“As soon as one theory is discredited, the advocates of the biological paradigm turn to another, putting forward a new set of ropey, inconclusive and ambiguous studies as putative evidence. Challenging the biological model of depression feels like a game of whack-a-mole: as soon as you put one theory to bed, another one sprouts up.”
—Joanna Moncrieff, Chemically Imbalanced (2025)
Establishment psychiatry has recently switched the biological cause of mental illness from a “chemical imbalance” to a “brain circuitry defect.” There is no more important institution in establishment psychiatry than the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), and in 2022, psychiatrist Thomas Insel, NIMH director from 2002-2015, stated in his book Healing, “The idea of mental illness as a ‘chemical imbalance’ has now given way to mental illnesses as ‘connectional’ or brain circuit disorders.”
Nowadays, establishment psychiatry is turning to ketamine infusions and injections for not only so-called “treatment-resistant depression” (defined by them as occurring “when at least two different antidepressants don’t improve your symptoms”), but also using ketamine for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), obsessive-compulsive disorder, bipolar disorder, and anxiety disorder. This turn to ketamine is occurring despite the fact that the Food and Drug Administration has repeatedly warned that the FDA has not approved ketamine for the treatment of any psychiatric disorder (though controversially approving esketamine nasal spray).
Apparently unconcerned by this FDA warning about ketamine infusions and injections, leading figures in establishment psychiatry, including key thought leaders in university psychiatry departments, are enthusiastic about it. John Krystal, Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at Yale, tells us “We think that one of the things that ketamine does that helps to explain its antidepressant effects is help the brain to regrow the synapses, the connections between nerve cells.”
While researching psychiatry’s current ketamine enthusiasm for the CounterPunch article “Psychiatry’s Latest Insane Magic-Bullet Treatment for Depression: Why Ketamine?” it felt like I was forever playing the arcade game of whack-a-mole. Shortly after that article was published in early 2025, I received a pre-publication copy of Chemically Imbalanced: The Making and Unmaking of the Serotonin Myth by psychiatrist Joanna Moncrieff; and on page 177, I discovered that she had come to the same whack-a-mole conclusion.
Whack-a-Mole Number One: The Chemical Imbalance Theory
For the last fifty years, prior to its recent pivot to “connectional” or “brain circuit” explanations, establishment psychiatry has told us that mental illnesses are caused by chemical imbalances in neurotransmitters such as serotonin, norepinephrine, and dopamine.
One such chemical imbalance theory, the so-called “dopamine hypothesis of schizophrenia (DHS),” was discredited by the 1980s, and it is now acknowledged as invalid by prominent figures in psychiatry, some of whom are puzzled by its persistence. For example, one of establishment psychiatry’s most prominent researchers Kenneth Kendler noted in 2011, “Although the DHS stimulated much science, most efforts to empirically validate it have failed . . . Nonetheless, the DHS has held the status of a scientific paradigm defended by some with great avidity.” And today, there remain psychiatrists who take this theory seriously.
One major reason for some psychiatrists’ avid defense of the DHS is their observation that patients diagnosed with schizophrenia have a reduction in some symptoms—especially those related to agitation—when medicated with antipsychotic drugs that block dopamine. The belief that this is evidence that dopamine excess is the source of schizophrenia is as scientifically unfounded as a belief that a reduction in social inhibition after the consumption of alcohol is proof that shyness is caused by an “alcohol deficiency.” Establishment psychiatry has shown this same unscientific thinking in its manufacturing of other biological theories of mental illness.
Psychiatry has offered various chemical imbalance—or monoamine imbalance—theories for depression. In 2000, in “Depression: The Case for a Monoamine Deficiency,” Pedro Delgado, one of psychiatry’s most prominent researchers of this theory, reviewed the case for the idea “that the underlying pathophysiologic basis of depression is a depletion in the levels of serotonin, norepinephrine, and/or dopamine in the central nervous system.” Delgado concluded, “However, intensive investigation has failed to find convincing evidence of a primary dysfunction of a specific monoamine system in patients with major depressive disorders.”
In Moncrieff’s Chemically Imbalanced, she points out that researchers had disproven these various chemical-imbalance theories by the late 1980s, when “the chemical imbalance theory of depression . . . should have been dead in the water.”
Establishment psychiatry is still in the process of getting all its members on board with the switch away from the serotonin imbalance theory. Apparently not yet having gotten the memo, the president of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) told a podcaster in 2023, “We know that serotonin has been strongly associated with depression” and antidepressants “work on neurotransmitters, the chemicals in our brain, to rebalance the relative levels.”
The idea that serotonin is crucial to depression has been difficult for establishment psychiatry to relinquish because this belief has long been used to convince depressed patients to take serotonin-enhancing drugs such as the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIS). Establishment psychiatrist Awais Aftab, holding on to a serotonin connection with depression, tells us that the idea that depression is caused by low levels of serotonin is only one way “in which we might understand the relationship between depression and serotonin.” In Aftab’s 2025 attack on Joanna Moncrieff (“Dummies Guide to ‘The British Professor Leading the Controversial Backlash Against Antidepressants’”), he tells us that there are many other ways that serotonin may be related to depression and offers a few such theories:
“Depression, generally or in some subset of patients, involves alterations of the serotonin signaling system (e.g. in the distribution or sensitivity of certain sorts of serotonin receptors).
“The serotonergic system mechanistically links depressive symptoms and neurobiological dysfunctions in other aspects of brain functioning (e.g. neurogenesis or neuroplasticity).
The serotonin system is generally involved in the regulation of mood and temperament, and there may be no specific abnormality in the serotonin system in depression, by and large, but it still provides us a target for intervention with serotonergic antidepressants.”
Aftab’s “Dummies Guide” can be taken seriously only by those with little regard for the scientific method, as Moncrieff points out:
“Aftab’s basic point . . . is simply this: although we haven’t found them yet, depression might be associated with specific brain processes, including those involving serotonin. And because it might be, we should assume it is. . . . This argument . . . inverts the most basic precepts of science. An idea or theory is unproven until it is proven, not the other way round. This has to be the case because anyone can propose anything—and they do. There are scores of theories about links between this or that biological process or chemical and depression.”
The Latest Whack-a-Mole: Brain Circuits and Ketamine
While some establishment psychiatrists such as Aftab continue to hold on to unproven serotonin theories of depression, others promote brain region theories of depression; Harvard Health Publishing, in “What Causes Depression,” reported in 2022, “Research shows that the hippocampus is smaller in some depressed people.” In addition to these theories, today’s “cutting-edge” members of establishment psychiatry are offering up new neurotransmitter theories and “repurposing” old drugs to fit these theories; for example, the International Bipolar Foundation 2017 presentation: “Ketamine, Glutamate, and the Future of Mood Therapeutics.”
Historically, psychiatry has simultaneously offered multiple biological theories of depression and its other disorders, but the theories that stick are those that are effective marketing devices for money-making drugs. The serotonin deficiency theory of depression sold SSRIs; and today, the selling of ketamine infusions and injections rests on theories about how ketamine affects glutamate and the NDMA receptor.
While the serotonin-imbalance theory of depression was simply wrong, it did not seem bizarre when it was proposed. In contrast, the claims today by cutting-edge psychiatrists of ketamine “helping to regrow synapses” (psychiatrist John Krystal) or that ketamine is a “brain fertilizer” (psychiatrist Michael Banov) appear whacky in the face of what is known about ketamine’s toxic effects on the brain and other organs.
Specifically, in 2024, internist and epidemiologist G. Caleb Alexander, co-director of the Center for Drug Safety and Effectiveness at Johns Hopkins, told Psychiatric News, “There’s lots of evidence that ketamine is toxic to neurons, and it’s toxic in a dose- and duration-dependent fashion.”
Moreover, in a 2022 review, “Brain Changes Associated With Long-Term Ketamine Abuse, A Systematic Review,” published in Frontiers in Neuroanatomy reported:
“Long-term recreational ketamine use was associated with lower gray matter volume and less white matter integrity, lower functional thalamocortical and corticocortical connectivity. The observed differences in both structural and functional neuroanatomy between ketamine users and controls may explain some of its long-term cognitive and psychiatric side effects, such as memory impairment and executive functioning.”
Confused as to whether ketamine is a brain fertilizer that helps to regrow synapses or whether it is toxic to neurons? First, keep in mind that Yale psychiatrist John Krystal begins with “We think”—not “We know”—in his statement: “We think that one of the things that ketamine does that helps to explain its antidepressant effects is help the brain to regrow the synapses”; and psychiatrist Michael Banov, who tells us that ketamine is a “brain fertilizer,” is the medical director of Psych Atlanta, a ketamine infusion clinic. Still confused? You might want to spend some time with recreational ketamine users to see if ketamine has improved or damaged their memory and executive functioning.
What is especially troubling about the assumption that ketamine is a brain fertilizer that helps grow synapses is that it encourages heavy use of a substance that is now easily attainable. Psychiatric News reported in 2024 that “nearly half (47%) of individuals who are receiving ketamine therapy [are] doing so outside of a clinical setting and in their own homes, ingesting a compounded formulation such as a lozenge or lollipop after being prescribed the medication via a virtual clinic.” This should be extremely disturbing because it is uncontroversial that heavy use of ketamine results in damage to the bladder. In 2025, Urology & Continence Care Today reported in “Ketamine Bladders: What Community Nurses Should Know”:
“In recent years, the link between ketamine use and damage to the urinary tract has become apparent, with estimation that at least 26–30% of users experience at least one bladder symptom. . . .Using ketamine at least three times a week over a period of two years has been shown to result in altered bladder function, with some patients complaining of severe urological problems. . . .This syndrome is often called ‘ketamine bladder’ or ‘ketamine cystitis’ in the literature.”
In much of the world outside of the United States, the horrors of ketamine bladder are widely known (for example, see the U.K. news story, “I Lost Everything’: Inside Britain’s ‘Worrying’ Ketamine Problem”).
How to Stop Playing Whack-a-Mole
The alternative to a life of playing whack-a-whacky theory and whack-a-whacky treatment is to delegitimize the manufacturer of the whacky game, establishment psychiatry, which is comprised of mental illness institutions that: (1) do not take science seriously; (2) are corrupted by drug companies; (3) have an impoverished view of emotional suffering, behavioral disturbances, and humanity; and (4) do not adhere to what should be the first rule of medicine: “above all, do no harm.”
Before demonstrating these four sad realities of establishment psychiatry, it needs to be made clear that defenders of establishment psychiatry conflate establishment psychiatry with psychiatry. The reality is that there are psychiatrists who are embarrassed by establishment psychiatry.
Psychiatrists who are critics of establishment psychiatry include Joanna Moncrieff; she has not only debunked the serotonin-imbalance theory in Chemically Imblanced, but in previous books, has explained how psychiatric drugs do not cure any underlying diseases but simply affect our feelings and behavior in the same sort of way that alcohol and recreational drugs affect them. Other psychiatrists embarrassed by establishment psychiatry include Mark Horowitz and Josef Witt-Doerring, who take seriously the scientific reality of psychiatric drugs and help people safely taper off of them (see their discussion “Psychiatrist Hurt by Drugs He Once Prescribed Now Challenges the Whole Profession”).
A handful of other psychiatrists have gone public with their embarrassment with establishment psychiatry, and there are other psychiatrists who are privately embarrassed but fearful of speaking out publicly against the following realities of establishment psychiatry:
(1) Establishment Psychiatry Does Not Take Science Seriously
In addition to the previously noted disregard by establishment psychiatry for the fundamentals of science with respect to its theories of mental illness, it has little regard for the scientific method in its claims of treatment effectiveness.
A major area of establishment psychiatry’s disregard for science is its bastardization of the randomized control trial (RCT), which is the critical test to assess whether a treatment is actually scientifically effective. Any genuine scientist is aware of the power of patient expectations and the placebo effect, which can result in patient positive reports following any “treatment”—including bloodletting. So a genuine scientist takes seriously the essence of the RCT, while establishment psychiatry debases the RCT.
Specifically, a trial is not a controlled trial unless the participant subjects and the researchers are truly blinded as to who is receiving the hypothesized treatment and who is taking the placebo. In establishment psychiatry trials of antidepressants and other drugs, such blinding has routinely been absent because the easily noticeable side effects of antidepressants result in patients ascertaining whether they are taking the drug or a placebo.
A genuine scientist—who actually wants to get to the truth as to whether or not a hypothesized treatment is effective—takes special care into ensuring that subjects and researchers are truly blinded. This true blinding can be accomplished with what scientists call “active placebos”; for example, instead of placebo sugar pills or saline solutions, substances used for placebos result in noticeable side effects. Such active placebos are not routinely used in establishment psychiatry drug trials, which makes antidepressants failure to meaningfully distance themselves from placebos—the “clinically negligible” nature of antidepressants—even more damning.
The same disregard for the scientific method that establishment psychiatry evidenced in standard antidepressant drug trials is now evident with ketamine. Psychiatric News reported in 2024 that PubMed shows more than 400 trials of ketamine as a depression treatment in the past decade; however, it also reports that G. Caleb Alexander, co-director of the Center for Drug Safety and Effectiveness at Johns Hopkins, told them:
“. . . .much of that research is plagued by nontrivial limitations, including studies that were too short in duration, had too few participants, were conducted by researchers with conflicts of interest, had no active comparator, or failed to systematically and comprehensively measure safety. The ‘dealbreaker,’ he said, was researcher and participant bias due to lack of blinding.”
What does genuine scientific research on ketamine as a treatment for depression look like? A 2023 Stanford University study, lead-authored by anesthesiologist Theresa Lii was designed to create a true RCT. Lii and her co-researchers used a subject pool of patients diagnosed with major depressive disorder (MDD) who were scheduled to undergo surgery; this allowed researchers to give all participants standard surgical anesthetic with half randomly assigned to receive ketamine, and this created the type of blinding necessary for a true RCT. In comparing the effectiveness between the placebo group and the ketamine group, Lii concluded: “A single dose of intravenous ketamine compared to placebo has no short-term effect on the severity of depression symptoms in adults with major depressive disorder . . . . Our results suggest that ketamine may actually be ineffective for the short-term treatment of MDD.”
Establishment psychiatry’s routine bastardization of the RCT is only one of many scientific reasons why their treatment effectiveness claims are meaningless. Antidepressant trials have been debased by the same previously noted issues that have debased ketamine trials (too short in duration, lack of blinding, conducted by researchers with conflicts of interest, and failure to systematically and comprehensively measure safety), along with other trial-design biasing (for example, in outcome measures) that dice-load the study to favor the hypothesized drug.
In addition, establishment psychiatry researchers have resorted to overt scientific misconduct; and the 2006 Sequenced Treatment Alternatives to Relieve Depression (STAR*D) study, the highly influential year-long antidepressant study, has been criticized as fraudulent. STAR*D researchers did not adhere to their original protocol; and most egregiously, they moved a large group of subjects who were previously excluded as being non-evaluable into the evaluable category, knowing full well that this (and other maneuvers such as switching outcome measures in mid-study) would dramatically inflate the remission rate. Even with STAR*D researchers’ scientific misconduct inflating results, their reported remission rate was still worse than the year-long remission rate of depressed patients receiving no medication reported in a 2006 NIMH study.
(2) Establishment Psychiatry Is Corrupted by Drug Companies
STAR*D researchers had extensive financial relationships with drug companies that manufacture the antidepressant drugs used in the STAR*D study, however, such a conflict of interest is not seen as unethical by establishment psychiatry.
The American Psychiatric Association (APA), the guild of American psychiatrists, is a key member of establishment psychiatry, and in the APA’s “Commentary on Ethics in Practice” (2015), in the section “Relations with the Pharmaceutical and Other Industries,” it states: “Psychiatrists may interact with industry in many ways, including . . . . accepting personal or office gifts or corporate donations from industry.” While psychiatrists are advised that a conflict of interest has the potential for compromised integrity, the APA does not prohibit such a conflict of interest, stating that “the mere appearance or existence of a conflict of interest does not by itself imply wrongdoing.”
In defending the financial relationship between psychiatry and drug companies in 1992, the then APA Medical Director, Melvin Sabshin, called the relationship: “a responsible, ethical partnership that uses the no-strings resources of one partner and the expertise of the other.” The APA publishes the DSM diagnostic manual, and PLOS Medicine reported in 2012, “69% of the DSM-5 task force members report having ties to the pharmaceutical industry.”
In 2004, Marcia Angell, former editor in chief of The New England Journal of Medicine, published The Truth About the Drug Companies, and she offered the following example of drug-company influence on another key member of establishment psychiatry, a prestigious university psychiatry department. Angell reported that the head of the psychiatry department at Brown University Medical School made over $500,000 in one year by consulting for drug companies that make antidepressants, and she noted, “When The New England Journal of Medicine, under my editorship, published a study by him and his colleagues of an antidepressant agent, there wasn’t enough room to print all the authors’ conflict-of-interest disclosures. The full list had to be put on the website.”
In 2008, such corruption of psychiatry by drug companies was still considered “news,” as the New York Times published several articles about the 2008 Congressional hearings on the relationship between pharmaceutical companies and establishment psychiatry, including key thought leader psychiatrists such as Harvard psychiatrist Joseph Biederman, who received $1.6 million in consulting fees from drug makers from 2000 to 2007. Such exposures led to federal legislation in 2013 requiring drug companies to disclose their payments to physicians, resulting in the creation of an Open Payments database.
In 2021, utilizing the Open Payments database, journalist Robert Whitaker reported: “From 2014 to 2020, pharmaceutical companies paid $340 million to U.S. psychiatrists to serve as their consultants, advisers, and speakers, or to provide free food, beverages and lodging to those attending promotional events.” Whitaker noted that approximately 75 percent of the psychiatrists in the United States “received something of value from the drug companies from 2014 through 2020.” Unfortunately, while the Open Payments database has now made the corruption of psychiatry by drug companies easy to see, it has not stopped it.
(3) Establishment Psychiatry Has an Impoverished View of Humanity
While establishment psychiatry claims to have a “bio-psycho-social” view of mental illness, it has been dominated by a biological perspective. In recent years, in the face of undeniable research and political pressure, establishment psychiatry has acknowledged the significance of trauma and adverse childhood experience to later emotional suffering and behavioral disturbances; but this has made virtually no dent in establishment psychiatry treatment practices which, overwhelmingly, consist of brief “medical management” adjustments to medication.
With establishment psychiatry’s biological domination, other perspectives that fall outside of this monopolistic one are denied and marginalized. So establishment psychiatry continues to ignore important psychological and social causes of emotional suffering and behavioral disturbances.
Prior to the domination of the current perspective, psychiatrists would not be accused of being “irresponsible” for considering the idea that notions such as “mental illness” and “mental health” were meaningless—recognizing that all human beings are capable of deteriorations that cause suffering to themselves and others; but that in any given society, such deteriorations are labeled differently, from sinful, to criminal, to unethical, to mentally ill, to successful.
So in U.S. society, deteriorations into corruption and greed are not seen as “mental illness”; instead labeled by some as sinful, criminal, or unethical, but increasingly rewarded with political and financial success. However, in another society, such deteriorations are evidence of a kind of mental or spiritual illness, and many indigenous societies would view thought-leader psychiatrist Joseph Biederman very differently than mainstream U.S. society viewed him. Biederman, as noted, received $1.6 million from drug companies from 2000 to 2007, and he is credited with creating pediatric bipolar disorder—resulting in millions of young children, including pre-schoolers, being psychiatrically drugged for such “symptoms” as a short temper, extreme irritability, and intense happiness or silliness for long periods of time. In some indigenous societies, Biederman may well have been viewed as mentally or spiritually ill.
In contrast to today’s monopolistic biological era of establishment psychiatry, there were once several prominent psychiatrists who actually spent significant time with their patients attempting to understand their lives, and who were interested in the complexity of human psychology.
Some such psychiatrists called themselves psychodynamic, psychoanalytic, or analytic; and fifty years ago, following in the footsteps of Harry Stack Sullivan and his Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry (1953), there were many well-known psychiatrists—including Eric Berne, Murray Bowen, Nathan Ackerman, Salvador Minuchin, Don Jackson, and Stephen Karpman—who observed interactions and transactions in families and other groups. Psychiatrists with an interpersonal, interactional, and contextual perspective distinguished between transactional and loving bonds, and recognized that emotional suffering and behavioral disturbances—rather than being the result of any biological defect—are often the result of dysfunctionality in families and in a society in which people were forced to be mere objects devoid of much of their humanity.
All this is to say that there were prominent psychiatrists, even throughout much of the twentieth century, who did not have an impoverished view of humanity.
(4) Establishment Psychiatry Does Not Adhere to “Above All, Do No Harm”
Perhaps the more serious indictment of establishment psychiatry is that it does not adhere to what should be the first rule of medicine: “above all, do no harm.” There are multiple examples of this.
For establishment psychiatry, “treatment-resistant depression” is defined, as previously noted, “when at least two different antidepressants don’t improve your symptoms,” and the “standard of care” options for treatment-resistant depression include electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) or ketamine infusions and injections. A practitioner who takes serious the rule “above all, do no harm” takes special care to ensure that the likelihood of treatment benefits far outweigh the likelihood of adverse effects. However, establishment psychiatry does not follow this rule.
The idea of defining a patient’s depression as “treatment resistant” because that patient has not gone into remission after two standard antidepressant drugs is not scientifically defensible. Research has shown that the benefits of antidepressant drugs are “clinically negligible” in comparison to a placebo in the short-term, and worse than no medication at all in the long-term.
Furthermore, many adverse effects of antidepressants are uncontroversial. The percentage of sexual dysfunction for antidepressants runs from 25%–73%, according to a 2010 examination of several studies. Furthermore, post-SSRI sexual dysfunction (PSSD), in which sexual dysfunction exists even after discontinuation of the SSRI, was first reported to regulators in 1991.When trying to reduce antidepressants, 56% of individuals experience withdrawal effects, and approximately one in four people will experience severe withdrawal symptoms. Many establishment psychiatrists continue to ignore scientific realities of withdrawal, mistakenly assuming that withdrawal symptoms following stoppage of antidepressants are evidence of a depression relapse rather than evidence of antidepressant withdrawal effects. However, withdrawal misery as well as sexual dysfunction are now acknowledged by at least some members of establishment psychiatry, which continues to deny research findings of the relationship between antidepressants with increased violence and suicide.
It gets worse. After depressed patients fail to remit following standard antidepressant treatments—that have not shown to be scientifically effective and which have significant adverse effects—establishment psychiatry next recommends treatments such ECT or ketamine infusions—which also have not shown to be scientifically effective and which have even more severe adverse effects.
The lack of effectiveness and adverse effects of ketamine have been previously noted.
ECT has also not met the scientific criteria for effectiveness, as a comprehensive 2019 review of the research on ECT effectiveness reported that there have been no randomized placebo-controlled studies since 1985; and those studies that were done prior to 1985 are of such poor quality that conclusions about efficacy are not possible. Moreover, it has been consistently shown that ECT results in serious adverse effects such as “persistent or permanent gaps in life memories, including of weddings and birthdays, somewhere between 12 and 55 per cent,” reported by psychologist John Read in 2021, who also reported that “one in 50 patients experience ‘major adverse cardiac events’.”
Similarly, the adverse effects of antipsychotic drugs as a long-term treatment for individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia far outweigh benefits. In 2007, an NIMH long-term longitudinal study reported that at the end of fifteen years, among those patients who had stopped taking antipsychotic drugs, 40 percent were judged to be in recovery, this compared to only 5 percent in recovery among those who had remained on antipsychotic drugs; and at twenty years, the researchers, Martin Harrow and Thomas Jobe, reported: “While antipsychotics reduce or eliminate flagrant psychosis for most patients with schizophrenia at acute hospitalizations, four years later and continually until the twenty-year follow-ups, patients with schizophrenia not prescribed antipsychotics had significantly better work functioning.”
Even though the Harrow-Jobe study was NIMH-funded research, the findings were completely ignored by establishment psychiatry, only brought to public attention by Robert Whitaker in Anatomy of an Epidemic (2010), after which it was dismissed by establishment psychiatry for being merely longitudinal findings; however, a RCT study was applied to this issue by researcher Lex Wunderink, who reported in 2013 in JAMA Psychiatry that at the end of seven years, the recovery rate for those who had been tapered off the antipsychotic drugs was more than twice as high as those who remained on them.
The adverse effects of antipsychotic drugs are uncontroversial. PLoS One reported in 2021: “The prevalence of antipsychotic-induced EPSEs [extrapyramidal side effects] was considerably high,” with one in five patients experiencing parkinsonism, and more than one in ten patients experiencing akathisia. American Family Physician (“Adverse Effects of Antipsychotic Medications”) reported in 2010 , “ The newer second-generation antipsychotics, especially clozapine and olanzapine, generally tend to cause more problems relating to metabolic syndrome, such as obesity and type 2 diabetes mellitus . . . All antipsychotic medications are associated with an increased likelihood of sedation, sexual dysfunction, postural hypotension, cardiac arrhythmia, and sudden cardiac death.”
In the sad history of establishment psychiatry, it is a regular occurrence for them to swear by a treatment that does far more harm than good. As late as 1969, one leading textbook of psychiatry lauded insulin coma therapy as “a landmark in psychiatric progress”; and lobotomies were still being performed in the United States throughout the 1980s and never banned.
Game Over
Establishment psychiatry is, at one level, unscientific, corrupt, impoverished, and damaging. At another level, it is just ridiculous.
Instead of critics of biological psychiatry wasting their time in the game of “whack-a-mole”—whacking the latest whacky theory or treatment—what needs to be whacked down is establishment psychiatry. While it is easy to scientifically demolish the credibility of establishment psychiatry, critics of psychiatry have had to face establishment psychiatry’s array of “rhetorical fallacy” defenses and attacks.
One of the most frequently used rhetorical fallacies by establishment psychiatry to divert attention from legitimate criticism is the ad hominem attack of “guilt by association”: falsely connecting the author of a critique with a group abhorrent for much of the general public in order not to have to deal with merits of the critique. Outside of psychiatry, a well-known example of this is the argumentum ad Nazium (or playing the Hitler card) in which the diversionary counter to an argument for the merits of vegetarianism is something like: “Hitler was a vegetarian!” Establishment psychiatry and its mainstream media supporters have commonly responded to critiques of psychiatry with such associations to abhorrent organizations or individuals who happen to have critiqued psychiatry. The abhorrent group that has been commonly used is the Church of Scientology (see “Behind Rolling Stone’s Hatchet Job on a Psychiatrist Critical of Neoliberal Capitalism”).
Another diversion from criticism is used by establishment psychiatrists such as Awais Aftab and Ronald Pies, who claim to be open to criticism of psychiatry, but only if it doesn’t delegitimize establishment psychiatry. Aftab and Pies distinguish between critics who are, in Pies’s words, “sincere and well-intentioned critics” versus those “‘critics’ whose hostile and vituperative rhetoric is clearly aimed at discrediting psychiatry as a medical discipline.” This second group, Pies tells us, falls under the rubric of “anti-psychiatry,” which he defines as: “that movement which denies the fundamental legitimacy of psychiatry as a medical specialty; consistently imputes malign or mendacious motives to the profession; and which denies the efficacy and legitimacy of psychiatric treatment, particularly its somatic treatments.”
Aftab and Pies conflate anti-psychiatry with anti-establishment psychiatry.
Establishment psychiatry also routinely conflates “anti-drug” with “anti-dishonesty about drugs.” So, I am aware of no critic of establishment psychiatry who is anti-drug and who does not acknowledge the possible short-term benefit of a tranquilizing drug in preventing hospital or prison incarceration. Unlike establishment psychiatrists, critics of establishment psychiatry such as psychiatrists Joanna Moncrieff, Mark Horowitz and Josef Witt-Doerring are fully informed about the scientific nature of psychiatric drugs, honest with their patients about these realities, and knowledgeable about the most judicious way of withdrawing from them.
Establishment psychiatry is not unique in its obfuscating conflations to marginalize critics. When millions of Americans protested the U.S. government’s Vietnam War policies, pro-war advocates called them anti-American. Another sad chapter in U.S. history was the era of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which led to the smearing and blacklisting of many Americans; but fortunately, it was ultimately denounced by a former president, Harry Truman, as the “most un-American thing in the country today.”
For critical thinkers, the rhetorical fallacies of establishment psychiatry further destroy its credibility and authority.
While critical thinkers and freethinkers are curious about criticism of biological psychiatry, much of the rest of society seeks only validation of the narrative about psychiatry that they have acquired from a non-critically thinking mainstream media. Thus, while it is of value for psychiatry critics to engage with open-minded critical thinkers, it is a waste of time to engage with close-minded individuals who refuse to rethink narratives that have been manufactured by establishment psychiatry and their drug company partners.
Excellent research, excellent shot.. “Game Over..”And… When psychiatric drugs began to ‘harm and kill’, the psychiatric world began to abandon the theory that ‘mental illness is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain’.. But it’s not quite like that.. As this study states.. This success was achieved by honest psychiatrists and other researchers (like Robert Whitekar) who exposed the harmful effects of psychiatric drugs (and refuted the theory that mental illness is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain). But still, there are still poisonous psychiatric drugs on the market.. “As long as they use these poisonous drugs, honest people will continue to reveal the truth.” Keep fighting.. Thanks for the article..
With best wishes.. Y.E.
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“… what needs to be whacked down is establishment psychiatry.” I agree. Thank you again for your continued truth telling, Bruce.
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Those of us who have been long time “wack a mole” commenters on MiA noticed decades ago, the need to point out psychiatry’s and psychology’s “wack a mole” problem.
You were given an antidepressant, which supposedly made you manic, thus you’re now “bipolar.” This type of misdiagnosis (according to the DSM-IV-TR at the time), thus malpractice, has happened to lots of us here at MiA.
“Wack a mole”
You’re supposedly “bipolar,” so you must be given huge amounts of antipsychotics, the “schizophrenia” treatments. Why the psych “professionals” believe this is appropriate, I still don’t understand, aside from their need to try to control and create iatrogenic illnesses, for profit, in innocent others.
Despite the fact that it’s already medically known – by all but the non-medically trained psychologists, and the rest of the non-medical researchers of the world – that the antipsychotics can create both the positive and negative symptoms of “schizophrenia,” via both anticholinergic toxidrome and neuroleptic induced deficit syndrome.
“Whack a mole.”
Oh, the entirety of the “mental health industry” is a “whack a mole,” iatrogenic illness creating system, with the goal of controlling and stealing from the rest in society (which I do have both medical and legal proof of) … thus it is the opposite of a system that actually helps their “clients.”
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Thank you for this.
It’s a shame so few psychiatrists are able to see how seductive science can be.
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Correction: It’s a shame so few psychiatrists are able to see how seductive bad science can be.
And that’s what psychiatry is.
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Birdsong: I think your intended correction is “It’s a shame so few psychiatrists are unable to see how seductive bad science can be.” But we shouldn’t be surprised because many people are not aware of how our minds work due to The Three Principles of Mind, Consciousness and Thought (uncovered by Sydney Banks in 1973).
People — not just psychiatrists — are unable to see how their thinking/beliefs create what they consider to be reality (even though it’s only THEIR experience of reality) because Consciousness creates each human’s separate reality based on their personal thoughts and beliefs (beliefs simply being thoughts that have become habitual. It’s not a coincidence that psychiatrists are trained to believe that medicine is necessary to solve the mental illnesses listed in the DSM, which as of 2012, as Dr. Levine mentions in this article, had/has “69% of the DSM-5 task force members [have] ties to the pharmaceutical industry.” So, while establishment psychiatry is the wolf guarding the hen house, whack-a-mole is sadly elevated by Western capitalistic society as the only game in town.
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I just want to add that “bad science” is NOT actually science at all. It’s pretending to use science to explain why a person’s viewpoint is true even when the actual science says otherwise. In other words, it’s fraud!
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Thank you for pointing this out, Steve. Maybe I should have said “pseudoscience”…?
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Maybe. Or “Scientism” is one of my favorites – the belief that anything “sciency” must be true, regardless of the facts. If there are a few brain scans in an article, people are apparently more likely to believe it, even if the scans have no connection to the article!
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Thank you! Scientism sounds perfect. It also sounds synonymous with psychiatry.
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“…the belief that anything “sciency” must be true, regardless of the facts. If there are a few brain scans in an article, people are apparently more likely to believe it, even if the scans have no connection to the article!”
Haha! That is just so funny. Please Steve, give us another one! In the meantime, here’s one from me. Socially conditioned people, particularly women and men who have a traditional view of gender roles, generally appreciate a person who expresses their non-facts with confidence and an air of authority, so the mere strength of an assertion wins over the hearts and minds of the majority regardless of it’s facticity, and this is by far the biggest thing shaping the minds of most people, and the decisive factor in electing politicians and governments. It’s no different from what you say only I’m fleshing it out to see it’s truth in the wider life. Perhaps this is why the weakness of Biden was almost certainly going to be followed by the strength of Trump, and it’s easy to be strong when you don’t give a damn about facts or people or life or anything else. And this is really the secret of all social brain washing. Just assert it strongly enough and it’ll stick into the brains of the impressionable, impressionable implying confused, implying subservience to intellectual authorities. It’s such an absolute circus/pantomime we are living through today.
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Thank you, B Burnett. I like your version better, although I have to admit I can’t quite see the difference….
But you’re entirely correct saying that it’s no coincidence that psychiatrists are trained to believe that a medical approach is necessary to ameliorate the “mental illnesses” listed in their DSM.
As I understand it, the 1970’s were when psychiatrists realized they had to come up with an effective marketing scheme to keep from losing “patients” to people with “lesser” degrees (PhD’s, MFCC’s, LCSW’s, etc.) because that was when it became legal for these people to practice independently (without the supervision of a psychiatrist). So, it made sense (of sorts) for psychiatrists to lean into a more medicalized propaganda, which dovetailed beautifully with the advent of Prozac in 1987, a product cleverly used to enshrine psychiatry’s somewhat newfound biologically based fanaticism.
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LOVE the whack-a-mole reference. It reminds of the jack-in-the-box song I used to sing in nursery school that went like this:
“All around the mulberry bush, The monkey chased the weasel, The monkey thought ’twas all in fun, Pop! Goes the weasel.”
I no longer wonder who the weasel is.
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Dr. Levine, many thanks for taking psychiatry to task for its intellectual dishonesty and moral corruption. There needs to be more bulldogs like you.
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Thanks for the article and the info about Dr Moncrieffs’ new book Bruce. I’ll be requesting my local library to obtain a copy.
In the documentary Hypernormalisation (2016) Adam Curtis suggests:
“We live in a time of great uncertainty and confusion. Events keep happening that seem inexplicable and out of control. Donald Trump, Brexit, the War in Syria, the endless migrant crisis, random bomb attacks. And those who are supposed to be in power are paralysed – they have no idea what to do. This film is the epic story of how we got to this strange place. It explains not only why these chaotic events are happening – but also why we, and our politicians, cannot understand them.”
I find myself wondering if what you call “establishment psychiatry” may be the very people who our paralysed politicians turn to for a solution to their ‘problems’? Not those psychiatrists interested in science and solutions, but those aware of the methods of exploiting the ’emergency provisions’ in our laws which enable acts of torture and killings to be defined as ‘medical procedures’?
And those who you speak of afraid to stand up? Dante said that “the hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who in times of great moral crisis maintain their neutrality” (in Italian of course lol). I pray every day to be allowed to watch on their Day of Judgement as they are hurled into that pit of fire. I think I will hold up a placard with the words “They wouldn’t do that” on it (the words I have heard from the mouths of cowards afraid to speak truth to power, and then look away when confronted with the facts)
Once again, thanks for the info, and the fight.
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Just to clarify. My State has enabled the exploitation of ’emergency provisions’ by allowing mental health services to procure police as their own personal thugs.
A Community Nurse need only tell Police that there is an ’emergency’ (a planned emergency of course), that a citizen is his/her ‘mental patient’ and the full force of the law will be applied to bring that person into custody. Combined with the ability to ‘spike’ the target with benzodiazepines before using police for ‘swattings’ of citizens, the forging of significant documents once they have been arbitrarily detained, and the “editing” and then uttering with fraud by our Chief Psychiatrist should a complaint about torture be made, they become a law unto themselves.
Approach Police about their offending and you will find yourself in an Emergency Dept (not another planned emergency?) being injected with a cocktail of midazolam (‘Chemical restraint’ as a result of the ‘planned emergency’) and morphine/ harvested from another patient. And once again the cover up can be completed at a later date.
Interesting story about some ‘rogue’ Muslim nurses refusing to treat Israeli patients, (and one suggesting that he had killed ‘patients’) and the response of the government by charging them…….. I note they do not prefer charges against doctors/nurses when it is actually being done to conceal State sanctioned corruption and human rights abuses (blanket cover up policy).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyGqHAUWiS0
Good to see that some people will actually speak the truth about the power they are being given by the negligence and corruption of the ‘authorities’.
I can’t help but wonder why these nurses were not given the protection afforded other ‘medical staff’ when it comes to cover ups. Was it based solely on their religious affiliation? Because Police could have quite easily refused to accept the documented proof and claimed “insufficient evidence”….. again.
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“I’ll be requesting my local library to obtain a copy.” That’s a good idea, Boans. I’ve requested my local library get me research papers that are hidden behind paywalls. Librarians are very nice, and they’ve been really accommodating.
But if a bunch of us critical psychiatry people all go to our local libraries and ask for Moncrieff’s, Levine’s, Whitaker’s, Breggin’s, and other critical psychiatry/psychology doctors’ books … and psychiatry/psychology survivors’ books … I think that’d be a great idea. Thanks, Boans.
And well said, regarding the rest of your comment. If it makes you feel any better, as one who is supposed to be an “architect” or “judge” according to 40 hours of unbiased psychological career testing, I’ve had God seemingly sending people to the “lake of fire” in my dreams, since 2015 (according to my brother, who was listening to me sleep talk).
Not that I personally think God should need a “lake of fire,” since He created the entire universe, so there are likely other less “advanced” worlds, that the evil souls of this planet can go to, to pay for their sins, in a eye for an eye manner. Which I believe is infinitely more just, than “sins of the father” justice.
Thus why would God ever bother empowering satan with some sort of eternal “lake of fire?” Instead, I prefer to think the “fire” may represent light, or an unveiling of the truth.
… And we are all going through an unveiling of the ugly truth, or a “great awakening,” via the internet. But who really knows all the answers … probably only God? Yet the bottom line is, I do believe God is actively preparing for whatever He plans to do, so maintain the hope, and I do believe He’s listening, and acting on your prayers, Boans.
Back to your initial comment, maybe MiA could come up with a list of books for us critical psychiatry people to start requesting our local libraries purchase? I know I’d like to read Laura Delano’s new book, too.
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Yes, it has been a strange journey of sorts for me Someone Else.
The Minister dead (the timing of that death interesting to say the least) so no longer able to answer questions regarding the matters, and laws passed which mean that our politicians are not subject to the law any longer….they would have needed to be concerned about ‘joint enterprise’ laws. Passing euthanasia laws to keep the killings at arms length, and no more concerns about those pesky complaints about ‘mental health services’ requiring offending on the part of legal representatives at the request of the State (the “editing” and uttering with fraudulent legal narratives by the likes of the Chief Psychiatrist). Whistleblowers are such a problem if they manage to get through the ‘security checks’ (ie they don’t trust the ‘venus fly traps’ of police, lawyers [of the Nicola Gobbo ilk] and other authorities)
Though politicians can’t apply such an exemption from our laws retrospectively, i’m sure their colleagues understand the difficulty they faced when a need to snuff ‘whistleblowers’ and those with documented proof of human rights abuses and criminal conduct turned up in Police stations. Like the prisoners who were being executed by soldiers in Afghanistan, you can’t enable such war crimes and then prosecute the perpetrators because someone exposes the atrocities……. you imprison the whistleblower if gaslighting him fails.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8kz6pCizi4
The same rules apply with the ‘internal’ human rights abuses. A ‘medic’ killing people in the ED for the State? (and doing a few for a psychiatrist friend?) A wonderful means of doing ‘cover ups’ and not having the worry of people like me turning up down the track (paperwork all sorted by the Coroner with ‘death by misadventure’)………. and the documented proof turns up in a Police Station when they thought it had been retrieved and the fraud distributed? It was almost funny to watch how quickly these organised criminals were exposed, and then used their positions of power to shut down the truth…..and their reach a concern for those who love the truth.
Hypocrites to the very core.
If anyone ever wants to know how the State will react to complaints about human rights abuses such as torture or killing, learn more about narcissistic personality disorder. It describes the response perfectly.
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Actually hearing the term “establishment psychiatry” reminded me of a lecture given by Noam Chomsky many years ago where he spoke about “establishing credibility”. In this lecture he said that the mafia don’t make applications to the courts to have people pay extortion monies, they actively let people know they are operating outside the law (with the right people being paid eg police etc).
In much the same way that the Operations Manager who ‘investigated’ my claim that I had been tortured made it clear that they would “fuking destroy” my family. Letting me (and everyone else) know that they were using police as their personal thugs outside of the laws protecting the community, and that if you dare complained they would have your grandchildren raped (along with other ‘coercive’ methods enabled under the guise of a “poor choice of words” [Police Commissioners comment’s regarding the use of rape threats to a young man for not wearing a helmet on his bicycle].
Knowing that the Police will hand back victims of torture who complain about criminal conduct by mental health staff (and it is a crime to lie to police about a persons status to use police for arbitrary detentions and then forge documents to conceal the crimes) to Police is exactly what Chomsky was explaining. And thus the torture and involuntary euthanising of ‘patients’ and the “editing” of documented legal narrative to ensure if Police did actually perform their duty they could then also utter with the fraud in the manner of the Chief Psychiatrist (in response to the complaint by the Law Centre based on the fraudulent documents they were provided with).
This “establishing credibility” helps understand why the kangaroo courts are quite open about their corruption in cahouts with ‘establishment psychiatry’. They torture and kill, and the courts ensure the community is aware their is no point trying to access the protection of the laws passed by our Parliament…… see the letter I have from the Chief Psychiatrist where he doesn’t even recognise a basic burden of proof for detentions and forced drugging. “The Authorised Mental Health Practitioner need only ‘suspect’ on grounds HE believes to be reasonable (instead of the legal protection of “suspect on reasonable grounds” with criteria set out in the law). Such negligence (and given that this negligence was to conceal criminal conduct it is thus criminal negligence, to pervert the course of justice) would certainly ‘establish credibility’ for human rights abusers AND organised criminals.
So they need to have it known that they are operating outside the laws designed to protect the community…….. which is exactly what they are doing in my State……… mock executions, threats of rape, involuntary euthanising complaints in the ED………any wonder the people here need to be disarmed, and have any and all of their rights removed except in the law (to meet the Conventions agreed to at the UN.) As I said above, typical of narcissistic behaviour…… show a good face to everyone while abusing behind closed doors, gaslighting with fraudulent documents and slander, and relying on the fact that Police will not perform their duty as the benefits to the State outweigh the rights of its citizens.
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Has anyone known any k heads? Just get to know a few and you will quickly realise it’s not any sort of Panacea, it’s like being with someone who gets very drunk very quickly. God people are naive!
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Another psychiatric “Whack a mole” issue?
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Elon Musk.
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I’ve been getting intramuscular ketamine injections (not by any means a micro dose) once a month for 3 years now, and it allowed me to taper off all my psychotropic medications and go back to graduate school. I believe this is because it gave me a space to grieve and confront my own trauma while gaining valuable insight, not because it changed the structure or makeup of my brain. People who use ketamine recreationally are more likely to have it laced with other substances, take much higher doses, and are more likely to engage in poly drug use. I don’t think it’s a fair comparison, as there are many factors at play.
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Bruce, I shared your Counterpunch article with the group that is working with a family relative. I understand and agree that the psychiatry of now and that has been not helpful too many times and harmful. They ( those that refuse to have a critical analysis of their profession) just cannot do the three strikes your out kindergarten discipline and acknowledge we went down a well that was more poison that not. There is a lovely Victorian picture of a female Truth coming out of the well. I don’t know if these people have the wherewithal to admit the problem. Frustrating because they all as medical students most have experienced at least one tumor board meeting where the dismiss if a patient was discussed as a learning tool and where mistakes abd errors were labeled as such. In fact I would say all family members should be allowed to be at that meeting and or have a transcript if they kept one and my guess and memory no.
So the concept of discussing what went wrong and its acknowledgement so important to the medical profession especially psychiatry and other professions such as the lawyers. Really why did Roswell Field fail in his efforts with Mr Dred Scott? What happened to the suit for his wife Harriet? And what happened to him the Scott’s two daughter? This is vital information for all of us even now.
Trauma still continues even when the systems that are supposed to be there are not at all really there are almost like ghost images of systems. Sometimes like in the film The Sixth Sense the ghosts can be heard and seen by some.
Even therapy has its weaknesses and yes hard to do EDMR if one is still having flashbacks. Trauma is not linear so the one hour time does not fit in well at all. Trauma is more like a damaged house by weather and inside foundational issues or product defects when built. Warped wood or poor masonry. It requires a multi system and multi framework approach. We certainly never did though the promises we can fix abound and echo throughout time. I see some possibilities but the tools are still from a tool box that is meh.
I see thinking here and there and efforts but reality still is random luck and you are forced to use or choose tools the fall into the lesser of two evils.
I don’t think even rich people or the billionaires are really getting adequate help if I were to be truthful. It’s a mess and until we see trauma as a damaged house in a multi perspective view point things will not go well for anyone. We all are survivors. We need that insight from survivor hood to work together and change. And you know chemicals and substances used throughout time not against but can’t be the only tool and judicious use if used at all.
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Mary, thank you for this response and for the house metaphor. As a psychiatrist “in the trenches” with no conflicts of interest ( well I once went to a paid-for dinner a decade ago) in a poor fading quarry town, who collaborates with many other carers, hear every day that psychiatrists are somehow responsible for all the cruelties in the world right now. To use your metaphor, I know I’m just a sump pump in a damp basement, not an engineer with a giant backhoe who can dig up the whole yard, put the house up on giant jacks and renovate the whole basement.
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Thanks but I was thinking of human beings and I guess systems and professions as well.
It was not quite basement level when I was working but the unit was run by a Vietnam Vet who really cared. From these pages I have read the basement meme without use of that metaphor.
I think it has always been at best not great or maybe good just I am unaware, or true houses of horrors. The new people entering any so called caring profession need to know all of the truths. And whether that means new professions or types of care and support which many here support or truth in great detail. Oral history art and film and written art I don’t know but something needs to be done asap. And the more we can work together the better. Though hard because the anger is justified abd only the tincture of time allows firm sine it to recede though the memories are always always there. And your profession needs to understand this.
And trauma yes and other ways to get into altered states. And a clearing house so that we can document this as well.
I talk to medical school students and they oh it’s all changed but they have no true idea of the history and it takes a long and detailed time to begin to open up their eyes. They are young and lived through this yucky century and I always try to be gentle because there is a reason why they choose your profession.
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jennifer f,
your reference to being “in the trenches” reminded me of an old article by Dr Hickey, writing on the new APA president (Paul Summergrad). Dr H wrote;
“Great neurological breakthroughs are just around the corner! Sounds familiar.
“Across this country every day, psychiatrists take excellent care of patients in hospitals, offices, and yes, under bridges and in prisons.”
Under bridges? I don’t think many psychiatrists are working under bridges.”
https://www.madinamerica.com/2014/06/new-apa-president-old-cheerleading/
Care to elucidate on what you mean by “in the trenches”? Your war analogy begs the question of who it is you perceive as your ‘enemy’…… the phantasm of ‘mental illness? (drawing on the politics of Augusto Pinochet and his war against the phantasm of communism)
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tldr; THREE PRINCIPLES PSCHOLOGY.
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I heartily second Peter Dahlheimer’s recommendation of Three Principles (3Ps) Understanding as taught by Sydney Banks from 1973 until he passed in 2009. Over the past 50 years, educating thousands of people all over the world about the 3Ps has proven to improve their mental health and enable them to live more peaceful, joyful lives. Hundreds of first-hand stories are available from people whom the 3Ps understanding has helped to go beyond their mental illness diagnosis (or diagnoses). Establishment psychiatry’s days are numbered, but hopefully it won’t take a century like it did to get humans to believe/understand that the sun is the center of our solar system.
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Peter Breggin contends that “Going to a psychiatrist has become one of the most dangerous things a person can do.” Psychiatry, an international criminal organisation that falsely diagnoses, prescribes neurotoxic drugs, tortures, electrifies and incarcerates individuals, should be forced to appear before the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity.
When will psychiatrists be held accountable for the disability and death that they have created? When will its victims and their families be vindicated and compensated?
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This is about life and death — I think it is very irresponsible of the article to minimize the probable and significant short-term benefits of approved psychiatric drugs by noting this point at the end of a very long article, doing so very briefly, and, most importantly, by under-representing the evidence-based benefit characterizing it as just “possible.”
The responsible thing to do is lead the article with the selective short-term use of psychiatric drugs has its place!
Please write an article on what meds have been shown by good studies to work on what mental illnesses!
Maybe psychiatry should build it self back up from there?
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Self comment — I should have led with the article was very informative.
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The thrust of the piece is about the poorly-structured “research” used to support use of these drugs for so many people. I don’t see how starting it with a statement of support for the use of these drugs for short-term, emergency treatment would add anything to his thesis. And, “good studies” that show the effectiveness of psychiatric drugs are in very short supply: again, a major point of the article.
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Thank you.
You are the writer I look for at MIA.
I wept while I read this…a history of my Industry relationship, path of revelations, & cruel, dangerous lessons learned.
I have studied for the 9 years following my self-rescue, addressing “HOW did that happen to ME?”, “HOW does this industry get away with this?”, and the ongoing assessment and repair of the damages, inside & out.
For me, having it concisely, accurately expressed is a powerful emotional anchor, as I continue to rebuild a healthy life.
My lost 15 years is a measuring stick when things are challenging…it will NEVER be that bad again….look who & what I beat.
My vigilance meter is always ON and powered up.
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Hands off our mole.
And leave our gophers alone.
And harken to Napoleon
“Leave the enemy alone –
Wen ‘e is mekkinng a meeestek!”
“Or “never interrupt your enemy when ‘ e is making a mistake “
Also: A woman laughinnnng…
Is a woman conQUERED!”
Some days I think I’m Walter Mitty,
Mostly, though, I know
I’m Joan of Arc and Buonaparte
And Jesus Christ, also.
Some days, I think I’m Walter Mitty
Mostly, though, I know
I’m really, truly God Almighty:
THAT’S the way to go.
Some days, Mitty’s ghost still haunts me
To banish him I go
And summon other ghosts around me
Like Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
I summon other spirits round me
Whispering, “Tom, ‘TIS so:
Yes, EVERYONE’S a ‘Child of God,’
And soon they ALL WILL KNOW!”
Seriously, though, whatever happens to The Humors and to Humor?
For is not madness merely humorlessness, and sanity, or consciousness, or “spiritual awakening” not just having it restored to us?
What must Austen and Bronte and Thackeray and Twain think to see them do to psychology what they are doing to democracy?
God, Is SO love to know what they’d say – like Lincoln and Washington of contemporary democracy, worldwide!
Whatever happened to sanguine and saturnine, mercurial and phlegmatic and even enigmatic and inscrutable?
Obviously, if you drink even more than your doc or diagnostician you are an alcoholic.
If you are even moodier, you are bipolar.
If you are even more arrogant, you are manic and grandiose.
More focussed and driven? Hypomanic!
If you have dreams of saving humanity, of making life better for everyone, rather than just making “a good living,” and serving The Economy, you are psychotic.
More distractible? ADHD
EVEN more gormless, or maybe not even as “academic?” Autistic.
“Gambling disorder,” Tom Szasz pointed out, used to be known as “bad luck.”
Oh, and, of course, if you are even more hopeless than your diagnostician thinks you have a right to be? Clinically depressed.
Etc. etc.
Even Joanna, for all her immense enlightenment, seemed, last I saw, not to have wished off every part but of the brain washing we have all undergone to varying degrees.
Why?
Because, like frogs in warming water, we never noticed that Western Science has for so long been so thoroughly contaminated by old Judeo-Pauline philosophy that we did not see it for what it is.
Rather than seeing the normal among us, the ones with sufficiently sticky chromosomes (was it?) as normal, the rest of us as suffering from Clown Syndrome, we say THEY have “Down Syndrome.”
Yeah, they have, they came DOWN to dwell among us belligerent, breeding idiots.
Borderline personality disorder? Narcissism? Ego? AKA, A*SH*L* syndrome? We almost all have it. Why not? It’s “normal,” thus far.
“Carl Jung tells in one of his books of a conversation he had with a Native American chief who pointed out to him that in his perception most white people have tense faces, staring eyes, and a cruel demeanor. He said: ‘They are always seeking something. What are they seeking? The whites always want something. They are always uneasy and restless. We don’t know what they want. We think they are mad.'”
Eckhart Tolle, “The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment.”
“The human condition: lost in thought.” – Eckhart Tolle in “Stillness Speaks.”
Comfort and joy, and may “God” rest you merry and mirthful,
Tom.
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I love this piece of writing, absolutely hilarious and speaks the truth so brilliantly. Must be a mix of the Bipolar 1, ADHD, CPTSD, Personality Disorder, social anxiety, anorexia oh and treatment resistant MDD. I gave up after 21 treatments of ECT. Thank you made my day.
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Alison, thank you very much, indeed.
You made my last three days, thank you.
Whenever it gets funny, it would be great to learn what you’ve learned from those 21 ECT’s, please, and if you have any theories about why some folks might and do say ECT actually helped them – apart from the obvious: “No, REALLY, I swear I’m good now, thank you! I’m good! I’m good! I’m GOOD!”
When committed in ‘08, it came as a shock to me to read that I could legally be shocked – and any of times – without either my drugged or undrugged consent – and as no consolation to read, also, that my “consent” WOULD be required for a frontal lobotomy, given that I saw that any number of ECT’s and of drugs could have been forced upon me before I signed up for the butchering.
(Personally, I can see how ice-cold baths – even or especially forced ones, or swimming, as Diana Nyad did, from Cuba to Florida – might appear to hasten or hasten recoveries, if only because we all only suffer so much before we are done suffering…)
https://www.ted.com/talks/sherwin_nuland_how_electroshock_therapy_changed_me?language=en
We both omitted gluttony/bulimia (I, personally, pigged out on plumbum/lead, but that’s another story…) to be called exhaustion or nervous exhaustion or overwork or need-of-a-vacation, and became burnout and physician burnout – which latter term obviously clarifies that physicians are not like other human beings.
When, on the pages of a PT (Psychiatric Times – and, not, aren’t they just?) blog I asked the wonderful H. Steven Moffic (love that guy) why, when “depression,” a necessary element of “burnout” and of “physician burnout,” was a mental disorder (or set of them, according to Ronald Pies and others), was burnout not listed in any DSM (and only got passing mention) reference in ICD 10), he VERY kindly explained that…
They preferred to consider it a “psychological condition” as to do otherwise – to call it a psychiatric illness – might have a stigmatizing effect and serve to inhibit physician colleagues from coming forward to seek appropriate treatment(!).
His illustrious colleague, meantime, as one of his many attempts to persuade everyone of the reality of “mental illness” or of “mental disorders” told us readers of PT of one of his own patients who was so disturbed that he tried to physically claw his way out of that psychiatrist’s office so that “his fingers and nails bled[!].”
Alison, I treated animals for 25 years. If one of my patients had done this to her/himself, I, I, I, I really don’t know how I might have felt about it, but I might have felt offended. Not him, though – a true philosopher.
Maybe madness really is just losing our sense of humor, ya think?, and none of us is immune, and all of us, the humorless “hypocrites” and “weasels,” the “sociopaths” and “psychopaths,” the “predators,” “parasites,” priests, prelates, pontiffs, princes, popes, politicians, premiers and presidents are all just actors as equal as all the psychopomps in our human drama – some reminding us how best to behave, and some how best not to…and all showing us that the surest way to peace and to joy is through learning to love?
Thank you very much, again, Alison!
Tom.
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My definition for “Biological Psychiatry” is pretty simple.
There are people we can classify (only phenomenolocigal) as having Schizophrenia or severe Mood Disorders.
Sociological or psychological theories do not fully explain their behaviour.
Dr. med. Hans Bangen
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I think “Biological Psychiatry” is much more than that. It is the ASSUMPTION that ALL “psychiatric disorders” as defined by the DSM are CAUSED by biological malfunctions and can only be “treated” biologically. An example is the insistence that “major depression” is caused by a “chemical imbalance” despite decades of evidence to the contrary, an insistence broken only very recently and now replaced with some concept of “circuitry” which again is not actually supported by science. It is the insistence that “broken brains” are the reason for all “disorders,” regardless of social conditions or traumatic history. And yes, there are plenty of psychiatrists who practice exactly in this manner.
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There are people we can classify as ar$e-clowns. This doesn’t make it scientific, or explain their behaviour regardless of their attainment of medical degrees or zero clowning credentials.
A theory will not explain the unique circumstances a person has tolerated throughout their life. This is the problem with psychiatry. They fail to consider that a person does not exist in a vacuum and continue to victimise people for their distinct personalities, whilst ignoring their profession’s incognizance.
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Amen Cat. You’re a fierce Cat. May you eat them all!
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Purrrrr.
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I wonder what we need to build up in order to whack it down.
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Thank you, this makes it so clear.
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So… does this mean that the pills being used to treat the no-longer chemical imbalances also treat the “brain circuitry defects”? Or should everyone who is taking pills for their now official non-existent chemical imbalances, stop taking their pills (political placebos)? Or, should everyone taking pills for their “chemical imbalances”, get a new “brain circuitry defect diagnosis, and thus begin receiving their updated “brain circuitry defect” pills? BTW: does this mean that the “social” component in the “bio-social” paradigm has also been dispensed? I mean…its going to be rather comprehensively prohibitive to trot out “brain circuitry social defect”, right? (though that would be hilarious!) I suppose when ideology masquerades as science-or medicine, such questions are rather foolish… however otherwise essential.
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Establishment psychiatry will likely do what it’s always done: use word games and other cheap tricks to make it sound like they know what they’re doing.
It’s my guess they’ll resort to some form of word “neurological”. These days it’s their favorite catch-all term for all things sciency.
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Thank you, Bruce, for all of your excellent analysis. Most especially, thank you for distinguishing between psychiatry and establishment psychiatry. As a member of a group interested in critical thinking about psychiatry, i and most of us in the group, are accustomed to any criticism being interpreted as anti-psychiatry, often invoking Szasz or scientology. It is great to have your endorsement that I can still be a psychiatrist, while not accepting much of what establishment psychiatry practices and promulgates.
Carolyn
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I don’t know how you are going to “de-legitimize” a group that basically has the power to decide what ideas are and are not legitimate. We can keep bashing away at the fact that their treatments don’t work. But in the end, we must really supply some sort of workable alternative and starve them out of existence. As long as there is a perceived need for “mental healers,” someone will step in and try to fill that role.
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Blameworthy?
“…and thank you for listening so intently to me.”
F**KKKKKKK! Why didn’t I listen so much more intently to her, then!? I could have, especially if I had not let myself get so thrown early on, when she’d said,
“See, I think Jesus was blameless. I know you don’t….”
Why could I not have completely dropped that and given her my very fullest attention, instead of allowing at least half of my…whatever…to stay back there, composing corrections, rebuttals and and and?
Actually, I knew and know damn fine why not: Because I have not cultivated the necessary discipline to drop stuff like that under circumstances like that, and because the whole thing is that not only do I believe that of course Jesus was every bit as blamesless as all the rest of us, but because I believe that that is precisely why the poor beggar gave his life so horrendously on that cross, to tell and to SHOW us that we know not what we do, whenever we stray, just as he did, and forget that we are never miscreants but always utterly ultimately blameless.
Damn! But I knew I needed to promptly forgive myself – I’d already stopped listening, – again!
Damn! But it can be so hard to go against a current that’s flowed so hard and so fast for so long that everyone’s been so caught up in it, and to cleanly catch a buck spun at you so hard and fast and with such spin on it!
Why is contemporary coercive psycho pharmacology not so much dominated by Native Americans and First Peoples as it is by…Judaeo-Paulines?
Because those Romans were all over Israel at the same time as Jesus was. Sic transit…
And so our Western science still sees this as a cosmos of increasing entropy or “randomness,” rather than perceiving the growing complexity of it as a natural consequence of the fact that the very processes involved in all decay, degeneration, degradation and destruction are (obviously!) every bit as orderly and intelligent and exquisitely choreographed as those of all creation.
Cosmos in all seeming chaos, as Jung and the Upanishads so clearly saw, and as Jesus must have, too:
“Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care. And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered…”
Mutations are never random, nor ever in error, and nor are we, because there can be no part of us which is not stardust, not Nature, and not God.
There are no missteps, no mistakes, no miscreants, regardless of what any science, any medicine or even any psychiatry says:
https://courses.seas.harvard.edu/climate/eli/Courses/EPS281r/Sources/Gaia/Gaia-hypothesis-wikipedia.pdf
“Mutation rates can also differ even between genotypes of the same species; for example, bacteria have been observed to evolve hypermutability as they adapt to new selective conditions…
The optimal mutation rate of organisms may be determined by a trade-off between costs of a high mutation rate,[25] such as deleterious mutations, and the metabolic costs of maintaining systems to reduce the mutation rate (such as increasing the expression of DNA repair enzymes.[26] or, as reviewed by Bernstein et al.[27] having increased energy use for repair, coding for additional gene products and/or having slower replication)…
Finally, natural selection may fail to optimize the mutation rate because of the relatively minor benefits of lowering the mutation rate, and thus the observed mutation rate is the product of neutral processes.”
– from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutation_rate
This seemingly chaotic, fizzing clang and turmoil in which all our worlds – all our social/political/meteorological/geological/environmental and psychiatric worlds, regardless of how many parallel ones there may be – may already sound like the splendidest music of the spheres to ears more attuned than mine, but that need not be any fault of theirs or of mine.
Oh, Sweet Jesus and Patrick/Maewyn, may we all do such works as you tried to, and greater, too, and listen through and through and through and through and through, and be true to us and true to you and to every other dear martyr, too – to those students, brave women and the men of Tiananmen, and of Budapest, too, as they show that we will no longer need leaders when we all learn to listen, and to lead…ourselves.
Perhaps the very most unscientific statement of all in all Jill Bolte Taylor’s February, 2008 TED talk came at Minute 4:24- Mi. 4:47 and was her most true, and truly SCI[O]-entific or knowing one:
“We are energy-beings connected to one another through the consciousness of our right hemispheres as one human family. And right here, right now, we are brothers and sisters on this planet, here to make the world a better place. And in this moment we are perfect, we are whole and we are beautiful.”
https://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_my_stroke_of_insight/transcript
Happy Saint Patrick’s Day evening!
Tom.
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How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb?
None of them have as yet, they are still trying to prove it has a chemical imbalance, and since that hasn’t panned out have changed-to/are-also-trying-out something called brain circuitry. But, they are making headway, there’s compelling evidence, light bulbs are complicated devices, just like the brain, which they are working on figuring out just to make sure you know HOW they are going to end up changing the lightbulb, when they have figured that out, because if your brain isn’t working properly you wouldn’t know how they change a lightbulb. They are used to trying to explain things to people, and then having to work on the problem of it not being understandable. So, they first have to make sure they know what to do would you not understand how they are changing a lightbulb, then they will actually work on changing a lightbulb, but they are making headway.
Once they get that far, they intend to work on how you unclog a sink and other such riddles…… since an unclogged sink has a different effect than a light not going on, they are already pondering how to engage with such a problem, but they have determined it could something different than [a variation of] having a chemical imbalance. Since a clogged sink isn’t taking in what would flow into it, they think a probable cause is a fear of causing emptiness. And again, they are making headway, and there’s compelling evidence…..
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I hadn’t quite worked this out, I notice…. Once the psychiatrists, yet to be able to change a light bulb, and their chemical imbalance for knowledge regarding such…….Once they get that far (which as yet is of course completely mental, having added on how you change a light with what to do when others can’t understand this mental need), they intend to work on how you unclog a sink and other such riddles…… since an unclogged sink has a different effect than a light not going on, they are already pondering how to engage with such a problem, but they have determined it could [have] something different than [a variation of] having a chemical imbalance. Since a clogged sink isn’t taking in what would flow into it, they think a probable cause is a fear of causing emptiness. And again, they are making headway, and there’s compelling evidence…..
You see, a wheel with spokes, has to have a hole in the middle of it, to actually be functional, for an axle. The same you can’t fill up a cup that isn’t empty. And being that for them to fill the cup, or have the world spinning around their axles, and how they want to make sure that such evil influences akin to the the anti-psychiatry don’t get into axles and empty cups (what would happen to carbonation for example?) that a clogged sink has to do with?
With fear of emptiness…
But as yet, they haven’t gotten permission to pour their wisdom, or rather their method and medications into the sink, being that the intent is to unclog it [this will make your sink want to unclog and be empty to be filled with our treatment and wisdom was mentioned as part of a label]. Although they HAVE looked into advertising quite abundantly the powers of their medications to alleviate the fear of emptiness [especially regarding the fear of being empty for them] and then also the danger of being filled with the wrong treatment, but found that the sink allegory could promote people thinking THAT is where their drugs belong, once the sink is unclogged. But they are making headway in how to explain this because it is so circuitous.
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I wonder whether the anti-antipsychiatry contingency is going to say that Bruce Levine is promoting taking a whack at psychiatrists whenever they try to have a creative idea in how to heal the multitudes…….
ON THE OTHER HAND!
There’s this experiment famous in psychology how when you tell people to give another person an electrical shock when they get a wrong answer, how many people keep on doing that EVEN when the person is said to have a heart problem and it’s clear they are being put in danger, although that was a setup: actually, actors. But that is FAMOUS I don’t think that ONE psychiatrist wouldn’t know about this, or almost none, since it’s part of any basic psychology course, and YET how many of them do EXACTLY that…… with their patients…….. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment#:~:text=Beginning%20on%20August%207%2C%201961,sounds%20for%20each%20shock%20level.
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One last unsolicited comment if I may: I’ve always regarded the title of Thomas Insel’s book to be an utterly tone deaf-clueless and arrogant-virtue-hoarding grift. Healing? Seriously? Where Herr doctor? To write a book denoting so much collective failure, and (I presume, viz various articles and interviews, because I didn’t have any smelling salts to safely read the bloody thing), offering little to nothing-“of the more obvious”-lessons of what was gleaned (sold$$$$) from those failures, and then call it “Healing”, is the very same strain of intellectual and moral PMC rot that has long brought us to our current political moment. But if the title of Insel’s book wasn’t infuriating enough (for me, at least), listening to Insel during his book tour interviews with legacy media outlets (NPR, etc.), only compounded my outrage. T-Ball questions and institutional deference by like PMC types. Go figure. In the end, I found Insel’s book to be the requisite PR campaign that the leadership class always deploys at the end or apex of their career, whereby they write a book so as to secure their careerist legacy and head off any messy details that might suggest a different legacy. It appeared to me that Insel did the assembly line circuit of legacy (institutional) media, though I’m not sure if he ever did appear on Dancing with the Stars-or like TV program? PMC types just love themselves silly when they fail upwards, especially when christened in the public spotlight of banal entertainment…
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This report is oh so true they almost killed me for no reason at all except that my ex was lying about me and so we’re others only to find out later! I mean I’m pretty injured and they totally dismissed all of that
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In what I considered yet another excellent essay from Bruce Levine, I, too, found this paragraph troubling:
‘Establishment psychiatry also routinely conflates “anti-drug” with “anti-dishonesty about drugs.” So, I am aware of no critic of establishment psychiatry who is anti-drug and who does not acknowledge the possible short-term benefit of a tranquilizing drug in preventing hospital or prison incarceration. Unlike establishment psychiatrists, critics of establishment psychiatry such as psychiatrists Joanna Moncrieff, Mark Horowitz and Josef Witt-Doerring are fully informed about the scientific nature of psychiatric drugs, honest with their patients about these realities, and knowledgeable about the most judicious way of withdrawing from them.’
1. In his own recent essay to these MIA pages,
https://www.madinamerica.com/2025/02/ethics-psychiatric-drug-use/ ,
Josef Witt-Doerring opened by stating:
“Taking psychiatric medications long-term is like playing Russian roulette.”
This suggests to me that Josef may be suggesting that there is a 16.666666666666% chance of predicting what may happen, “long-term,” and no suggestion that the odds of accurately predicting what short-term effects OR the effects of any kind of tapering regimen may be predicted by him with any greater accuracy.
Given that placebo and nocebo effects both of taking in or being tapered off any psychotropic drug may vary so widely, and given our current limited and skewed data on what effects such drugs alone or in combination may actually have on our brains, even ne-in-six may be a wild exaggeration.
I don’t know what Bruce meant by “the scientific nature of psychiatric drugs,” but one might be forgiven for inferring that he did indeed mean that forcing potent neuroleptics on folks against their will – coercive psychiatry – is justified if it is used to prevent incarceration, and, presumably, to sedate law-abiding citizens considered ” danger” (perhaps an “immediate and substantial or grievous danger?”) to themselves and/or others?
As for “Primum non nocere!” or “Primum nihil nocere!” or “First, do no harm!”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primum_non_nocere ,
I suggest that telling any professional healthcare worker this may be as insulting as it is stupid, that to so swear would be nonsense and a lie and that, in any case, even to offer any person such a diagnosis/label as any of the utterly unscientific “mental disorder” or “personality disorder” labels is already to have done or risked doing serious harm – given that a trusted authority’s handing one any such label may be so much more damaging that self-diagnosis.
“I think I am who I think you think I am” is, until now, part of our human condition, of course, which, as Eckhart Tolle has pointed out and thoroughly explained as being “lost in thought.”
Once upon a time, when I wish I’d known what I still don’t know (kind of), confused about how anyone could be depressed without being anxious, at least about being depressed, or anxious, without being depressed, at least about being anxious, I might have been seriously worried about misleading a doctor into believing I was depressed when I may have been anxious, instead, or vice-versa – not realizing that I need not have added worry and confusion to my anxiety and depression as the poisons about to be prescribed me were used for both diagnoses.
A more appropriate worry might have been that I might fail to say the words necessary to help the good doc to the most appropriate diagnosis then available to him – that of “double depression,” which, according to the science of that day occurred when someone morose by nature – so sorry, suffering from “dysthymic disorder!”- became even more filled with acute self-pity.
What’s in a name, or a term?
Frequently, an awful lot, actually – if you look at it closely enough.
Take “hyperreligiosity,” when one’s religious (“or atheistic”) beliefs actually interfere with one’s daily life/activities/relationships.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreligiosity
God forbid THAT ever happening, eh!
No, any religiosity present should, of course, given the diagnostician no such cause for concern.
(In case anyone’s interested, I consider myself an atheist {or panentheist}, just like Jesus, insofar as I acknowledge no God, what- or whomsoever, who does not reside as fully within me as in all things: The Father and I are One: the phenomenological worlds and the realm of formless consciousness are One, in my opinion.)
And “bio-pyscho-social” implies not only that we sociable/social humans beings are no longer natural,
https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2009/mar/03/science-definition-council-francis-bacon
of course (possibly since long, long before Y*hw*h handed Moses those stone tablets), but also that our psyches are not biological, material, of products of mere matter
The logic of this would be that the mind is not simply brain activity and that consciousness is not somehow mysteriously generated BY the brain, but may act through as well as outside our brains…and probably that we must be immortal elements or aspects of immortal Consciousness.
This, of course, at any level, flies totally in the face of all contemporary, coercive, materialistic, biological, psycho pharmacology.
As, of course, does my repeated assertion, of course, that, of course “clinical depression” obviously does not cause hopelessness: It IS hopelessness…
…just like clinical jaundice does not cause yellowing of skin, mucous membranes etc: it is the yellowing of skin, mucous membranes etc.
One day very soon now, Modern Medicine and Science may agree that it is a laughing stock not to have pointed this out to Psychiatry and to the public long, long ago, and to have made full use of Thomas Szasz’s insights. At least, that is my (undepressed) hope.
Thank you Bruce, for another excellent essay.
Comfort and joy, and wishing all, Ronald Pies and Awais Aftab most definitely included, and HOPE,
Tom.
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Sincere apologies:
I ought not to have suggested – certainly not without proper explanation – that “First, do no harm,” uttered to a healthcare worker, “may be as stupid as it is insulting” (or even counterproductive), even if I, personally (as a veterinarian, mind you), have found it to be so, and consider what I see as any fearful, defensive, C.Y.A. (Cover-Your-Rear), safety-first medicine to be more dangerous than a more open, expansive, mutually trusting, proactive, caring, compassionate, put-the-patient-first kind.
In my experience, if one tries to merely be a perfect, impeccable professional, one is doomed to fall short; if one tries to be much more loving and caring than that, forsaking any notion of sinfulness or peccability, one is far more likely to succeed, and to please and to heal.
Similarly, while I hugely admire men and women who see themselves as less than Jesus yet try to emulate him, in moments of greatest weakness, I try to take heart from Jesus’s own reported words,
“Very truly I tell you, whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father.”
I do not consider contemporary coercive psychiatry – psycho pharmacology – to be medicine, at all, by the way.
(And, if any prospective employer of mine offered me any kind of Ten Commandments as terms of employment, telling me I must not steal, sleep on the job etc., personally offended or not, I think I would rightly want to run very far very fast – wouldn’t you?
“I am always suspicious of people who are suspicious,” as my old friend Kordual used to say.)
I do see a role for enlightened psychoanalysis and for any therapies where empathic, compassionate, non judgemental listening is considered key. I am not at all sure that such listening ought to be sold, that it can be sold or how it can be sold, mind you, although Dr Howard Schubiner, for one, at least, seems to have had some success in doing just that – even if he was fired from a hospital for not making (enough) money.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYz_ApWYeg0
Incidentally, Bruce mentioned cultures’/people’s/psychiatrists; seeing “deteriorations” as “mental illness” as criminality or as sin, for instance:
‘Prior to the domination of the current perspective, psychiatrists would not be accused of being “irresponsible” for considering the idea that notions such as “mental illness” and “mental health” were meaningless—recognizing that all human beings are capable of deteriorations that cause suffering to themselves and others; but that in any given society, such deteriorations are labeled differently, from sinful, to criminal, to unethical, to mentally ill, to successful.’
From about Minute 5 of that same podcast,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYz_ApWYeg0 ,
Howard offers one possible theory for how the notion of sinfulness/shame arose, and how this continues to be tied to how we all allow buried emotions and old, unprocessed traumas to cause us chronic pain/insomnia/anxiety-depression/fatigue and/or other psychic and psychosomatic ills.
Apologies, again, for any possible offense.
Comfort and joy.
Tom.
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