Mental Health Services Must Be Prised From the Grip of Psychiatry

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From The Irish Times: “To paraphrase Einstein, the definition of madness is doing the same thing again and again and expecting a different outcome. Our Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (Camhs) are a tragic demonstration of just that. The outcomes the Maskey Report highlight show the medicalisation of difficulties that many young people experience.

Dr Seán Maskey found ‘unreliable diagnoses, inappropriate prescriptions and poor monitoring of treatment and potential adverse effects’ exposed many children unnecessarily to the risk of significant harm in South Kerry Child and Adolescent Mental Health services between July 2016 and April 2021.

The over-prescription of medication reflects not just a system that offers insufficient alternatives to drugging young people, but trenchant resistance from the psychiatry profession to adopting more collaborative and better decision-making approaches within the teams in which they work.

. . . The crisis in Camhs is not unexpected. Mental health is a multidisciplinary field where the medical model approach is now very much a minority view, and where other professions and many patient/client representative groups – and indeed an increasing number of psychiatrists – advocate for a very different one. Our mental health services have not evolved to reflect what we know about mental health. They have maintained the vice-grip of a medical model and are designed to protect the privilege and interests of one profession at the expense of people’s mental health. There are better ways, and we all know it.”

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4 COMMENTS

  1. ” Mental health is a multidisciplinary field where the medical model approach is now very much a minority view”

    On a site like this this statement, which may be applicable in the area where the author resides, reads like a form of gaslighting. It is absurd to say this when the public in its great unending ignorance generally believes in psychiatry and, when, all over the world, various countries fail to adhere to the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities with regards allowing psychiatrized people their rights. The harm psychiatry has done is indelible, for many if not most people currently alive and especially older people, they will forever believe in nonsense like chemical imbalances and “mental illness”. This piece also suffers from the same tired lack of understanding of semantics; it is not possible to have good (or poor) “mental health” as the mind is abstract, it can’t actually be well or ill. The brain can be, but the mind cannot. The fact that almost everyone IN the “mental health” (sic) fields believes in the validity of the term “mental health”, speaks very poorly for their ability to think clearly.

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    • “The fact that almost everyone IN the “mental health” (sic) fields believes in the validity of the term “mental health”, speaks very poorly for their ability to think clearly.”

      Most people confuse “mental health” with conformity.

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    • They are caught in their lie and desperately trying to find an off ramp without utterly destroying all faith in the healthcare system to detriment of everyone. As much as we want to blow on those thin strands of straw holding up their house of cards we must recognize innocent individuals who will fall and help provide them a safe landing.

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  2. I’m very glad to see that there is some movement on Psychiatric Abuse in Ireland.

    I believe that at least 50 per cent of so called “Longterm Mental Illness” is caused by “psychiatric medication”; and that it’s very possible to recover from this.

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