Human behavior is shaped by a complex interplay of life’s events, conditions, and circumstances. To truly understand a person’s actions and behaviors, one must ask: What was this person exposed to? What did they experience? These questions point to a profound truth: behavior cannot be separated from the environment in which it develops. From the safety of one’s surroundings to access to proper nutrition, sleep, and social stability, the circumstances of life have a lasting biochemical effect on the brain. These experiences are not merely coincidental with development, they actively shape it.
For example, Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) research reveals that exposure to high levels of stress and trauma during developmental years impacts development of various areas of the brain, including the hippocampus, the amygdala, and the prefrontal cortex. These areas of the brain impact how a person reacts to the world. Those with high ACE scores have brains physically different from those with low or no ACE scores. At the same time, people with high ACE scores are also more likely to do drug of all kinds—tobacco, marijuana, alcohol, opiates, mushrooms, etc., and of course a host of pharmaceutical drugs. They are also more likely to be depressed. They’re more likely to develop heart and lung diseases, cancers, and other health issues. They are more likely to struggle in finding and keeping gainful employment and to struggle with meaningful relationship and struggle with emotions.
The biological and environmental realities of a person’s life impact their brains and their behaviors and their actions. Those with common experiences define what behaviors and actions are common and ordinary, while deviation from these expectations is considered peculiar, undesirable, and sometimes pathological, even sometimes illegal.
To me, when a person’s natural state—naked—is deemed illegal, and people using nature’s medicine cabinet for medicinal purposes are labeled as criminals, it signals that our ideas of common decency have gone too far. The societal expectations and legal consequences tied to these judgments reflect a departure from humanity’s evolutionary roots. These conditions also conflict with the deeper, evolutionarily older parts of the brain, which developed in environments where nudity was unremarkable and certain psychoactive substances were used freely, without the rigid societal judgments and penalties of modern times.
Yet, it seems natural to us today, in a society shaped over a mere few hundred years, to assume we know better than nature itself. When we make aspects of nature illegal, we may be damaging humanity in ways we cannot fully grasp. Likewise, when we sever people from the natural rhythms and connections to their natural environment, we risk causing problems that remain beyond our understanding.
Yet, modern psychiatry operates as though behavior can be neatly categorized, diagnosed, and treated without this deeper understanding and consideration of the biological, social, environmental, circumstantial evidence and events that need to be understood unless they want to sell snake oil remedies. Psychiatric diagnoses, rooted in observable patterns of behavior, are often presented as authoritative conclusions.
Some patterns are those expected from people who share common experiences. But those patterns of behavior or actions displayed by the few who experienced unusual circumstances are identified as peculiar. But these patterns—seen as symptoms—are shaped by systems and constructs psychiatry rarely questions. This leads to a dangerous fallacy: psychiatrists trust the scientific apparatus of their profession, believing it produces reliable results, while ignoring the systemic and societal forces that render those results incomplete.
The issue is not merely that psychiatry fails to account for the whole person. It is that psychiatry treats people in an unnatural state as if they are natural subjects. Human beings evolved to live in harmony with nature, solving tangible problems like finding food, shelter, and community. But modern systems have displaced this natural existence, replacing it with an artificial need to survive in a monetary economy. This displacement affects every aspect of life, from how we work to how we perceive success and failure. A day’s labor isn’t rewarded with food to eat or clothes to wear, but instead with tokens. Somebody else spends their days producing food and clothing, while we pay others to live our lives so we can earn a living. Psychiatry studies people within this unnatural context, drawing conclusions as if it were studying natural phenomena.
To put it simply: psychiatry studies human behavior in a human-made world and applies natural science methods to reach conclusions about disorders and treatments. This is akin to trying to predict where water would naturally flow by observing how it moves through human-made pipes. The pipes, not nature, dictate the water’s behavior, making any conclusions about its natural course fundamentally flawed.
This infallibility of psychiatry—its inability to recognize the limits of its methods—is at the heart of its failure. Patterns of behavior that deviate from societal norms are labeled as disordered, and treatments are designed to suppress these symptoms. Yet, psychiatry rarely considers whether such deviations might be valid responses to an invalid world. By focusing on symptoms, psychiatry fails to address the systemic and societal forces that drive distress, perpetuating a cycle of misdiagnosis and mistreatment.
A Misplaced Focus on Symptoms
Consider the expectation that people should behave as though they were untouched by their unique and sometimes traumatic life experiences. This expectation is not rooted in nature but in societal constructs that prioritize conformity and productivity over individuality and healing. Psychiatry, rather than challenging these constructs, reinforces them. Diagnoses become labels, and labels justify interventions that address symptoms while leaving the underlying causes untouched.
For instance, a person who behaves differently may have been exposed to conditions and events that are anything but common. Their experiences are etched into the biochemical structures of their brain, influencing how they think, feel, and act. To expect such a person to conform to societal norms without understanding their unique life story is not just unrealistic—it is cruel.
When a person’s behavior is pathologized, they are treated as if they need to be fixed. But what if their behavior is not the problem? What if it is a natural response to an unnatural world? Psychiatry’s focus on symptoms blinds it to this possibility, leading to treatments that suppress rather than heal.
The Role of Systems and Constructs
Part of the problem is that psychiatry doesn’t operate above the fray. It’s deeply embedded in societal systems that prioritize profit, productivity, and conformity. These systems capitalize on human differences, sorting people into winners and losers, normal and abnormal, healthy and disordered. Psychiatry’s methods and conclusions are shaped by these systems, making it complicit in perpetuating the very problems it seeks to address.
Psychiatry thrives within a system that rewards it for treating symptoms rather than addressing root causes. To question the societal constructs that drive mental distress would be to challenge the very foundations of the profession’s authority and economic success.
If psychiatry is to truly help people, it needs to move beyond its current framework. Comprehensive understanding of a person’s life—including their biology, environment, and experiences—is essential. Without this knowledge, any diagnosis is merely an educated guess, and any treatment risks being misguided. I wonder if what this is was Jean-Paul Sartre was advocating for when offering existential psychoanalysis as an alternative to modern psychiatric approaches.
Psychiatry must also recognize and understand the systemic and societal forces that shape behavior. In this context, it needs to question the unnatural conditions of modern life and the expectations they impose on individuals. Only then can it begin to address the root causes of mental distress rather than merely managing its symptoms.
Ultimately, the goal should not be to label or fix people but to create a world where their natural responses to life’s challenges are met with compassion and support that can only arise from either a comprehensive understanding we don’t have yet, or from a position of learning about nature instead of diagnosing it. This means treating people as individuals with unique stories, not as problems to be solved. It means acknowledging that behavior is not just a matter of biology or psychology but of circumstance, experience, and environment.
In the end, psychiatry’s greatest failure is its refusal to recognize its own limitations. To truly help people, it must first admit that by peering through its quasi-scientific lens, it doesn’t yet understand them.
Thank you for this absolutely brilliant blog.
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Thanks for your kind words. Being a fan of the comments you post, I really appreciate your appreciation.
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Thank YOU so much, Dan 🙂
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Personally, I think psychiatry’s greatest failure is its “Treating Symptoms, Ignoring Causes” problems – which are so bad that my former psychiatrist literally declared my entire life to be a “credible fictional story” in his medical records.
But I do agree, both psychiatry and psychology have a “failure … to recognize [their] own limitations” issue. Yet if our societies took away their “right” to defame innocent others with the “invalid” DSM stigmatizations, and force neurotoxic poison people they do not know … this might help reduce that staggering, systemic, psychological and psychiatric hubris?
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One big problem the profession invites upon countless people already struggling is the unofficial license it gives arm-chair psychologists and gossips to try their hand at diagnosing and cycling through all kinds of theories and tests and try all kinds of “home remedies” or engage in countless passive-aggressive behaviors (well-intended or not) that succeed in making a person’s struggles worse. And they don’t recognize their complicity.
Arm-chair psychologists and gossips seem to have even less intellectual humility than the professionals. Maybe these layperson treatments contribute to keeping the professionals’ waiting rooms full. So it’s good for business.
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“And they don’t recognize their complicity.” After some thought, this might more accurately be said: “Some don’t recognize their complicity; others secretly revel in it while still others aren’t secret at all.”
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I largely agree, Dan. And I will admit, I found psychologists to be worse (more morally corrupt) than psychiatrists, albeit I’m not standing in support of either industry.
And I agree, “Some [within the psy industries] don’t recognize their complicity; others secretly revel in it while still others aren’t secret at all.”
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It’s hard to overstate the impact gossip can have, especially when it produces a chilling effect permeating a person’s orbit. It’s not merely the gossip among mental health professionals, but amongst the people a person sees every day (before the person started to seek professional “help”).
Especially after this chilling effect gets to the point where a person’s will to live is challenged, it can start a downward spiral of cascading consequences. Life is a social experience, after all, and when that experience increasingly consists of pain and rejection, it can lead to bizarre rebellious behaviors that are of course further pathologized.
A person racked by suicidal ideations really might not care what others think at the time. If the behavior freaks them out, so what? It’s not like they were ever going to be genuinely accepted anyway.
Should they pull out of their episode of suicidal ideation, or mental distress, they might find it’s worse than it was before. More stories are now available. Opportunities that were already diminished become even more diminished.
And the cycle continues.
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I, too, understand today’s psychologic industry tends to have a “gossip” problem – I have medical evidence of such a psychological “gossip” problem within my medical records.
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Dan – Has anyone ever evaluated gossips impact in a formal way? Your description is discouraging at best and flat-out harrowing at worst.
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Ryan, a Google search yielded some results: “Research studies indicate that gossip can have both negative and positive impacts, with the key factor being the nature of the information shared.”
Further poking around would probably yield some formal research.
Maybe these studies make the impacts more tangible or real to some by the application of scientific apparatus?
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I agree, though I haven’t experienced this myself. For example. to see or experience a mental health professional disparaging or gossiping about another patient or me would cause profound self judgment problems. Did you find the damage may comes mostly from doctors/counselors, or friends/family?
I found one article that sheds some related light on this issue (for those that may be curious). It speaks of identify illness, but that self judgment almost certainly is absorbed by the surrounding environment: “The impact of illness identity on recovery from severe mental illness: A review of the evidence”
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0165178120301682
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Ryan. You might want to look at the work of Erving Goffman, though I don’t think he deals with ‘gossip’ directly.
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Thanks for this excellent piece Dan. It’s mind boggling some psychiatrists take such a simplistic, primitive and judgmental approach to allegedly “help” people dealing with adverse life circumstances. I don’t know how these psychiatrists sleep at night knowing they have only made life more difficult for those who placed trust in them.
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I’m glad you liked it and thanks for saying so
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Still it is ALL absolute bullshit. All your earnest and beautiful works are wasted because you are trying to change the diseased human world, or in this case, a disease within the disease within the disease.
I don’t want to fix this world. I just want my Earth back. And I know that if we all just wanted our Earth back then this would fix the Earth, and fix us and all of our children. Giving the Earth back to our children is something that could not be equalled by all the collective birthday and Christmas and thanksgiving gifts, all the wedding gifts and all the gifts of dignitaries, monarchs and politicians put together throughout human history. It is a gift that could not compare even to having the whole diseased human world under your thumb. So don’t want a husband or a wife or even less a baby or a job or a car. Want your Earth back, that lost and once perfect, shimmering totality snaked by the golden sun and it’s many playing shadows. Nothing could compare to the freedom of having only that, and when we have only that, all of us become part of that perfect and shimmering totality.
If we understood this, nothing would then compare to the bliss and delight of being a simple and free human being, maybe on a boat under the hot sun and a blue sky, jumping into the sea. Seeing this vast oceanic horizon and that vague apparition which is beyond it is our eternity, as we strive forth to work it out. What is beyond that horizon? An infinite journey called freedom.
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I think I agree with you. The answer isn’t in trying to fix or improve the dysfunctional systems and institutions in this world, but to abandon them all together. We’d be better off living in smaller autonomous communities living as part of nature instead of in disrespect and defiance of it.
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I think the healthiest time we lived was when we were hunters and gatherers and in small farming communities. Living off the land is the most honest way to live, and everyone was involved in it. It was a tough life in many ways (out hunting for days at a time or not enough rain for the crops, etc.), but they were surviving together as a family and as a community. Tough but honest. They had their spiritual beliefs and were bonded that way too. We went to visit the Amish a few years ago. They were friendly to us, and I got to milk a cow and hang out with them. I love animals and nature. I’m not religious and they have their problems, but I really appreciated their commitment to living that type of honest life that comes from living off of farming and living in small communities where everyone helps everyone else. Some communities have more modern technology then others but still they life a much simpler life than we do, and they only use certain technology like the dairy farmer I met. He uses milking machines. He had about a dozen cows and some horses and cats. I don’t blame them for wanting to preserve that kind of lifestyle. They all pitch in to help each other.
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For the record–and I’m not saying you said this–science has shown that women sometimes hunted as well.
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I saw a re-creation one time of a group of men and women hunting down a mammoth. Those animals were huge!
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Your comment and that of zero’s suggest a world that can only exist with a much, much smaller human population. The drive to produce ever more humans is entirely related to economic considerations, and that reduction of humans (and other animals) to purely economic units is behind many of the mental health woes today.
Humans consider ourselves superior because we have managed to “trick” Nature in so many ways that have allowed our population to explode beyond anything reasonable or natural. How many people recognize that the fetishization of “family” is society’s way of driving the population size ever higher?? Yet this is now catching up with us as we have irreversibly damaged the very environmental conditions that we originally evolved in and that we need to survive. Disease, starvation, decreased fertility, and increased aggression are all Nature’s ways of suppressing population size of any species. All of those, especially in the last century, have dramatically increased. No matter how many tricks we develop to cheat Nature, it will win in the end.
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Hi Mary Anne. Rather than a smaller human population, maybe the same-sized population would be healthier and happier if living in smaller autonomous units living closer to nature instead of trying to artificially and collectively rise above it?
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This is a nice idea, but it is both illogical and not our real past.
You want to at once live in small autonomous groups AND keep them healthy and happy? How do you propose to protect them from the organized groups that want all the nice resources that the small groups are enjoying?
Also, our past is full of games – not all of them fun or non-violent. We have been organized into “great” empires that conquered thousands of worlds. Good luck at suppressing all that experience in some idyllic leafy paradise. Many of us are too restless and headstrong to stand for that. I wish that the solutions to our problems were as simple as you would like them to be. But we need to face what really is and what has really been.
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Before colonization in North America and the British Enclosure Movement, people often lived in small villages and tribes. While some tribes and societies were violent, many were not. These communities developed complex alliances and social structures that balanced individual needs with collective well-being. It’s impossible to know exactly what these systems might have evolved into without the disruptions of industrial revolutions, colonization, and the commodification of land and labor.
The idea isn’t to ignore humanity’s capacity for conflict or ambition but to explore whether decentralized, cooperative systems might provide a better foundation for addressing our challenges today. Modern history shows us that centralized systems often create the very inequalities and conflicts they claim to solve.
I’m not advocating for a naive return to an idealized past. Instead, I suggest we ask what lessons can be learned from how humans lived before industrialization, especially in terms of sustainability, community cohesion, and interdependence. It’s about blending the best of our past with innovative solutions for the future.
There is research suggesting that living closer to the Earth is good for us, even therapeutic. I’ve seen blogs here on MIA that make that point.
I understand the skepticism, and I share it when solutions are oversimplified. However, the idea of smaller, cooperative communities isn’t about suppressing individuality or denying history. It’s about reimagining systems that align better with human nature and our planet’s limits.
What’s really idealistic, it seems to me, is to think the systems that produce the unacceptable results we observe today will somehow produce better or different results than they do.
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Dan, the way humans lived “before industrialization” is truly not remembered (by most). You persistently avoid acknowledging that this is what I am saying. I am not saying your ideas have no merit. But they are not grounded in all the facts.
There is a reason we lost our simple ways. I cannot exactly tell you what that reason was, but I think it probably involved the fact that too many people didn’t want those simple ways. While many of us might prefer them, many of us don’t. This problem can’t be solved by ignoring it. It is an ancient problem.
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I appreciate your perspective, but I take issue with the implication that “we” (or I) need to ‘face what really is and what has really been’ as though our (or my) understanding of reality is lacking. And yours isn’t.
Having an opinion, even a strongly held one, doesn’t obligate others to become students of your worldview or your opinion about what is, what was, and what could be.
And maybe the idea isn’t for everybody. That doesn’t make it wrong.
Maybe it depends on who “we” are.
In a smaller, autonomous community, unless “we” are living there, our opinions about how the community should choose to order themselves are invalid. We shouldn’t assume we know better how other people should live.
Our systems of concentrated power presume a small number of people should govern the masses, because they know what’s best for the masses. I believe they’re mistaken about that. Every time.
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Here’s another way to look at it: What if the community you lived in consisted only of Scientologists? Wouldn’t that be wonderful? Since the community members would share the same worldview (at least to some degree), do you think there would be a natural harmony among them? Being generally aligned with the principles of Scientology, would that alone reduce conflict and promote peace? In such a community, the people in your day-to-day world would share your basic perspective.
Then, could a community of Scientologists and a neighboring community of, say, Christians coexist without trying to convert each other or impose their respective worldviews? Despite their differing beliefs, could they still agree to come to each other’s defense in case of an attack?
Could dozens or hundreds of such communities, each minding their own business and living as they see fit, form defense and trade alliances? And perhaps, as a group, join even larger alliances?
Or do you believe this is impossible according to your worldview?
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Dan, I appreciate your willingness to communicate about this.
Psychopathy is a fact of life, demonstrated by considerable research and human experience.
We have a “community” made up only of Scientologists. It is called the Sea Organization. It is a beautiful and caring community. But it has experienced much upset. Even if it were completely immune to infiltration by psychopaths, it still must deal with the rest of the world (and the universe) and psychopaths exist there.
This problem goes back a long long time. And up to recently, it seems, we had no solution for it. The solution would involve a technology that can detect psychopaths and keep them out of the group. It would also have to include a technology for removing the mental and emotional influence of psychopaths on otherwise good people. These technologies are now available and in use, but not widely in society. So the problem in society continues.
Scientologists work alongside many other religious communities. If you haven’t heard that news it is only because it doesn’t get reported, not because it isn’t happening. Again, due to the work of psychopaths who have gained control of our channels of information.
Having an accurate “worldview” about certain matters is important. If someone’s “worldview” includes the idea that everyone will treat you nice if you treat them nice, then they will always get into trouble because that is a false (or we could say, unworkable) datum. Scientology welcomes people from any religion. No “conversion” required. But if they can’t wrap their heads around the problem of psychopathy (the “criminal mind”), they will not do well in Scientology and probably not in life.
This is quite understandably a difficult subject. And when I describe what I have learned about it, I’m not trying to “convert” anyone. I’m just trying to point out that the subject is there and that it needs to be confronted and studied.
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Hi Dan, I guess I’m not entirely concerned with the “happiness” of humans, although I suspect that a world with fewer humans would be a happier and healthier world. I just don’t see how happiness and health can occur in a world in which there is so much competition for natural resources and where we are pushing so many other species to extinction because we need more and more space for human habitation.
Somehow we have come to believe that our “superiority” as a species means that we don’t need other species to survive. But the web of life has evolved over hundreds of millions of years to support every node of life. The industrial revolution has completely disrupted that web in just the last 200 years and exploded our own population way beyond what the Earth can absorb. I think the worldwide decline in human mental health is the best indicator of that.
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Hi Mary Anne. I appreciate your perspective, and I share your concerns about the strain our way of life places on the planet and its ecosystems. I think the key issue lies not just in population numbers but in how we live. Our industrial, resource-intensive way of life creates vulnerabilities for both humans and the broader web of life. It fosters competition and destruction rather than cooperation and sustainability.
If we were living in harmony with nature—smaller, self-sustaining communities that respect the ecosystems they inhabit—we could mitigate many of these problems. Such a way of life could support our current population while reducing our impact on other species. It’s not just about survival; it’s about creating conditions for a flourishing planet where humans coexist with the rest of life.
The industrial revolution indeed disrupted the natural balance, but I believe that with intentional changes, we can reimagine our role within the web of life rather than continuing to dominate it. The decline in mental health you mention might stem from this disconnect—a symptom of living in ways that conflict with our natural instincts and interdependence. Perhaps a return to more localized, cooperative ways of living could help us rediscover not only our health but also our sense of belonging in the broader web of life.
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We would at least have to abandon mass production animal farming and many land hungry industries for there to be any hope at all of having the space for the present population in autonomous communities without further eroding and destroying the environment which simply has to end here, otherwise we have absolutely no moral right to expect to survive as a species. Why should we? We killed millions of species and ravaged Mother Earth for millenia. I’m afraid you have to stare the horror of what we have done to Earth, to ourselves and all of our children, otherwise you will never be strong enough to cope with what is inevitably unfolding. Don’t allow yourself to become a lost elderly person stranded by ridiculous and comforting hopes. There will be blood on the streets of America and consciously or subconsciously you know it. Let me assure you it will be the same in Europe and the Middle East, and migrants will be spilling out of the countries that historically we in the West have done more to exploit, destabkilize and destroy then any other culture. Don’t be a stranded dependent of this doomed and tragic society. Grow legs and a strong heart and get the f*ck out of this writhing madhouse before it kills you and steels your eternity in order to service it’s infinite crimes.
And realize that capitalism and democracy are really very similar to Soviet communism in the sense that they are an arbitrary manifestation of what we actually are, a greedy, all dominating, predatory people, not the realization of sound rational ideas because if you look around you, we have a vampire society of dangerous exploiters, grifters and usurpers who are coming for you and for everything you have. Only utterly tragically afraid people, or else complete and utter blind idiots would want to shelter from these facts my friend.
If I were unbeknownst to me being marched to a concentration camp I’d want someone to tell me to give me the chance to escape. Hand on heart people: would you?? Because on some level you have already made this choice and if you want to know what you have chosen, it is showing in your thinking, feeling and action. Only a deeper understanding of the problem can ever hope to help you change this decision because it is not an intellectual decision at all. It’s a decision based on what you are and what you understand right now. Deepening your understanding naturally transfoms what you are in line with understanding, so understanding is the only transformative action, which demands unprejudiced and unblinking perception and acknowledgement of what actually is, all about you. Retreating into hopes and illusions destroys any possibility of such transformation which is the only thing that will save any of us today. There will be no hero or collective solution besides you yourself. Help without love is invariably vampirism in disguise today, and it will – indeed it is – destroying every single one of you. And it’s destroying me too – not because I demand help from others but because it is an entangled hellish pig nexus of drowning people trying to clamber on each other for safety thus ensuring they all drag each other down. I wish these words could flash and thunder like lightening because as Adorno said, “only exaggeration is true….[;] the appearance of utmost horror in the individual detail. A statistical compilation of those slaughtered in a pogrom, which also includes mercy killings, conceals its essence, which emerges only in an exact description of the exception, the most hideous torture. A happy life in a world of horror is ignominiously refuted by the mere existence of that world. The latter therefore becomes the essence, the former negligible….[And] when power was at
stake, the rulers have piled up mountains of corpses…”
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While this article rightfully challenges an approach used by many “doctors,” not just psychiatrists, it perpetuates other fallacies that have been used to support this approach.
While it is quite correct to ask, “what has the being experienced?,” how do you ask that in a way that produces a full answer? The average human experience includes many incidents which cannot be fully remembered, if they are remembered at all. Birth is an obvious example. How do you overcome this problem?
One researcher who did find a way to overcome this problem (Hubbard) then went on to discover many other unremembered (or “suppressed”) incidents in the experiences of people he worked with. These included past life experiences, which led to the obvious conclusion that the mind (as the storehouse of experience) must not be in the brain.
Are you counting the number of fallacies that psychiatry wants us to believe along with their unwillingness (inability) to locate root cause?
1) The mind is in the brain, therefore mental “illness” is brain malfunction. False.
2) Human experience only extends to the beginning of this lifetime (due to 1. above). False.
3) All of human behavior “evolved” on Earth in various natural environments.
False. Human experience, when properly investigated, extends beyond Earth to many previous man-made environments. The track of experience of an average person is, in fact, quite complex if not downright confusing.
The desire to find root cause is valid and of immense importance. But this is where it leads, if pursued truly and honestly. Are we ready, whether we be students of the mind or their victims, for the real truth of human experience to be known?
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I agree that asking the right questions can’t produce answers revealing the whole story of a person’s experience. The whole story would entail not only the biological predispositions of a person, including pre-birth experiences and conditions, as well as a comprehensive, infinitely detailed account of the person’s life—including conditions, events, and biological realities throughout. The whole story isn’t available to us, even to the person living the story.
In the blog, I tried to convey that idea toward the end, where effective action “. . . can only arise from either a comprehensive understanding we don’t have yet, or from a position of learning about nature instead of diagnosing it.”
Absent this comprehensive understanding, it seems more responsible to be a humble observer and student of nature than it does to assume a role of authority over nature by diagnosing what’s wrong with a person.
If psychiatry were a natural science, would it be the only one in which scientists observe nature with the idea that nature is wrong and needs to be fixed?
It seems if natural phenomena escape current scientific explanation, we know our understanding is in error or incomplete. Nothing happens in nature that’s contrary to nature. When we can’t explain it, in no case is nature suspected of being wrong or broken.
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Very interesting, thought provoking analysis of what it is to be a human being and I feel it would benefit more people/communities to understand your observations, feelings, experiences related to the discussion (including with Mr. Cox) if you could perhaps venture to present in a TedTalk? Thank you for this amazing, intelligent sharing. LOVE. PEACE. God Bless
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Thank YOU for your comment. Love and peace—I’m with you there. Sometimes I wonder what the world would be like today if the Flower Children got their way.
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I must admit, when you mentioned a TedTalk, a video clip ran through my mind. It’s the one where Coach Jim Mora is asked about playoffs. My (imaginary) response to being asked about doing a TedTalk is like Coach Mora’s response to being asked about making the playoffs. (See at 0:17.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NK3Jx2yvtVE
We’d both be happy with just winning a game! 🙂
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You are convinced that humans are totally a part of the “natural” world and that we should be humbled by this world. I don’t think that’s what the research is telling us. Of course we can respect nature as a grand and marvelous invention. But there is some indication that we were at least partly responsible for creating it. So, how humble should we really be? My main point is that a lot of information (research results) is already out there and being ignored.
We don’t need an exhaustive history of a person’s experience to treat them. We DO need, though, a way of finding all the most important traumatic experiences on the case. Hubbard has found a way to do this. Why isn’t anyone paying attention?
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Yes, we will never have a comprehensive understanding of a person’s life. It’s with this humility that we need to approach treatments that are impactful beyond our understanding, like pharmaceutical interventions.
Humility might benefit those who prescribe treatments with impacts we don’t fully understand (and would only really understand by having the comprehensive knowledge we lack).
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Humility is essential in any healer. Though perhaps not to the point of inaction. Psychiatry as it is practiced today, though, is not failing simply due to a lack of humility. It is arrogant and greedy. As well as suffering from self-imposed ignorance. We cannot summon the higher emotions simply by ignoring the baser ones. They must be confronted and handled in each individual. It is a daunting task.
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I think the mind can create some false memories, especially when under hypnosis. There is an expectation to remember past lives.
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We are dealing with research methods that rule out the possibility of false memories. Past lives are real.
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Does your third assertion–that human experience, when properly investigated, extends beyond Earth to many previous man-made environments–have any CREDIBLE evidence? Just where were those environments located–on other planets in the Milky Way, in remote galaxies, in parallel dimensions or universes? And what exactly do you mean by “proper” investigations, and who possesses the skills and unimpeachable integrity to conduct them accurately and objectively?
Lastly, why should I accept the tenets of Scientology rather than the traditional wisdom embodied in Huna, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, ancient Egyptian texts, or shamanistic lore, not to mention the Abrahamic religions? Does Dianetics supersede all these ancient sources in regard to understanding human nature, and if so, how?
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I’m going to let one more post stand on this topic. Larry, if you have any validated links or literature to share that Mark can read, please help us out and do so. If not, it sounds like you’ve answered Mark’s questions and I’d like to leave off with one more post. The discussion is really quite far off the original topic.
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I am not here to be your teacher. If you are really interested you can study the subject yourself.
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You made a claim, that past lives are real. The burden is on you to validate your claim.
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No it isn’t! There is no “burden” here! This is not a court room where innocence versus guilt is being decided. The evidence for past lives is quite extensive. If you aren’t interested, then forget it.
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You stated in a recent comment that psychopathy is a fact of life, demonstrated by considerable research and human experience.
Unfortunately your entire argument is totally vitiated by your sweeping assertion, which you take as an article of faith, that so-called psychopathy is a demonstrable and universally agreed upon condition. Anyone who has the most elementary acquaintance with cultural anthropology will grasp that what you term psychopathy is solely an arbitrary metaphor for patterns of thinking, emotion, and behavior proscribed and often punished in specific milieus. To cite just two examples among countless others, Mongol warriors in the Golden Horde who gleefully raped, tortured, murdered, and pillaged, or Nazi concentration camp doctors who performed lethal experiments on “subhumans,” were lauded by their superiors and considered worthy of emulation. In the context of their own societies and cultures, such individuals were obviously not considered to be madmen at all. So, what experience and research can you cite to prove your point that what you label as psychopathy does in fact have a universally accepted, VALUE-FREE definition and medically or scientifically verifiable criteria for assessing its severity?
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If you are not prepared to agree that psychopaths exist, then you are swimming against the current at this point. It’s obvious they exist.
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Once again, you have failed to substantiate your claim asserting the reality of psychopathy, which, I presume, you classify as a form of mental illness. I reject the existence of mental illness as a verifiable medical phenomenon, except in cases of demonstrable physical etiology such as dementia. This concept is meaningless outside of a specific historical, social, and cultural context (as I mentioned above with two concrete examples).
Kindly tell me the “current” you are referring to, and cite the body of credible, universally accepted scientific knowledge on which it is based.
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If you want to remain blind to the reality of our situation, be my guest. But for goodness’ sake, stop asking me to “prove it.” This is not a productive question and I have not interest in getting into such discussions. The research is there to be studied.
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Posting as moderator:
OK, I think we have sufficiently fleshed out this argument. Everyone made their positions clear, and it’s not going to be productive to continue along these lines. Let’s move on!
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RE: “what you term psychopathy is solely an arbitrary metaphor for patterns of thinking, emotion, and behavior proscribed and often punished in specific milieus”
That’s MISdirection or hogwash.
It does not matter whether a “specific milieu” does or doesn’t acknowledge that we ARE dealing with a psychopath or psychopaths. Humans have recognized psychopaths amongst them for millennia despite that they did not have this contemporary well defined term for it.
The empirical reality of psychopaths has been in front of everyone’s “awake” nose for decades and centuries — see “The 2 Married Pink Elephants In The Historical Room” at https://www.rolf-hefti.com/covid-19-coronavirus.html
Yet…
“The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduces them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.” — Gustave Le Bon, in 1895
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I’m afraid that your cavalier dismissal of my argument as “misdirection” or “hogwash” totally fails to refute the validity of the point that I sought to make.
Have humans really been aware of the existence of so-called psychopaths in their midst for millennia? A study of history is replete with examples of populations–including intellectual elites–willingly accepting the promises and blandishments of deluded and manipulative leaders. Are you aware that half of German psychiatrists in the 1930s and early 1940s belonged to the Nazi party and supported the sterilization and mass extermination of “subhumans,” so-called asocials, and numerous other undesirables? What about the Soviet psychiatrists who labeled political dissidents as latent schizophrenics, or the American Psychiatric Association, which endorsed eugenics and branded homosexuals as deviants in the not too distant past? Are you aware that Dr. Albert Seligman, a world-famous dermatologist affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania, conducted harmful experiments on hundreds of inmates in the state prison system for over a period of more than 20 years–WITH the approval of his colleagues? (See the book “Acres of Skin” by Allen Hornblum for details on the heinous project.). Are you also familiar with the infamous Tuskegee Project?
Did the media, the scientific community, and other other institutions recognize and condemn these inhuman activities pursued for commercial gain and professional prestige? No, because the milieu of the time tolerated them.
In short, the concept of psychopathy or any other type of supposed mental illness is wholly defined by the culture and mores of a society at a given point in time. Dr. Thomas Szasz’s books and articles on this subject remain as relevant today as they were decades ago.
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Thank you, sir.
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One question for you and anyone else interested in the contextual significance of psychopathy (or any other hypothetical mental disorders):
Random killing of strangers (e.g. as in the case of serial murderers such as Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy) is typically regarded as a manifestation of psychopathic behavior.
So, what about the crew of the Enola Gay B-29 bomber who vaporized tens of thousands of children, elderly people, and other civilians in Hiroshima? If the killing of perfect strangers is psychopathic, were the American flyers who did exactly that classifiable as homicidal maniacs? If you respond to this line of reasoning by saying that they were servicemen following the legitimate orders of their superiors, I would point out that the Einsatzgruppen death squads tasked with exterminating Jews, or the Soviet commissars who knowingly starved to death millions of Ukrainian peasants in the Holodomor, invariably resorted to the very same pretext in justifying their actions. Or are decisions made by “democratic” leaders to be automatically regarded as somehow more “sane” than those imposed by autocrats? Weren’t Dick Cheney and George W. Bush psychopaths guilty of launching a war that was based on outright lies and led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians ? Why didn’t psychiatrists hospitalize these malefactors and subject them to forced treatment?
Context provides the obvious explanation. American psychiatrists, like their equally venal and cowardly counterparts in Nazi Germany and the USSR, rarely question the sanity of the powers that be. The risks would be too great.
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The flyers were following orders. Someone involved in giving the order to drop huge bombs on civilians WAS a psychopath.
Anyone who has studied psychopathy is aware that psychopaths do not specialize in killing “random strangers;” they specialize in getting other people to kill each other.
I have no idea why you are so insistent about this. If you had met a few of these people (and the researchers in this subject certainly have) you’d know they were real, and real crazy.
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Joel, I appreciate your participation. I recently wrote a piece that guest stars Jeffery Dahmer in a thought about “walking in another’s shoes.” I wonder if it makes sense to you?
https://drive.google.com/file/d/17apqD3pztW-6682gIhARm9quXD6RYlRJ/view?usp=drive_link
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To Larry Cox:
You reply that the flyers (i.e. the crewmen of the Enola Gay) were only following orders. So those who blindly obey the dictates of a “psychopathic” superior can be absolved of all moral responsibility? Hence Nazi physicians like Joseph Mengele (are you aware that 7% of the SS were members of the medical profession?) acting on the orders of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin or Professor August Hirt in Strasbourg were noble, innocent researchers toiling selflessly in the furtherance of scientific knowledge? To cite a more recent example, what about Dr. Albert Seligman, the dermatologist I mentioned in a previous comment, who injected radioactive isotopes and toxic substances into the hundreds of prison inmates he used as guinea pigs? He initiated this heinous project of his OWN volition, and profited from lucrative contracts with corporations sponsoring this activity. Were Seligman, the University of Penn colleagues who supported him, and the corporate executives who gave him financial backing upstanding paragons of ethical conduct? Given that none of them suffered any sanctions or punishment (as indeed they should have, under the standards established by the Nuremberg Trials) it’s quite obvious to me that the social context in which they operated did approve or at least gloss over such conduct.
You claim that psychopaths do not specialize in random killing. Really? Then how would you describe the Son of Sam, Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and the Unibomber Ted Kaczinski, all of whom cold-bloodily raped, mutilated, butchered, or blew up perfect strangers?
Lastly, you seem to be mystified why I’m so “insistent” about this matter. To answer your question as succinctly as possible, I reject the concept of psychopathy (and the vast majority of other so-called psychiatric illnesses), which to me are basically metaphors for socially proscribed patterns of thinking and behavior, metaphors that evolve over the course of time (as one can readily see with the arbitrarily concocted, now ridiculed disorder of drapetomania). I suggest that you peruse the works of Dr. Thomas Szasz if you need confirmation of this elementary truth.
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Joel, I will not continue to verbally joust with you. Your mind is obviously made up. Why bother to challenge my information? Just state what you think is true and leave it there.
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Larry, I’m sorry I can’t reply directly to your comments. You mention troubles “due to the work of psychopaths who have gained control of our channels of information.”
You make a good point about the dangers of people manipulating communication networks. This issue, along with the rise of deep fakes, identity theft, and other forms of deception, reflects how technology and large-scale systems are being exploited in ways that erode trust. These problems are symptoms of living in a highly interconnected but impersonal world, where accountability often gets lost in the vastness of our systems.
There may be better solutions to devising technologies to “detect psychopaths and keep them out of the group.” Slathering more layers of technology onto existing technology to deal with the problems created by technology might sound good, but it also sounds unsustainable.
In smaller, interdependent communities, these kinds of issues wouldn’t have the same foothold. When people know each other personally and rely on one another for survival and well-being, trust is built on direct relationships rather than mediated through sprawling, anonymous networks. A liar or manipulator in such a setting would face immediate social consequences because their actions would directly impact people they interact with daily.
By contrast, in our globalized world, bad actors can operate with relative impunity, hiding behind layers of technology and bureaucracy. It’s worth considering how we might reimagine our social structures to mitigate these risks—perhaps by emphasizing smaller, more connected communities where relationships are built on mutual reliance and shared responsibility, making deception far less viable.
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This problem existed long before “globalization” and “technology” were a thing on Earth. They existed long before there was an Earth. This is a universal problem much bigger than Earth. We could make Earth a benign and peaceful place and we would still experience threats from external entities.
If you are correct that indigenous cultures were more benign and peaceful than we are now, what happened to wipe them out? What will you do to ensure that doesn’t happen again?
When I speak of “technology” I don’t speak of electronic gadgets and computers. I speak of any tested and workable process for accomplishing something. It’s a broader definition that most people today are using. The wheel is a “technology.” Oars on a boat is a “technology.”
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While it’s true that smaller, autonomous communities may appear defenseless in the face of external threats, the value of self-determination and living according to one’s own principles should not be underestimated.
The argument that we need a larger government for protection overlooks the fact that the government itself may be a source of oppression. The question, then, is whether we are willing to trade our freedom and autonomy for the security offered by an oppressive system.
If the worry includes invasion from extraterrestrials, it seems that would be hard to defend against in any case. But the question remains–and people will answer it differently; it’s something reasonable people can disagree about without anyone being right or wrong:
Does the possibility of being invaded outweigh the certainty of living as seen fit?
In smaller communities, protection could take on a different form, one rooted in cooperation and mutual aid, rather than reliance on an external, centralized authority. NATO consists of autonomous members who will come to each others’ defense without needing to give up their autonomy.
And the defense of a community might not always be military in nature; it could be a collective, non-violent resistance or even a reimagining of what ‘defense’ means—creating systems that make the community less vulnerable to exploitation or violence in the first place.
In this view, the ‘defenselessness’ of smaller communities is not necessarily a fatal flaw, but rather an invitation to think differently about what it means to be secure. Do we want to be protected by a government that controls us, or do we want to create our own security by living in a way that reflects our values and builds resilience from the ground up?
It’s important to understand who “we” are. “We” might consist of people who subscribe to the belief that smaller units of autonomy are desirable.
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You are speaking of ideals that could only exist in the spiritual world.
For this reason, they have some validity, but we are spirits playing a game in the physical world, and in that world we need to protect our communities from criminal activities. This must be a part of any vision of a more viable future.
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I totally agree
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I was told that I was gifted in first grade. I’ve always struggled with not understanding people. Evaluations showed giftedness and unspecified anxiety. Burnout was mistaken for depression. But when put to the test, I did not meet criteria. Anxiety was thought to be a trauma response to bad parenting. But again, that didn’t fit criteria. My parents weren’t neglectful or abusive, and I didn’t meet criteria for childhood trauma or a personality disorder. So after these evaluations, I was thrown to a therapist. I find it mindboggling that therapists stayed rooted in depression and trauma narratives, and failed to consider the actual impacts of being gifted. Even the professionals see giftedness as something that can only lead to positive life experiences. Since the world seemed so skeptical and downright offended by my disclosure that I was diagnosed as gifted and that it can come with a myriad of problems, I just rejected the idea myself. But it didn’t change the struggles I faced living in a neurotypical world. Giftednes is a neuro diversity. It’s a neurological hard wiring. I was correct to reject medication and therapy that amounted to gaslighting. What I needed from the mental health community was an understanding of how gifted individuals struggle and strategies on how to live in a neurotypical world. But instead, I was hit with DBT and family systems bs that did nothing to help me. I understand now that few therapists are skilled at helping gifted clients. It’s also very clear now that admitting you’ve been diagnosed as gifted, but still struggle is the wrong thing to disclose. Most people, therapists included, seem put off by this and see it as my feeling superior to others, which is untrue. Thankfully, I have the ability to do appropriate research and can be self critical. Self critical does not mean hating on yourself, it means being honest with yourself about both your strengths and weaknesses. It means being self aware and having insight about yourself, rather than falling into a downward spiral of self hatred or going into denial to protect a fragile ego. It would be helpful if therapists would be more open minded, check their confirmation bias, and actually listen to their clients and believe them rather than twisting their words and misinterpreting them.
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It’s not uncommon for unusually intelligent children to be misunderstood and subsequently mischaracterized by schoolteachers and therapists.
Which tells me that 90% of what “professionals” are taught is actually useless — if not outright harmful.
Many times, all kid has to be is unusually sensitive for their lives to be made miserable by whatever “professional” they (may) have the misfortune of meeting.
I believe too often the dynamics of “psychotherapy” amount to the therapist implicitly coaxing clients into triangulating against themselves because I believe the dynamics of “psychotherapy” are built on the therapist unconsciously stoking a client’s self-hatred spurred by the unconscious hopes of distracting themselves from facing their own.
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Hi Sheila. Do you think that not fitting in with your peers was traumatic for you in any way? It was for me. I didn’t fit in for other reasons though.
Unfortunately, the mental health industry has like a formula (one size fits all) approach and not everyone fits into their narrow-minded approaches. There are a variety of different therapies and therapists out there though but I can see what you are saying about your particular situation.
Good for you to reject medication since you didn’t need it. Self-awareness is key in life. You can’t change without it.
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I think being exposed to any form of psychiatry would constitute an “adverse childhood experience” and yet the psychiatrists and their army of servants of tyranny claim to be the solution?
I do think you might be missing the point of this negligence. fraud and slander disguised as ‘medicine’ though Dan.
An example I mean to observe over the next couple of years.
A young man (early 20s) has just been convicted of “animal cruelty” in our Courts. I won’t go into details but the community is up in arms about the 2 month prison sentence he has been given for the crimes. Comments have been made on social media, including one rather observant poster who suggested he be subjected to a “chemical lobotomy”. How fitting that this is where he will likely end up after serving his 2 month sentence, in the hands of people whose acts of barbarism towards other humans kind of match the ones he committed against animals. Of course without a ‘confession’ from these human rights abusers what they do to this young man will be called ‘medicine’….. they have the means and opportunity, but you will never prove the motive….. and so they may act for the State in such a manner with impunity.
So I expect to see this young man wandering the streets, dribbling from the mouth as his brain is deliberately damaged by people who are obviously breaching their Hypocritic oath to “first do no harm” (63:2: “They have taken their oaths as a cover, so they averted [people] from the way of Allah”). People in the community will no doubt believe that he needs help as a result of said brain damage, and they are correct. It’s just that like the young man handed back to Jeffrey Dahmer by the Police, they are not seeing what is actually occurring with these ‘treatments’.
Okay, so it’s a form of extra judicial punishment? Might be, …… but like my situation, having the documented proof is a dangerous situation for the individual to be in……. when the State has “euthanasia laws” and the right to “edit” documented legal narratives after the fact. (I have some data here about the levels of ‘coercion’ being used to create the appearance that people being restrained and force drugged are “voluntary patients” that is absolutely shocking. One wonders about the levels of people being ‘coerced’ [by the same people] into ‘volunteering’ to be euthanised in such a State).
So a bit like the Germans 1940s, we keep our mouths shut while these abuses occur? It sure seems that way when the punishment for trying to complain about State sanctioned torture is to be “unintentionally negatively outcomed” by exploiting the “emergency provisions” provided under our laws.
I think your right in what you suggest above, but it goes much much further than even you have suggested.
I’ll be watching while ‘mental health services’ go to work on this young man….. and provide him with the ‘help’ he so desperately needs.
“The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience.” Albert Camus.
Note: in my State cruelty to an animal carries twice the penalty of abuse of a mental patient (and ALL citizens are considered mental patients by default according to our Chief Psychiatrist, thus enabling arbitrary detentions and ‘coerced’ treatment of dissidents) and as the above case shows there is a chance you may be prosecuted for crimes against animals. Recent questions in our Parliament show that there has NEVER been a charge laid against anyone for abuse of a mental patient, never mind a conviction. In fact, the debate has exposed that no one even knows who would be responsible for the enforcement of the laws that ‘protect’ the community (and Police will simply refuse to take the proof and claim there is “insufficient evidence” anyway, thus perverting justice for the benefit of a few individuals)……. any wonder they are using the ‘hospitals’ to torture citizens, and then “edit” the documented legal narratives? And these guys, unlike Bashar al Assad, don’t need to run when they are exposed.
Who would dare say anything? The “liberals’? The ‘democrats’? Human rights lawyers (Hi to the Mental Health Law Centre) who provide material assistance to the State to throw their clients under a bus by uttering with known fraud and actively concealing such vile abuses?
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You put “animal cruelty” in quotes, which implies you disagree. I don’t know what happened, so I’m not able to form my own opinion. I don’t want to know details, but I’m going to say, if it’s bad, he deserves far more. Animal abusers rarely get what they deserve.
Also, not all doctors take the Hippocratic Oath, which DOES NOT begin with, “First, do no harm.” As I recall, it’s not in there at all.
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5th century BC: “I will prescribe regimen for the good of my patients according to my ability and my judgment and never do harm to anyone.”
Older version: “With regard to healing the sick, I will devise and order for them the best diet, according to my judgment and means; and I will take care that they suffer no hurt or damage.”
Recent version: “Above all, I must not play at God.”
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In my experience, which is very much at the coal face of psychiatric treatment in the UK, your words ring very true and labels are given and heavy handed attempts are made to ‘fix’ people with drugs which usually do so much more damage than good. It is a frighteing world and the psychiatrists I have had anything to do with are all rather disturbing people. It must take such courage or callousness to believe you can ‘fix’ someone’s life with such a blunt instrument as a neuroleptic drug, and then walk away feeling you have done a good job.
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Thanks! Your comment highlights the importance of personal experience–it’s important to the issue of this discussion, too. Isn’t it odd how lived experience, from the perspective of the person who lived it, is so easily dismissed as irrelevant by those wondering what’s “wrong” with that person—often by observing “symptoms”? To them, a person’s experiences might be relevant only to the degree that they produce a “good diagnosis.”
In nearly every other context, experience is highly respected, even revered. Employers demand detailed résumés and won’t consider you without the right background—personal experience is king. But when it comes to understanding behavior or diagnosing ‘mental disorders,’ the lived experience of those living it is brushed aside, left for others to debate. Although nobody recalls their entire life experience, the one who lived it is the best authority.
But who cares what someone with decades of experience being treated as an ‘untreated mental disorder’ thinks? It’s just the opinion of someone with a mental disorder, after all—gossips and experts alike always seem to know better than a distressed person who actually lived it.
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Forget about being taken seriously if they see you as being overly emotional or you’re diagnosed with a personality disorder.
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Very true.
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When we hear someone talk about a distressed person’s past, filled with horror stories extending to childhood behaviors that were seen as warnings in need of intervention and control—we need to listen one layer deeper. What you’re hearing is the story of a person who has been pathologized since childhood. Given enough time and exposure, being pathologized can invite some strange behavior (which of course becomes further evidence of pathology).
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I’m glad I grew up the 70s before so many children were being diagnosed and put on medication. I’m glad I didn’t have to deal with that.
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“–gossips and experts alike always seem to know better than a distressed person who actually lived it.”
My solution: stay away from professional gossips—especially ones who carry a checklist.
More words mean more money to the “professional” class.
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I think I might have a further solution. (Please notice I did not say I have the solution or the final answer. There is no end to this search for a better way)
I definitely think asking “what has happened to this person” and finding root causes for emotional/mental/spiritual distress could be pushed further in order to help folks is to also ask THEM “What do you want?”
Right now even when we do sometimes acknowledge that bad things happen to people & their reactive behaviors are understandable we STILL ask them to change those reactive behaviors to similar circumstances.
Why do I need to behave differently to bad things happening if my behavior was understandable the first time?
I agree with ZERO! We dont need a new & improved mental health system! Each person who is a patient in the mental health system needs to get some tools in order to build a new and improved world for themselves!!
Ask them, “What kind of world do you want to live in? How can we help you be equipped to build it for yourself?”
Pretty soon, there will be no need for drugs or shocks or psychotherapy.
And THAT is exactly why psychiatrists will never ask those questions of their patients. They’d be asking themselves right out of a job!
It’s why instead they tell you you’re incompetent and need to be managed with their treatments. “You are mentally ill. There is no cure, it’s chronic. But we will help you by prescribing you drugs for the rest of your life”
That’s a great business model.
A win for the professionals. But in this case, a HUGE LOSS for the customers. But that’s OK because they work for the State and so can force their customers to be customers.
Again. A win for the business owners but a loss for the people who are paying.
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Agreed. Psychiatry isn’t about health, it’s a money-driven fallacy that unjustly rewards those who practice it, imo.
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“The issue is not that psychiatry fails to account for the whole person. It is that psychiatry treats people in an unnatural state as if they are natural subjects. Human beings evolved to live in harmony with nature, solving tangible problems like finding food, shelter, and community. But modern systems have displaced this natural existence, replacing it with an artificial need to survive in a monetary economy…. Psychiatry studies people within this unnatural context, drawing conclusions as if it were studying natural phenomenon.”
Dan, thank you for illustrating so eloquently what I’ve long believed to be at the root of so many psychiatric “illnesses”. I believe the struggle to survive in a dog-eat-dog world affects people in ways most aren’t’ aware of, that this deeply affects what people value in life which in turn can harmfully affect the way many parent their kids.
As a young adult it freaked me out to realize how precarious life is for most people in a market-driven economy, especially when losing your health to disease or accident could mean losing everything to a healthcare system more interested in profit than health. Or having to work for an abusive boss because without that job you lose health insurance. Or being fired by an abusive boss without just cause or adequate warning. It’s brutal realities like these that had me wondering how in the world anyone survives the pressure of living in such a cruelly competitive world.
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Thanks for your kind words. I agree with you about how real world pressures impact how kids are parented (which just might impact their ACE scores). After a day of earning a living in an unnatural, high-stress world, mom and dad might not be the caring, nurturing parents they would be if working under natural conditions for natural rewards. When they get home from work, they might need to focus on their own self-care and stress relief.
Parents are pressured to earn a specialized living in the real world to pay for food, clothing, and shelter. And now child care, since both parents need to work to make ends meet. The variety of natural work of producing food, clothing and shelter is done by paid strangers.
Instead of working cooperatively to produce what they need, people spend their lives earning money to purchase these necessities, often at the expense of genuine human connection. How many people pay professionals to raise their children in day care while they are busy earning money to pay for food, housing, clothing, healthcare, and of course, day care? Are they effectively paying someone else to live their lives for them while they earn a living? Isn’t raising children kind of an important part of the child’s and parent’s natural lives, a part so important that society at large depends upon them doing a good job?
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Raising infants and children while incredibly joyful is also a lot of hard work. Some say it’s the hardest. But daycare is not always the answer imho.
The necessity of both parents having to work full-time outside the home just to barely pay the bills adds to the already challenging and often downright stressful job of child-rearing; the parents’ stress can’t help but spill over onto each other and more tragically onto their children.
Things have gotten to the point where people are subliminally led to believe that we “need therapy” (i.e., a professional friend) to help us sort out our lives. And if THAT doesn’t work, we are further led to believe that we must be “mentally ill”. So off we go the doctor and then to the pharmacy to purchase more “help” that often ends up benefiting the “professionals” more than us, but some would say it’s neoliberalism at its finest.
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…it seems logical to me that pressures like these could make anyone “mentally ill” — except for maybe the psychiatrists who “treat” them.
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Thank you for writing this article.
Having recently got out of a hospital, I discovered that symptoms had been incorrectly ascribed to me to fit a diagnosis they believed I had, because they wouldnt recognise or believe the trauma id been through. I don’t dispute I had mental health difficulties, but now I have these errors on my notes, no doubt they will use them to justify keeping me on inappropriate doses of medication.
If anyone reading this is in a better place, and has experience of successfully challenging psychiatrists over incorrect notes, it might be ever so helpful to write a guide. Although I could make an official complaint, it seems as though they repeatedly dismiss my view claiming lack of insight (oh the irony!).
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Liz, I am so sorry this happened to you. It seems many people who see a psychiatrist for ‘help’ dealing with adverse life events find out there are errors, untruths and fabrications written in their records. This doesn’t concern the psychiatrist however because after someone is labelled with any psych label they are deprived of a voice and credibility. The psychiatrist’s narrative is the only one that counts, no matter how erroneous and fabricated it is. It’s long overdue that patients are immediately given a copy of notes following each interaction/appt with a psychiatrist or access to electronic records to know what fallacies have been written about them. There also needs to be accountability and a way to correct such fabrications. As it is now psychiatrists easily destroy a person’s reputation and/or life with lies and defamation but are never held to account because the patient is deemed to ‘lack insight’ and to have no credibility.
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Rosalee, thank you for your kind reply. I wholeheartedly agree that something needs to be done. I felt so foolish afterwards because he was perfectly charming.
I’ve no idea if he had been specifically trained in trauma. Everything seemed skewed to fit the medical model.
One thing I realised afterwards was my memory would often skip details and then later bring them back, as if I’m not able to hold all the information about what happened at once. I wondered if it was that which caused him to say it was all delusional.
I’m totally certain about the reality of what happened, but he said I was seeing things which I never have done. All very convenient for the perpetrators of the events which harmed me so much.
I really hope someone is able to petition for change and highlight what is happening.
Also, I became aware that over 8000 people over several years have died in connection with one NHS trust (I’m in the UK).
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Wow that’s a big number -are you referring to Essex/ Chelmsford ? the staff all refused to give evidence at the statutory inquiry. Imagine that the hubris and arrogance and power.
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They don’t call it the National Homicide Service (NHS) for nothing. (See Majiid Nawaz on Midazolam and End of life “care” pathways)
The refusal to give evidence is possibly the result of the ‘joint enterprise’ laws. Situations where the witnesses to public sector misconduct need to exercise their ‘rights’ to conceal criminal conduct for the State, but where others (eg Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs) can and are imprisoned for doing the very same thing. So 14 Police watch as a young man is kicked to death in the cells, and they refuse to testify? Who benefits?
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Hi K, no it was Norfolk. There are articles online about it, but I’m not aware of what’s happening more recently about it.
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“As it is now psychiatrists easily destroy a person’s reputation and/or life with lies and defamation but are never held to account because the patient is deemed to ‘lack insight’ and to have no credibility.”
Well said. The same phenomenon happens with people in a person’s orbit, which can be devastating. Gossips and arm-chair psychologists can ruin a person’s life, too, with lies, over-simplified half-truths, and defamation. And they’re never held to account either. The target of gossip doesn’t know who said what behind their back and doesn’t get the chance to offer another perspective before the gossips are already behaving as if the gossip they heard through the grapevine carries the whole truth.
By the time the target can find someone to understand more of the story, it’s too late. Minds are made up.
As life is a social experience, when a person’s orbit consists entirely of people who treat them like someone they are not, it can really drive some powerful mental distress.
Then it’s off to see “professional help” which might be basically more of the same, coming from the same mindset.
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That’s so true.
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Thanks! If you’d like to see the expanded view of it, you can find it here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1edxj1VdCgOzZlhvj6X54NRayiDeFhLkK/view?usp=sharing
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Dan, yes dealing with lies, back stabbing and defamation is extremely hard to deal with. I experienced this while undergoing cancer treatments. Unbeknownst to me an estranged sibling called doctors I had to see during cancer treatment and told them many harmful lies. She even lied by claiming I had been given certain psych diagnoses in the past. I was never told of the damaging lies/false labels they took from this sibling and put onto my health records as factual so it was confusing and worrying when these doctors began treating me with utter contempt. It was several years later when I was finally able to obtain copies of my records and was shocked by what I saw. I tried to have my sibling write a letter to retract her lies but to no avail. I had no choice left but to sue her for defamation and she finally issued a legal retraction of her many lies. However because the doctors believed her lies without questioning or verifying with anyone else (including my family doctor, partner, other family members) they put her lies onto my electronic records as fact. Even with the legal retraction, plus strong letters of support to dispute her lies from my family doctor, several MH professionals, my partner, other family and friends, I have not been allowed to have this false information on my widespread electronic records corrected. It has truly been a nightmare that won’t end.
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Yikes! Sorry for that. Sibling dynamics can be very impactful for sure. As more focus becomes placed on the social and systemic origins of mental distress, more awareness of how those in a troubled person’s orbit regard, treat, and talk about that person may become more relevant to understanding a person’s distress.
Even factors like birth order and the associated power dynamics could take on new relevance.
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I’m shocked to read this. It’s strange that they just took her word for everything without consulting you or your other doctors. I don’t know if you’re in the US but medical records are only kept for about 5 to 7 years but about 10 years for Medicare or Medicaid.
In psychiatry, from my experience they rarely asked me for information on prior psychiatrists and their records. With other doctors and specialists, I just don’t give them any psychiatric information. Not even about psych meds I take because of the stigma I see when I’ve done that in the past. I only mention it now if they want to put me on a medication. Even then I’ll usually keep it a secret and google how that medication might interact with any psych meds I take. There’s just too much stigma so it’s best to keep it personal as much as possible.
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Dan, your article on gossip and empathy is spot on!
Per your article: “The target becomes a scapegoat for others’ insecurities.”
This is so true.
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Thanks, Rosalee
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All this is true. I’ve tried to tell people, when someone tells a lie about you (or even a misunderstanding) and it’s accepted by others, people believe everything bad about you, even if most or all of it’s lies or falsehoods. Your reputation and credibility are diminished or gone.
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It’s especially painful if a bully hates you and turns others against you in school or in the neighborhood or both.
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hi
I’m in Australia and the MH records in my experience are a complete pack of lies. These lies are not written by accident or as “an honest mistake” but deliberately and systematically written that way to label, discredit,defame and destroy people and their families especially if they dare to complain about the appalling and inhumane “care”.
Each lie is then carried through the record over the years,built on, repeated and exaggerated by each new set of staff. That includes Nurses and any other person allowed to write in the notes.
You can only obtain a copy by use of the FOI Act which they drag out for up to 6 months and then they redact swathes of the lies they have written or include sheets of blank paper!
Within 2 hours of his first admission my son was savagely assaulted unprovoked by another patient I was phoned to tell me but nothing documented. These beatings occured twice more and no one there did anything to protect him. My angry complaints earned me the label “overprotective mother”..yes truly.
There is no way here to correct the record in anyway. The lies just stand and as most of these staff are also incredibly lazy they just repeat like parrots what was written previously. They have no ability to go against their colleagues or interest in the truth. Whatever you tell them in good faith will be twisted and subverted. We learned quickly to tell them NOTHING at all and the main priority now is to avoid the system at all costs.If you don’t engage it’s hard to write anything. Sorry Liz this has happened to you the best you can do is learn from it and protect yourself as no healing flows from these systems and their servants.
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“ . . .because they wouldnt recognise or believe the trauma id been through.”
In thinking about your comment, I don’t know which is worse: when impactful lived experience is dismissed as irrelevant by someone who “knows better” (expert and arm-chair psychologists alike), or dismissed as being part of the “diagnosed condition or illness” (and therefore seen as a perception/hallucination problem) or when it’s dismissed as being an “excuse.”
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I’m glad you found something in it, thanks for commenting. Sabrina’s comment seems to align with yours when she said: “ Forget about being taken seriously if they see you as being overly emotional or you’re diagnosed with a personality disorder.”
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Hi Dan, thank you too for bravely publishing articles to highlight issues of concern.
Sadly, it seems that some psychiatrists are experts at invalidation, at least the ones I’ve seen .
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hi Liz
That’s what they all do they are trained specifically to do that very thing. It’s not you its them their reason for being invalidating others..
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Thank you for your kind words. Often times, bravery seems to arise in defense of freedom. And as Aunt Janice once told us, “Freedom is is just another word for nothing left to lose.” 🙂
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