth about them hidden, because maintaining the illusion profited powerful companies to the tune of billions. Psychotropic pills are psychiatry’s tobacco. It is understandable that psychiatric companies would lie and distort, because without these lies and distortions, their lifeblood – sales of psychiatric pills – would wither away. An organism or company will do anything to avoid (financial) death.
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I completely agree
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Sadly you are allowed to put this information into the public domain.I occasionally read this journal as a source of information for my students.
Your understanding of the mechanisms of antidepressants is minimal at best.Your article is so replete with hyperbole it is no surprise that you do not publish this fantastical thinking in a peer journal.
It is sad that you use your M.D. to give the illusion of “medical expertise”.Why not label it as is-a forum to advertise that you like doing psychotherapy.An intervention that has many papers on its adverse effects.May I suggest you write a paper on that? Will never happen since you might loose business.
I suggest you read nature neuroscience rather than yet another book that extols the talking cure.Real educators give a balanced approach to an issue.Ideologues only proselytize on how terrible psychiatry is.What have you contributed based on science? Nothing.The irony is I am a psychotherapist.
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A “real educator” would not write in this disparaging, supercilious tone. I’m glad I’m not the client of a therapist who writes like this. It is indeed ironic that you are a psychotherapist, but perhaps not in the way you intended.
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It is meant to be both disparaging and accurate.Ask Dr.Berezin to proffer a reference in a peer reviewed journal to support any of his ideas suggested in this blog.
There are none.That is not to be disparaging-but to be accurate.
I have friends who are scientists, (such as my mentor Eric Kandel)who have spent a lifetime understanding mental illness.
The clear irritation expressed is due to the misleading information presented under the guise of pseudo science.
As mentioned-lets see a review of the hundreds of papers discussing the dangers of psychotherapy.
And I have had my modicum of success as a research and clinician-without being an ideologue.
Thank you for your deeply thought out reply.Did you read either Caspi or Lesch’s work on the genetics of major depression prior to writing your ..comment? No, because it takes time,effort and it does not allow one to hide behind a few big words.
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Loniusmonk,
How do you know what I’ve read or haven’t read before posting my comment? Unless you’re a telepath, you might not want to make such assumptions 🙂
Without asking you, would you like me to say, “Did you read so and so? Of course you didn’t, you’re too lazy to take the time and effort!” But I won’t say that, because I haven’t been able to develop telepathy yet, despite the long time I’ve been trying to remotely access your and others’ minds.
I am familiar with Eric Kandel’s work and the related field of twin studies on conditions including depression. Also, I’ve read counterpoints to his work on twin studies/genetic inheritance, such as Jay Joseph’s writing, who discusses some of the methodological problems behind twin studies which Kandel still needs to address adequately.
My point was that it is possible to be accurate without being disaparaging. You might try using some humor, it would make your posts come over a lot better!
I’d be interested to hear from you what is dangerous about “psychotherapy”. My position would be that of course (structured) human relationships which are intended to help (i.e. psychotherapy) can be dangerous if they go wrong. There are innumerable factors affecting such a structured interaction between two people; the attributes of both patient and therapist and the setting of each unique psychotherapy relationship will affect in unpredictable/complex ways whether and how their interaction is helpful or dangerous. Saying “psychotherapy is/can be dangerous” is obvious, but at the same time simplistic.
Try to do your telepathic predictions of what I’ve read a bit better next time 🙂
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