Abolish Psychiatry and the Mental Health System: Really?

Hmm…where are the comments? Am I really the first?

I agree, on a practical level, I highly doubt it’ll happen as you have outlined.

However, Bob, you seem to have missed something. The All-Holy Bible, the DSM! Diagnosis means some people are singled out as diseased and “requiring treatment.” This is what leads to drugging and marginalization. You also specified, in your outline of the abolition events, only one MH practice, psychiatry, leaving out the rest of the shebang. I suspect also you took the comments (all by survivors, notably) out of context. Do you know any of these folks personally? It was almost like you were saying “All survivors are extremist black and white thinkers” which is, sorry to say, another way to say just how diseased we are.

Most of us who are angry are not permanently angry. Anger serves a useful purpose, to protect us against another psychiatric assault and to preserve our human rights. Anger also helps spread the word to others who may be in the “questioning” phase. Many find that the anger, which is really a necessary part of grieving, dissipates over time. Especially if we are heard.

You didn’t mention psychotherapists going out of business. Maybe because some therapists might be reading here and (horrors!) be offended. I think in many ways, since some therapists are movement allies ($$$), MIA and other groups sell out and let the entire dubious practice of psychotherapy off the hook.

As I see it, it is pointless to abolish psychiatry as if it were the Isolated Evil of the World, when there are so many abusive practitioners and institutions that are not psychiatrists.

After all, many MIA readers are “therapists” who work outside the box, outside of diagnosing and “treating.” However, these are rare indeed, far more rare than many are willing to admit.

I think very specific things need to happen. We need to disempower the practice of psychiatry and Western Med in general. Doctors are overpaid. The psychiatrist’s opinion should not be used as court evidence. Emotional and mental distress should not be viewed as a permanent condition, and should not turn into lifetime disability and marginalization. What is “normal” should not be determined by mental health professionals.

The CRPD has wonderful guidelines and literature outlining how people should be treated and is demanding that all countries agree to be humane to its people.

What would happen if we abolished psychiatric *diagnosis* as a mode of eugenics? I don’t personally care what happens to the drugs, they can go on the street or be sold in vending machines so they’ll harm people less.

Abolishing the DSM would improve the practice of “therapy” also. Therapists wouldn’t be cornered into treating diseases, they’d consider the person and the circumstances. A person wouldn’t be incarcerated due to being seen as “ill.” Without the support of the DSM’s phony diagnoses, many of these drugs would disappear from the market or fall into disuse.

If psych drugs were sold on the street (they likely are already) people would use them for what used to be thought of as the drug side effects. Helping them get to sleep, a few for weight loss (or the opposite), a few to enhance one’s sex life (likely, again, the opposite), and one or two as date rape drugs. I used to hear of people using a few of these to “come down” off of hallucinogens such as LSD.

Report comment

The DSM should be gotten rid of, since it’s scientifically invalid.

Forced or coerced treatments with the psychiatric drugs should be made illegal.

We should start weaning people off the psychiatric drugs, if they so choose. And full and honest information about the adverse effects of the psychiatric drugs, and withdrawal from those drugs, should be legally required to be given to all patients.

We should require a massive educational initiative to make state and local administrators and legislators aware of the Soteria model and Open Dialogue.

Funding for research into the ‘invalid’ DSM disorders should have disappeared in 2013.

Training in the universities should stop being based upon the DSM, and move towards education on drug withdrawal methods, various therapies, trauma informed care, Open Dialogue, and Soteria models.

There should be a long run plan to eventually make prescribing the psychiatric drugs illegal.

It should be made illegal for doctors to start people, who are not already on the psychiatric drugs, on them now.

Since the number one most common trait amongst those called “mentally ill” is child abuse, which of course is not a brain disease, we need trauma informed care, we need to start believing the child abuse victims, and we need to start arresting the abusers and pedophiles again.

And given the fact that huge percentages of the “mentally ill” are actually child abuse victims, and all doctors are mandatory reporters. All doctors who are drugging child abuse victims, rather than reporting the abuse, as is required by law, should be arrested.

Change is imperative.

Report comment

The whole mental health system is the epitome of futility. The only successful outcome is to disable the patient for good so we should we consider abolishing it, I don’t see any other way. The same can be said about technology. We all move on and find our way in the new system. At some point you have to realize that what you’re doing isn’t working and you have to “just start over”. You’re not going to find a solution holding on for dear life to the system you have. It just doesn’t work.

At some point you have to realize that the system we have is like a religion or a legal system. It’s just not based on science. The only thing that can come out of those kinds of systems that are not up to par, are atrocities and that’s exactly what’s going on in this area of commerce.

You’re telling me doctor’s can’t find other jobs. You’re telling me that drug companies cannot redirect capital to other areas. You’re telling me that people are addicted and cannot be weaned off these medications.

I think it’s not only possible but necessary. Too many human beings have been destroyed.

Report comment

If antipsychiatry is psychiatric nihilism it is only because psychiatry is nihilism to begin with, and so it could be said to be anti-nihilism. In the same way in which you make your statement about nihilism, antipsychiatry is often accused of being extreme. While antipsychiatry is accused of being extreme, I see locking innocent people up in prisons called hospitals as extreme. I also see a treatment that involves maiming and killing people with toxic chemicals as extreme. The same criticism goes for seeing electrically induced epileptic seizures as therapy. It’s not therapy, it’s brain damage.

Unlike many of those who call themselves antipsychiatry, I don’t single out psychiatry for attack. Psychiatry has been aided and assisted at every step by the allied fields of psychology and social work. If there are termination slips to be handed out, when it comes to these psychiatric nihilists and extremists, they must cover these allied fields as well.

Institutional psychiatry, although it would not be referred to as such, let us call it incarceration of the insane, arose sometime during the latter half of the 17th century. It has done nothing except grow exponentially ever since. With it has grown the numbers of people killed and injured by its practices. If we are going to stop injuring people, we have to do something about the power of these psychiatrists, as well as psychologists and social workers, their partners in crime. Were it kaput, so much for the business, and very big business at that, of fabricating illness that you can turn by chemical and electrical means into real illnesses.

What is at work when non-illnesses are taken for real illnesses? Medicalization. Right now the “mental health” cops accuse approaching 25 % of the population of having a “mental illness”. Okay. Nobody has a “mental illness”! Minds don’t get ill, bodily organs get ill. Right now psychiatric intervention (scapegoating) is a global response to social problems that only creates a bigger problem in the end, namely, this monstrosity of a bureaucracy that you, Robert Nikkel, are going out of your way to defend. With that kind of pork cut, we’d all be a lot better off.

Report comment

So, I guess according to Robert Nikkel, those who believe in making revolutionary changes in this world as it pertains to ending ALL forms of psychiatric abuse, are advocating for nothing more than a form of “PSYCHIATRIC NIHILISM.”

Definition of nihilism: “…the rejection of all religious and moral principles, often in the belief that life is meaningless…”

The tone and content of this blog quite often comes across as arrogant and reveals ignorance about the actual nature of many abolisionist positions relative to anti-psychiatry.

Robert Nickel has presented the classic “straw man” characterization of an anti-psychiatry position and then proceeds to mock and ridicule it with this hysterical and ominous prediction of how the world would simply fall apart if efforts were made to abolish Psychiatry and the oppressive disease/drug based Medical Model it has spawned.

Anti-psychiatry positions articulated at MIA and other places in this society are far more advanced, filled with morality and compassion, and nuanced than his completely simplistic and self serving characterization of “psychiatric nihilism.”

Robert Nikkel says: “These changes are of such magnitude that a planning process, if it was taken seriously… would take many years and yield endless reports because this is obviously a complete re-conceptualization of how [mental health] challenges would be handled. It would require a complete overhaul of how any remaining supports and services would be funded, and how entirely new training programs would be created.”

“I can guarantee that this would bring lobbyists from every profession (not just psychiatry) and every pharmaceutical corporation out of the woodwork. No legislator would touch it with a one-hundred-foot pole.”

Robert’s above comment does contain some truths, and herein lies his HUGE error in ridiculing, misconceptualizing, and then characterizing ALL anti-psychiatry positions as being hopelessly monolithic.

Some of us (I noticed he did not quote any of my writings) have linked the future of psychiatry (because of its critical role of social control and the profitability in the pharmaceutical industry) to the future of the entire capitalist system.

Ending Psychiatry (based on the depths of its overall influence and power in society ) ultimately involves a complete overhaul of all major institutions in our society, including property relations, and the dominant role of profit in the economy, which corrupts almost all our science, and the functioning of every existing social service agency in our society.

And Robert, even if you (and others) DO NOT believe such revolutionary changes are possible, I would still say that your analysis lacks an understanding of the overall depths of oppression that Psychiatry wreaks on millions of people today, because you forecast DOOM if somehow it were to suddenly disappear. I have FAR MORE faith in the compassion an ingenuity of the masses to find OTHER ways to help people in psychological distress than the current horror that Psychiatry and their sick system has to offer.

Richard

Report comment

i want to know why the author didn’t quote Bonnie Burstow, who publicly calls herself an abolitionist. Mr. Nikkel did not call BB a nihilist nor an extremist nor an angry black-and-white thinker. Who would dare do so? No, it’s easier to call survivors “angry,” “extremist,” all those euphemisms for “personality disordered.”

Here we see the class system at work. The socioeconomic tiers created by the “needy ill” and the unblemished wealthy who hold power over them. In my opinion, this class system is exactly what must be abolished.

Report comment

This makes sense only if comments such as those made by Tireless Fighter, Frank, and StDoP actually reflect some kind of consensus anti-psychiatry agenda. They definitely do not. So as Richard pointed out, you are making a straw man argument.

Also, abolishing psychiatry as a medical specialty and abolishing the “mental health” system are two separate issues that are conflated here. Though some people who consider themselves anti-psychiatry do call for the latter, that agenda is not inherent to anti-psychiatry. In fact, several prominent anti-psychiatry activists right here on MiA are therapists themselves.

Report comment

Thanks for posting this. As someone who is aware of considerable deficiencies within the mental health “system” – if it can correctly be called that – in the USA, I follow Mad In America to round out my perspective. While I don’t agree with a lot of what is said here, there is valuable perspective and insight, and I’ve found MIA to be a good jumping off point to dig into research I wouldn’t have otherwise heard of, and so on.

Unfortunately, I think some of the more wild-eyed frothing that’s posted here – and not solely in the comments – strays into counterproductive territory at times. Some of the posts, and many of the comments, may help a subset of writers and readers to vent their spleen or to feel vindicated, but they accomplish little toward the goal of reducing human suffering.

There is a lot of work to be done to make things better in all areas of human endeavor, including how we care for those with mental illnesses and the non-neurotypical. The only way to “abolish” the mental health “system” is to make sure that all people are safe, secure, healthy, and have their human needs met. That’s a 10,000 year project, so we’d best get started.

Report comment

Robert,

Thanks for the thoughtful article, which I largely agree with – with one big proviso: abolish involuntary commitment. That way, the whole “therapeutic” field would have to reform itself or else be without customers.

Best regards,
Mary Newton

Report comment

Nonconsensual psychiatry cannot be reformed. Psychiatric slavery cannot be reformed, just like chattel slavery could not be reformed. Civil commitment and the insanity defense form the foundation of psychiatric slavery. Consensual psychiatry should remain legal.

Report comment

I just want to comment on the tone of this article. It comes across as condescending. I get the impression that the people who you mentioned have experienced real suffering and have gathered wisdom through those experiences. To dismiss what they’ve said as a “black and white view” sounds shallow.

Report comment

Robert, thank you for this provocative article. If the entire mental health system is to be abolished, to the steps you listed, one would have to similar steps for the other mental health professions beyond psychiatry. This would mean closing all training programs, de-registering all practitioners, abolishing all organisations, etc. in fields such as psychology, social work, counselling, marriage and family therapy, and even (paid) peer support work. If it seems likely such steps would not happen with psychiatry, it is even more likely they would not happen with all mental health professions combined. I understand how those who wish to abolish the entire mental health system might react negatively to the tone of Robert’s article. At the same time, I think his analysis can provide some insight into how those with a different agenda might react to calls for the abolition of the entire mental health system and all who practice within it (such as the quote Robert listed by Tireless Fighter), even those whose work does not follow psychiatry’s biomedical paradigm.

Report comment

I agree with Robert Nikkel that, realistically, the abolishment of psychiatry is a self-indulgent fantasy, but would add that those on here that mostly go in for that self-indulgence, leap-frog over the vast chasm that separates the real world from the fantasy world. They have no idea at all really about how to get to their desired ideal. They have no viable alternative plan, other than, seemingly, leave people to do what they will, if they perish or cause others to perish, let that be the point people intervene, to clean up the mess.

But libertarians are pretty much fantasists. Not that dreaming the dream is a terrible thing to do. But eventually Dorothy has to wake up.

The system will not change from within, significantly. It will be changed from without, by reformed legal frameworks. As time passes, the human rights status of the mad and the deranged, the dangerous and non-dangerous, will improve, and all those routine human rights abuses will lessen, and perhaps even fade out entirely. All self-proclaimed reformers operating within the system really achieve is rearranging the chairs, as well as making career for themselves, and keeping their paternal keepers happy and safe. While the number of chairs are constantly cut-back.

Psychiatry will survive these reforms. It has won over the majority of people. There are generations of people wedded tight to their neurochemical tinkerings, and as technology is gradually marrying man and machine, psychiatry will increasingly play the role of legitimiser of this process, offering new and exciting fusions of computer-controlled technology and the human body. There are currently no human rights laws that adequately cover the marrying of man and machine. And that is how psychiatry will save its neck, and prosper.

Report comment

“And I can assure you from my experience, no government I can imagine would ever even start on this process.”

A revolutionary dictatorship can do that. During the revolution, all the services of the bourgeois state are stopped brutally, and the revolutionary state sets up only the services which are immediately useful to it. Naturally, setting up psychiatric hospitals is the least of the worries of a revolutionary state.

“But the reality is that closing departments of psychiatry would itself cost far more than any hoped-for savings.”

Closing departments of psychiatry is free. Repressing psychiatry costs a little money. Psychiatry is weak without the support of the police: they have no weapons. Block totally bank accounts of the psychiatry, and see those “coming out of the woodwork”. Put them under arrest.

On the weaning:

The revolution will provoke an economic crash such that the question of weaning will be very secondary. At best, two to six months of psychotropic drugs will be given, dependent on patients and doctors to do the weaning. In any case, the industrial production of psychotropic drugs will be stopped because the whole economy will be oriented towards the civil war.

You can not conceptualize the abolition of psychiatry because your mind is not brutal enough. Abolishing psychiatry is like take the Bastille.

I do not feel that Robert Nikkel caricatures my vision, but rather that he does not go to the end of his thought.

I thank Robert Nikkel for frankly asking that kind of questions.

Report comment

The key problem with psychiatric abuse is that drugs are the most common denominator. Whether or not it comes from mental hospitals, or domestic abuse at home it is my view that drugs and mental modification are to inherently dangerous not just because of how effective it can be, but how easily the methods can be tampered with. The human soul is fragile… and I’ll explain why I look at it that way.

One is that every prescription drug has a street equivalent. Crystal Meth relates to Adderall. Clonazepam has similar effects to Peyote. Heroine isn’t too far from Fentanyl. Those examples have either the same active ingredients, or similar effects. Two, all psychotropics play with dopamine by either changing methods of acting, neutralizing it, or in extreme cases preventing it’s synthesis. When I was a child I remember talking to a brain surgeon and thinking the same things about repairing things around the house. If it wiggles and it’s not supposed to, you apply duct tape. If it needs lube, you apply WD40. If it does not need to be fixed, you do not screw with it. The brain is certainly far more serious than a squeaky hinge, or a leaky faucet. And yet we are just as careless with it.

And yet the ability to unhinge the human mind is accessible by everyone in America, as well as the tools to do so. Psychiatric records are accessible via the Dark Web. Back before deinstitutionalization in 1963, mental hospitals knew how to deal with lack of self care and other issues caused by family members who acted kind and loving while poisoning someone in the closet. The closing of that hospital system eliminated a major filter against psychopathy in American society, and the reduction of prisons and jail diversions is removing a societal safeguard on the other side of it. We keep asking for less criminal penalties, while simultaneously crime rates increase. You do not get less crime by pretending crime doesn’t exist – be it by changing the definition or by not looking for it. But only in the mind of psychiatrists would reality be something that is tangibly alterable for the sake of emotional comfort.

It was the Nuremberg Trials and dissimilation of the Nazi eugenics programs of the mid 1930’s in the late 1940’s that establishes that genetics do not cause mental disorders. They are caused by stress, and the altering of perceptions. Yet, our modern society continues to remove burdens of proof by lumping people together based on socioeconomic status, genetic relation, and psychiatric histories; this has only limited validity. We might as well go in with both feet and declare it a genetic cause at this point and just drug everybody.

Insanity is certainly a legal defense, but it has become a hammock for criminals – easily induced before a crime and corrected later via access to medication and more easily corrected the sooner than later. It is also a sad way for victems and witnesses to crime to be discredited and declared delusional. The only people who can now access the legal system are those who either have no known history of drugs, or have control of them. What is society to do with this power vacuum filled in by criminals where law enforcement continues to close prisons and reduces the number of Police?

It’s only a matter of time before more and more of America goes “open season”. As it is, in places like the Phillipines drug activity and unchecked criminal behavior lead to the election of a man willing to declare martial law. In that climate, 1/3 of all drug dealers and users are being eliminated by vigilanties, supported by millions of people who are so disgusted that no one even bats an eye at the death of a drug user. In the late 1860’s the Chinese rebelled against the British Empire for forcibly drugging their population for forcive labor. Nazi Germany was both at once – where there was an outcry against prostitutes, drug use, and it lead to the criminalization of the mentally ill and their elimination as Hitler lumped in descenders with the genuinely degenerate.

Give it time… and enough people angry enough. America will sooner or later follow suit.

Report comment

Before I got Lyme I used to think psychiatry was not really helpful. I now realize if it wasn’t for psychiatry I would not have made it through my Lyme. It was articles written by psychiatrist that helped me understand what I was going through and how to deal with it. It even prepared me for how others would react. My question is why do psychiatrist know more about how illness effects the body then medical doctors do?

Report comment

It’s great that you brought up the example of Bonnie Burstow, Julie. She’s actually doing something that potentially could achieve something big for the anti-psych movement, namely, publishing a book that can reach thousands of people in an easily accessible way. Breggin and Whitaker have also put out books that people read, but a novel is likely to attract many more readers who would not pick up a non-fictional work.
We can abolish psychiatry (probably only via a bloody revolution, and we don’t have enough supporters to push that through, but never mind that for now) but if there isn’t something better instead, society’s fear of “madness” will just find another way to make us “other,” as we see throughout history. Once we were called witches, or demons, or devils, or possessed, or evil, or immoral, or lazy… Few are the examples where we were treated with compassion and helped to heal. Especially in the developed world.
“Realistically” speaking it’s hopeless, but we can still try for changes via educating people at the grassroots level and getting them to reject the psych paradigm. Yes, there is a problem of forced treatment. But, many people want treatment because they don’t see an alternative. Can we provide it? Can we tell them what they can do instead? And can we get the message out in an effective way? Commenters and bloggers here have a lot of passion but it just doesn’t seem like they are channeling it effectively.

Report comment

Psychiatry is so woven into the fabric of capitalism that one cannot be abolished without abolishing the other. As I see it, this can only be done from the bottom up.

When society goes into revolutionary crisis, every institution splits along class lines, with employers and managers on the one side and workers and service users on the other side. A great many will waffle in the middle, shifting back and forth as the struggle develops.

As workers take collective control of their workplaces, they will change how the work is done, for their own benefit and for the benefit of those they serve. This will generate much discussion about what is needed, what is effective, and what should no longer be done. Everyone will be involved in this discussion, including service users.

Out of this genuinely democratic process will develop systems of meeting people’s needs that are completely different from what we have today. And in the process of transforming society from the bottom up, human beings will also be transformed in ways we cannot imagine.

Critics will say that this is an impossible pipe dream, but I think it is far more achievable than the impossible task of convincing the powers-that-be to abolish psychiatry.

Report comment

Point No 6.
Life expectancy in the United States would improve by up to 10 years.

Report comment

Psychiatry can not continue as it is now:

Peter C Gøtzsche concludes 10 January 2018 (BMJ 2018;360:k9): «Psychiatry is a disaster area in healthcare that we need to focus on» (15):

Firstly, the effects of psychiatric drugs are not specific.

Secondly, the research in support of the paradigm is flawed

Thirdly, the widespread use of psychiatric drugs has been harmful for the patients.

Fourthly, all attempts at showing that psychiatric disorders cause brain damage that can be seen on brain scans have failed.

There are four main problems with psychiatric drug trials:

1)Almost all placebo-controlled trials are flawed due to their cold turkey design

2)The trials are insufficiently blinded

3)Psychiatrists assess the effect using rating scales, the relevance of which for the patients is often uncertain

4)Selective reporting of outcomes is very common and can be very serious

Psychiatry needs a revolution. Reforms are not enough. We need to focus on psychotherapy and to hardly use any psychiatric drugs at all.

http://www.bmj.com/content/360/bmj.k9/rr-15

Report comment

1…how about spending some time finding out the CAUSES of mental/emotional suffering…
2…how about helping those in trouble without making a profit…not for profit health care…

Report comment

“Instead they would be talking about the ongoing Crimes Against Humanity trials of the former mental health practitioners.”

I think it will be just that. What psychiatry is doing is criminial and will be treated as criminal. These medicine are poison and administering them is a crime – https://echa.europa.eu/substance-information/-/substanceinfo/100.000.142 (haldol)

The result is not an abolishment of psychiatry but a psychiatry that is not allowed to be criminal, see the first attempts to have a psychiatry without the use of poisonous substances in Norway.

Report comment

if those who want to abolish psychiatry and the mental health system have better plans to accomplish this, I think it would be extremely interesting to see their alternatives to what I’ve outlined

I like the various steps outlined; the devil is in the implementation.

For the record the anti-psychiatry movement to the degree that it exists is working to expose the fraudulence of psychiatry and the absurdity of trying to “reform” something that is based on false premises; this is contrary to the meaning of the word “reform.”

PS The term “nihilism” as applied to anti-psychiatry is an immediate indication of a biased “exploration.”

P.P.S. I don’t think anyone here considers “Tireless Fighter’s” comments to necessarily represent the anti-psychiatry movement, especially his mantra about the “middle class family,” etc.

Now to the comments…this should be interesting.

Report comment

Here are my solutions to psychiatry. I strongly agree with Robert that psychiatry fills a void and even legitimate needs in people’s lives. I didn’t stumble into Dr. M’s office in the spring of 1992 because I was overwhelmingly happy, surrounded by friends and achieving my dreams. However meth can also be used to fill a void or meet needs in the lives of unhappy people. There are alternatives to meth, and psychiatry as well.

Abolishing psychiatry would require either a collapse of our economic system in which case the government will be to busy fighting all of its citizenry to worry about programs like TAC and other crap. The other scenario would be some dictator coming in and killing massive quantities of people including shrinks. But many dictators like shrinks if they toe the party line. Neither scenario is desirable since I don’t want people to die.

Here are three suggestions to restrict the powers of psychiatry and offer alternatives to its intended victims.

1. Educate the public. Force Big Pharma to remove the lie about the chemical imbalance from their commercials. Widely publicize articles/admissions by Dr.Pies and other psychiatric bigwigs. Tell people that folks go nuts not because they’re monsters or evolutionary throwbacks but because they get stressed out. Tell everyone that NAMI is not just a front for Big Pharma but abusive parents and partners. Many who know the former don’t know the latter.
2. Provide alternatives to psychiatry. Temporary respites where people can “come back” from journeys into non-mainstream reality or whatever you call it. Coaching for eccentrics who want to tone down odd behaviors and pass. More groups like Hearing Voices. In Indiana there is nothing but mainstream psychiatry and NAMI. If TF and others find the notion of these things offensive they can stay away. Only people who wanted them would even be allowed in. “Counseling” someone against their wishes is pointless AND traumatizing. Everyone would benefit from more community activities as well. Our society is too isolating.

3. This should be a no-brainer. Flop houses for psychiatric drug addicts to dry out. This would also help make the point that the”meds” forced on us are really mind altering drugs.

Report comment

Forced treatment is a human rights violation according to the UN. Making forced treatment illegal is the first step toward fixing the mess that is called the public mental health system. Getting rid of the DSM is the second step.

Report comment

This article must get the record for getting the most posts, and long posts, the fastest.

Yes, abolish the mental health system, and incarcerate the practitioners. If someone is giving mood alteration drugs to a minor, then prosecute them for Crimes Against Humanity in the International Court.

Stop our government from giving out psychotherapy licenses.

The entire edifice is much like Social Darwinism. It take those who are marginalized and hence vulnerable, and then further marginalizes them by taking advantage of them.

If parents are taking a child to a psychotherapist, and that child is not already being represented in court by an attorney, then the therapist is being hired to help to exploit the child. That should be prosecuted as felony violation of mandatory reporting.

The entire edifice is simply converting the experience of injustice into a medical problem and self improvement project.

But I will admit, that most people in the Mental Health – Recovery System are in such voluntarily. They are just being duped.

So we have to work with such duped and raise their political consciousness so that they are willing to strike back. Can’t solve the problem from the top down.

https://sites.google.com/site/stompingthecockroach/

Report comment

When people begin to stop paying for psychiatrist/mental health visits and “medications” because the truth becomes known, the revolution will gain momentum. No one ever gives weight to the consumer law of supply and demand in this.

Report comment

We live in a society where force is a way to wield power. Children are forced to go to school and if parents keep them home, it is considered truancy. In some societies woman are forced to obey their husbands, I daresay right here in the USA. Workplaces can be forceful. A boss or manager may threaten employees with “dismissal” should they act out of line. Employees are threatened with background checks and drug screenings. The atmosphere is oppressive in some of these workplaces, with much division between workers and those up top.

We have normalized force, we shrug off the use of it, and that is not right.

Report comment

Great blog, Bob! The strength of people’s feelings about this confirm that you are speaking about a key issue. For me, when I am dealing with the effects of abuse (similar to what I am understanding many here to be saying they have experienced in the mental “health” system), one strong initial response of mine is to fight back, and to not particularly care too much if the one who has hurt me feels some of the same pain. At that point, I don’t really care; and in fact, there is a part of me which wishes I could make it so. It just hurts, and just talking doesn’t make it disappear. Yet, good friends who have made it down the path of recovery a bit further fortunately don’t leave me when I want to do to others what has been done to me, and I gradually can begin to focus on what principles I truly want to live by; one being that I want to hold people responsible for their actions, and I truly don’t want to become a vengeful abuser myself. But finding the path to that balance, where I am staunchly unrelenting in my boundary setting, yet open to finding common values even with my “enemies,” is very challenging for me. I try to distinguish the abuse from the abusive person caught themselves in such tragedies. I hope to make even further gains in that as I continue in my life.

Thank you for stimulating such important discussion.

Report comment

The comments here are really great. Steve McC I saw your comment in my email but I can’t find it now.

Yes people do feel terrible sometimes, to the point of considering suicide. If you feel that conflicted, is that a “need”? Well it’s a need for something but not for psychiatry, lockup, and labeling.

Yes, people suffer and yes they need something. They need to be heard, first and foremost. Most mental health modalities focus on symptoms and bullshit illnesses, not on real life problem-solving and issues such as poverty. Therapy doesn’t address it because therapy milks the poorest of the population (now, as this wasn’t always the case), so it’s an embarrassment.

I have personally known people and read many stories about people who were in some kind of “treatment” for ages with therapists and during all those years the real thing bugging them was never spoken about.

Then, something happens or some new person nudges their consciousness a bit. Then it all spills out. A sexual assault, abuse, bullying, these kinds of things that don’t get discussed in therapy if they don’t fit the therapist’s idea of what might bring patients to their offices. And some therapy patients never ever talk about what is really on their minds.

Here is an example and this is public knowledge, a story I found online. A young person was suffering for a long time, and her therapists kept trying to hound her about her “abusive parents.” She knew her parents hadn’t been abusive and staunchly defended her upbringing.

Finally, she was able to unearth it and tell someone. No it wasn’t her parents, but she had indeed been abused. By her grandmother.

Yet this story doesn’t fit the stereotype. Nor does my own. I was abused while in high school but not by a family member nor relative. I was abused by my “best friend.” Trust me no therapist wanted to touch this one. They mostly insisted on defaulting to “abusive parents.” It was so harmful to me and harmful to my siblings (ripple effect).

I did need to talk to someone. I found people sometimes, not therapists, usually some person older than myself I could look up to as role model, or mentor. Back then folks didn’t go to therapists very much.

Report comment

Wow, every time I visit this website I get discouraged by the narrowness of the discussion about abolishing psychiatry. The black or white, all or nothing approach. Kill psychiatry, punish psychiatrists… Are people here so fortunate that they’ve never had to experience abusive treatment by physicians in other fields of medicine? Do people who post here believe that psychiatric medications are the only ones that are toxic and kill people? that only psychiatric diagnoses and treatments can be considered bogus and nonscientific? that psychiatrists and the mental health industry are the only ones hyper-motivated by profit in the overall health “care” industry?

As someone who has suffered permanent physical (and emotional and cognitive) harm as a result of being poisoned by my metal hip prosthesis, I find it very difficult to have such a narrow view. Abuse and corruption have infiltrated all fields of medicine, not just psychiatry.

Just for the record, I’ve experienced the whole range of abusive, damaging psychiatric “treatment”, so I could be right at home with all the rage-filled vengeful anti-psychiatry people.

Personally, though, I have to say that I’ve had extremely competent, caring and compassionate doctors in all fields of medicine, including psychiatry and psychology. I’ve also had extremely abusive, incompetent, practically criminal doctors in all fields of medicine, including psychiatry and psychology.

Well, for that matter, I’ve met competent, caring, compassionate human beings, as well as incompetent, abusive, hate-filled human beings, in all walks of life.

So where does that lead me to in this whole discussion?? If I were to take the argument to its extreme, maybe I would conclude that all of Homo sapiens should be obliterated to remove the “bad” ones. Well, I admit, sometimes I do think a good sized asteroid on a collision course with earth is way past due. However, that doesn’t provide a solution to anything going on in real time.

I am not convinced that “abolishing” anything is the answer. Human beings create institutions that are reflections of themselves, and human beings are inherently flawed. I guarantee that abolishing anything will leave a vacuum that will end up being filled with the same exact thing with a different label on it. Until the discussion changes from “let’s destroy this” to “let’s figure out why we keep creating these abusive systems”, nothing will improve.

Over the long term Homo sapiens needs to make an evolutionary leap so that we don’t keep creating abusive institutions. However, I think (or hope) that we do now have the ability to make a conscious choice in how we act and what we create. Although it may feel good to blow something up, obliterate it, I think we are much more likely to have lasting positive effects by making small incremental changes over a longer term. Often, those small incremental changes set the stage for a quantum leap in evolution, but you can’t force that quantum leap if you haven’t built the base. So whoever it was above who suggested a 10,000 year time frame for change was probably quite accurate. Sorry, it won’t happen in our lifetime. But that doesn’t mean that our suffering and activism are without value in contributing to overall progress.

Report comment

I would like to present a point of view from natural medicine perspective.

This article suggests the abolishment of psychiatry by a political force. However, I think that the market itself could do the job, or at least lower the dominance of the psychiatry.

My idea is to provide western countries with the “equilateral triangle” (or other possibly neverending geometric pattern), present in some parts of India. There, a patient and his family have the free choice to which kind of medical system they want and the public insurance pays the bill. So if a person become troubled with psychosis or any other mental distress, he choose whether he wants psychiatric hospital, ayurveda, chinesse medicine, soteria program, unani medicine etc. – or any combination. In such context, what must be abolished is a coercive treatment – of course and thats the only more legally demanding change in such a model.
As per my research in those areas, this has the effect that psychiatrists themselfs treat patient with much more dignity and sensitivity, because they are aware that the patient can leave his hospital and therefore profit in any moment. And, the lies and corruption in research is less dominant, because the public itself make the decision about what is true and what is not.
In such a system, psychiatry loose its power and maybe, its existence in the future, by the force of market.

Report comment

I hope we have NON-VIOLENT revolution….a lot of things need to be taken down…

Report comment

The death of psychiatry starts with number 4 on the list.

4. State laws would be changed to eliminate all references to psychiatrists or their current legally defined functions.

All court cases would be judged on facts that have happened first, not the reason WHY they (what crime? ) happened first.
No one should be sentenced BEFORE they commit their crime they will do in the future.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEVQ2oOOofE

Report comment

I see a lot of people blaming medication, blaming big pharma, and blaming capitalism. You have a point here, but there is a bigger one you are missing: it is not about capitalism. The Phillipines is not a capitalistic society, nor was China. It is not about socio-economic status though it does come more towards the bottom. Rogue Psychiatry and medicine comes from all walks of life.

The common denominator for all situations where drugs are an issue is lack of regulation and law enforcement. It has everything to do with people not watching for when the unscrupulous would get into the system. Sadly, this can include doctors, drug dealers, or anyone else, and the fact that such methods as psychiatry and drugging can be used by anyone.

The only thing that weeds out domestic violence and forced drugging is law enforcement. The prisons are getting smaller, and the Police are getting smaller while people avoid punishment and beg for a system where people can confess their crimes, be forgiven, and forget them without any further consequence… except perhaps for the person who turned them in in the first place. So then people won’t want to report crimes.

No, it isn’t just an issue of corruption. It is that moral apathy is taking over and the system is failing because the individual is no longer standing for his freedom. We’ve grown too soft on criminal activity and people are being forced into tolerance for anarchy. The only people who win that are those that have the resources to survive.

Report comment

violent anti-psychiatry will not accomplish anything but more suffering…

Report comment

the anti-psychiatry movement is in trouble….one of the big reasons….most people suffering out there want a drug…they want a quick fix…and the psychiatrist will provide them with a drug…

Report comment

Another thing that stands in the way of reform/revolution is the quasi-religious reverence that laypeople have for psychiatry.
Psychiatry, as a political institution, has taken on many of the roles previously filled by the church; especially the roles regarding religion as a means of social control.
It only has as much power as people give it.
De-mystify it, and people will (finally) begin to see it as flawed and unworthy of such deference.

And we can start right now by STOP calling DSM “The Bible of Psychiatry”!
That epithet alone betrays the way some view psychiatry, even if they claim to be critical of it.
Every time someone says this, remind all those present that it’s nothing more than a billing guide.
Start with that.

-Liberty^ΝΥΞ

ps.
Here’s the article I wrote on this very issue.

https://www.reddit.com/user/The_Sorority/comments/7hagh2/talking_back_to_tumblr_swallowing_salvation/?st=JD0FRIW1&sh=4d485150

Report comment

Mental health system is now greed, but some of us benefit.

System has an appetite it needs to feed, but some of us couldn’t do without.

There’s no glory in eliminating for the sickest of the sick.

Within dire call for their head above water.

The levy breaks and all fury follows like flies out of the mire.

A good counter is to find a balance in a bellow.

Responds to the need for greed

Recoils the metal teeth in pain ratchet for the champion to be.

Report comment

It’s worth pointing out that mental/emotional struggles appear to be a part of human life, and that every culture in history has had both formal and informal ways of dealing with these challenges. So while abolition of coercive “treatment” and the DSM are very realistic goals, it does appear that something needs to be in place to assist people who are having difficulty figuring out how to respond to the stresses of ANY society, especially our bizarre Western post-industrial culture.

I think that Steve McCrea is making a very important point here.

Report comment

Robert, in a professional article you ought to cite your sources.

“These kinds of comments, if taken literally, seem to reflect a form of ‘psychiatric nihilism’—a black and white view in which psychiatry is the dark side of nothingness. No good can possibly come from it, a blot of meaninglessness that is used only to inflict harm and traumatize anyone coming into its dark web.”

As Frank rightly pointed out, psychiatry and nihilism go hand in hand, so antipsychiatry is also anti-nihilism. Moreover, there is a good that will come from psychiatry, and it is this: when it is finally abolished, future history books will contain a chapter on psychiatry that will be read by students alongside chapters on chattel slavery and the holocaust. It will provide future students of history greater perspectives on the nature and scope of tyranny and oppression.

Robert, I like your analogy about the dark web. That is a wonderfully creative description of psychiatry that I can incorporate into future writing. Thank you.

Report comment

I wonder what “compromise” Robert favors? By Oldhead’s definition I’m not anti-psychiatry but I am anti-coercion. I no longer “consume” any crap the mental illness racket sells.

Maybe “bend over, hold your ankles, I may not paddle you too hard this time”?
🙁

Report comment

Generating peer run and owned alternatives that actually meet needs and relieve suffering would do the trick. The psychiatric industry will collapse under the weight of its crimes. Meanwhile people will be meeting their needs and freeing each other from suffering autonomously. Mutual Aid and Solidarity Economics. Sweep the legs.

Report comment

Doing this is possible. It’s already being done. Mad solidarity.

Report comment

Folks, when is anyone going to accept that the bigger issue is the immorality of inducing mental disorders for the purposes of distorting reality and it being done at any level by anybody?

Report comment

Worth reading, by “The Conscience of Psychiatry” Peter Breggin: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/the-end-of-the-american-h_b_3799463.html
Here are his ideas for why things are looking so gloomy. He doesn’t sound incredibly hopeful for the future, and since he wrote, things have only gotten worse.

Report comment

I don’t think it should necessarily be totally shut down, either.

But most of the reasons the author has given are for the benefit of the psychiatrists, rather than the patients.

It worries me that he seems to lack the self-awareness to realise this and the knowledge that every medical system should have the sole purpose of helping its patients.

Report comment

I understand the dilemma here. The system is broken, but eliminating the system in totality creates room for more dangerous practices, limits the freedom of others to choose their own methods of treatment (just as many want the right to refuse all methods), it closes doors to better practices that could lead to well informed understanding, it would create devastation to unknown numbers of human lives…
The DSM and it’s labels are more dangerous than they are beneficial. At the least, it can only be recognized as opinion. The APA must be dismantled because it is a corrupt and corrosive regime that serves only to make itself money at all costs. Forced treatment of any kind must end, and those once deemed mentally ill must be afforded the same rights and protections as everyone else. Research and treatment findings must be made transparent. Medications, if any, must comply with the same standards as those of other branches of medicine.

Report comment

I’m all for dismantling the “mental health system”, just call me a black and white thinker. But how are we going to go about doing this when this system has gotten into bed with the legal system? That’s an unholy alliance if there ever was one. We even have a court of our very own less than a block from the “hospital” where only cases dealing with the “mentally ill” are brought before the judge. Now the courts can mandate “treatment” for people. I’ve even seen a particularly gross and arrogant judge who mandates “treatment” even though the psychiatrist doesn’t ask for it. Talk about destroying a person’s human and civil rights, and the judge gets away with it because everyone is scared of this particular judge.

Report comment

Suggest Robert Nikkel, you get yourself on the other end of forced drug induced akathisia, preferably benzo withdrawal, then came back and talk to us. That’s if you haven’t killed yourself or anyone else, which I promise you, is very possible .
——–

I want to place this video in the comments :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K12jE7TH7zQ

here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34Xh9TI8giI

But it seems I’m not allowed to do so, with reference to silentum excubitor correct statement, of psychiatry being a drug racket. If anyone can do it for me, it would be appreciated.

Report comment

This is one of the most disgusting interviews – yet everyone should listen and reference it – I have every heard. There are two things I find disgusting: At the beginning the interviewer is flogging his service in Harley Street London in the context of the genocide of his profession. Then he seems to want to find an opening of rational thinking to present the inference that what they were doing spared them a life of suffering. This just brought the full horror of truth from the psychiatrist, Dr Michael Von Cranach being interviewed. For example when they killed the children, they had to find a way to legitemise it on the death certificate, so instead of killing them within hours they did it over days giving them pneumonia just so they could write that on the death certificate.

https://youtu.be/4YU6CHaTWb0?t=767

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YU6CHaTWb0

Raj Persaud asks if it could happen again. Someone needs to inform Persaud, it’s already happening and has been happening for some time.

Report comment

Dear Robert you’re missing the point
Before slavery became illegal it was unthinkable that the world could exist without it, most people believed the economy would collapse as so many jobs depended upon the slave trade. Before women won the right to vote most people believed that women’s brains could not understand politics and their brains would collapse.
My personal view is that we need to disentangle medicine from mental health as medicine looks at what’s inside a person, it looks at their biology whereas what is needed is a discipline that looks outside, at the culture, values and beliefs that are prevalent. A degree in medicine is about as useful as a bull in a China shop when it comes to navigating human experience.
We need a catalogue of abuse, not a catalogue of ancient bullshit.

Report comment

We must just discourage people from having any dealings with Psychiatrists, Psychoanalysts, or Psychotherapists. What these people attempt to do, get the angry and alienated to accept society the way it is, and tell them that their health and wellbeing depend upon this, is just wrong.

And then stop our government from being able to license it. Until this happens, these violators will continue to have power. Angry persons will always be dismissed by telling them that they ‘need therapy’.

The only exception would be a Psychologist trying to aide someone, adult or juvenile, who is currently be represented by an attorney in court.

And then some will get something like psychotherapy from clergy. And really, psychotherapy only exists because of the abject failings of western religion anyway. So let them deal with their clergy. Sure, it is just as much non-sense as psychotherapy, but at least the government is not licensing it and making it normative.

The alternative to all these therapies is political consciousness raising and political activism. These things change people because the people are focusing themselves on making social change, and because they do this by finding comrades.

Your therapist is not your comrade.

So yes, ERADICATE THE MENTAL HEALTH SYSTEM AND PROSECUTE THE PRACTITIONERS!

“A degree in medicine is about as useful as a bull in a China shop when it comes to navigating human experience.
We need a catalogue of abuse, not a catalogue of ancient bullshit”

^^^^^ YES!

Report comment

Yes, abolish the obvious rotten apple. There’s no such thing as “Mental illness”. Psychiatric “illnesses” are the lazy doctor’s way to ignore illnesses they don’t want to deal with. In fact, pain patients are regularly being prescribed anti-depressants and anti-psychotics instead of pain meds these days. We know the damage these drugs can do. They are much more harmful than opioids for chronic pain. People who take them for pain end up in psych wards as a result.
There was a time when regular doctors wanted nothing to do with psychiatry because there was no pathological test. Pathologists didn’t want anything to do with them either.
Psychiatrists and counselors should be working with people on dealing with their emotions, because ultimately, it’s about emotions, not “mental illness”. No behavior can be considered an illness, as Thomas Szasz said. Been through the psychiatric mill myself. It IS about emotions and learning how to deal with them because emotions aren’t necessarily a reflection of reality. It’s about how to deal with relationships as well. It’s about emotional health. Back in the 50’s and 60’s we had health classes in grade school. It discussed emotional well being/health in ways kids could understand. I always wondered what happened to those books. There is nothing that qualifies to be labeled as “psychiatric medicine”. Psychology has a legitimate role – dealing with emotions and relationships. But psychiatry, no. It’s a fabricated profession from start to finish.

Report comment