Sunday, March 26, 2023

Comments by Andrei Stirbu

Showing 68 of 68 comments.

  • Psychiatry is more or less a conspiracy. It survived because it managed to manipulate the main sectors of society, which are made up by people who do not think independently, who take the establishments as they are.

    This is WHERE IT SHOULD BE HIT. From inside, it will take too much time to collapse.

    Focus should be on changing masses’ mind about what psychiatry actually is.

  • I want to say two things:

    1. I, like many here probably, was having an intuition that ‘autism’ could be another bogus disease. A confirmation about this coming from someone inside the system turns my intuition into firm belief.

    2. Somehow, this text should reach Greta Thunberg, as she is among those who naively believe have’autism’, because a representative of medicine said so to her.

  • Is true, I noticed this narcissism at most (but not all) doctors. They love to control and become nervous if you doubt what they say.

    I worked in an universitary institution and my impression is that initially, as students, at least some of them are motivated by noble intentions (while others just by the pleasure of feeling important), but then, the system and their greed turn them more and more (morally) corrupted.

    In fact, is human nature. Few people are smart enough to remain principled, to not become conformists and manipulators.

  • Agree, I just wanted to point out how young the present principles of medicine are. In 19th century they were still believing in four humours and such. In 1949 they gave the Nobel to ‘discoverer’ of lobotomy.

    I didn’t want to say drugs are good. I think most of them are harmful.
    But unfortunately, conventional medicine is drugs. Take the drugs off and you don’t have medicine.

    I think medicine should focus on causes of diseases, not on treating the symptoms. And causes are mostly lifestyle and trauma related.

    But as you say, medicine is business. People want to make money, doctors and pharmaceutical companies.

    Psychiatry wouldn’t survive if not tacitly supported by doctors from other branches. Is sort of uncoordinated conspiracy

  • EBM is still in its infancy. Before the 1970s, it basically didn’t exist. And as Mr. Timimi says, its results are interpreteted in a cultic way. Correctly, conclusions should be taken only if hundreds or thousands of studies show same thing, not only one or only few studies.

    But psychiatry has not much to do with EBM. Is still at level of the 1950s, when they believed pigs are flying and any theory that sounded cool was adopted, without the fear it could be wrong.

  • Lot of eye-opening observations in this chapter, like the one with the misnaming of neuroleptics as “antipsychotics”. Do you know that there are even veterinary doctors who, out of ignorance, recommend psychiatric drugs to animals?
    .
    As Mr. Timimi says, the critical psychiatry movement will remain a marginal phenomenon for a while. I noticed that, when I tried to present rational arguments and objective data about the falseness of mainstream psychiatry through presentations of representatives of critical psychiatry movement, people tend to see this movement as sort of delusional cult, sect. This is because most people are not used to think independently, to inform / document themselves, they believe that what is mainstream is what is correct. The herd mentality.

    Making the masses understand that psychiatry in its present form is not an evidence-based discipline will be the greatest challenge for the ones who know the facts. Is this “common brain” most people refer to in order to make their opinions that allow the deception to continue.

    And I would say is a double deception: psychiatrists deliberately deceiving the public and psychiatrists themselves deceived with sincere belief in their profession’s supposed effectiveness.

  • We need a revolution in medicine, not only in psychiatry. Most doctors behave as owners of esoteric knowledge. There must be a cooperation between an informed patient and doctor(s).
    .
    People must be encouraged to learn themselves about medicine, not to go with blind trust to doctors. Internet offers nowadays almost all necessary information in this field and not only.
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    Charlatans can prosper only in a world of people who don’t think.

  • Is not “the psychiatry”. Is the psychiatrists. They initially may be fooled like everybody else that is some branch of medicine that heals the patients but at some later point, either in medical school or at the beginning of career, they realize is a hoax that traumatizes the ones it should help. But out of greed, they accept this moral compromise and most continue with it all their professional life.

    Also, this moral corruption is supported by doctors from other branches as well, some of whom too will realize that something is wrong with psychiatry but will keep silence, as being vocal about the scam would harm their careers too.

  • What they call psychosis, is an existential experience through which you become more knowledgeful about yourself.

    “Instead of asking what is wrong with a person, I think we should be asking what has happened to them” = this also applies at physiological diseases. They should correct the causes, not try to ‘heal’ the symptoms. And the causes are either a wrong lifestyle, or traumatic experiences / stress

  • We live in the world of conformists (consider this word an euphemism for some stronger term), who haven’t developed an ability of seeing beyond appearances because they cultivated appearances all their lives. Including the so-called doctors, most of them (not only psychiatrists but all branches).

    You have to behave such way to be seen as “normal” by their sick perception, if you want to avoid troubles.

  • The lies psychiatrists are used to in are sort of individual phenomenon. Is not a proper conspiracy (collaboration between wrongdoers), but more like sort of inertia of the system, born out from independent contributions of individuals. These lies survived because nobody exposed them, nor are talking the psychiatrists to each other about them.

    This is why such articles affect them: they expose them not only to the public, but to each other.

  • Every claim in this article is backed by objective reference and the conclusions are as unbiased as they can be.

    I have no words to describe my admiration for Mr. Whitaker’s activity and results and for the activity of the other people at MIA.

    I would just want to point out that this information and understanding is made accessible only to people at scientist level and for that reason, the process of changing the minds is slow.

    Finding a way to address the masses an adapted version of same things may help a lot, demolishing their blind trust in ‘specialists’ that so often are as dishonest as unprofessional they are.

  • Relative to psychiatry, the society is divided in three groups:

    – we, the people who know that psychiatrists are quacks and psychiatry a hoax
    – the psychiatrists
    – their fools, the large majority of population who falsely believe psychiatry is a science and a branch of medicine

    Now, the quacks will not repent. We, the aware people already know pretty much everything that can be known about this pseudoscience.

    The fooled majority is the people that CAN BE CHANGED. We should focus on opening their eyes. Lets look together and individually for the best ways of doing this

  • To be a science, psychiatry needs very clear definitions of the object of its activity, call it mind, brain or soul. Also, very clear presentations of the physical-chemical way thoughts and emotions are formed (number and types of molecules involved in each cognitive process etc). All these are impossible to be done.

    This is why psychiatry will forever be the bastard son of psychology. Just a pseudoscience.

  • Suffering is part of life, not a pathological manifestation (in most cases). Suffering is what shapes our personalities, makes us more empathetic, have a broader view, being adapted to more diverse types of situations etc. In fact, in some spiritual cultures, like Christian ascetic one, suffering is seen as the purpose of present existence, as a “temporary evil” necessary for attaining a superior understanding on things useful in a next existence.

    On other hand, intervening in others lives against their consent on the ground of a supposed lack of discernment, is a violation of individual liberties. I can see it only as an expression of the insanity that rules in society and which sees individuals in a simplifiying way, missing the complex nature of rational beings.

  • I would say psychiatry, or better said psychiatrism, is a natural (spontaneous) social-cultural phenomenon that was born and is feeding from the stupidity of the masses but is true that involves lot of lying at individual (psychiatrist) level, both by misleading interpretations in written works in scientific publications, as well as in respect of what patients, or their tutors are being told by psychiatrists.

    Also, is very important to mention (as part of their manipulation) that the psychiatrists, though they learn in medical school that the psychiatric medicines, specifically the antipsychotics, are not having a healing but rather controlling (tranquillising) purpose, they intentionally leave confusion over this aspect even when are involved together with other state authorities in the work for production of mental health legislation.

    Most psychiatrists, the morally corrupted ones, are stupid people. This is why they are corrupted in first stance. If they were smart, they were honest. I don’t see them capable of sophisticated conspiration. They too are victims of the phenomenon they created. Some of them sincerely believe the lies this pseudoscience is made up from.

  • Based strictly on this review, it seems to me an extraordinary book and made me curious about the author’s other books.

    I too often contemplated and analysed the way teenagers give away their true aspirations, in fact their true self, in order to mimic a personality that would be accepted by others. As I didn’t have access to the many studies existent in the developed countries on such matters (rather because my inability of finding them at the time, as many are actually available online), I based my conclusions only on the attempts of understanding on my own these mechanisms at individual and collective levels.

    The ideas extracted from this book in this presentation changed my perspective, pointing to the fact that the alienation that most people apparently suffer in teen age actually starts earlier and is owed to the attitude of the parents, alienated by similar conditions.

    I think this is a valid and precious psychoanalytic and psycho-social investigation and trying to compare such approach with the approaches used in psychiatry, is easy to see that the latter will never work, exactly because of the pathologizing perspective, which acts as a false track (not sure this is the commonly used term in English).

    Making parents understand what’s happening with their children, by firstly making understand what happened with them at same age, would be helpful in stopping the vicious cycle that transforms most of world’s population in formalist, dehumanized and dehumanizing zombies, a generalized alienation out of which actually the psychiatry was born and is feeding, as one of the manifestations of this dehumanized, objectified understanding of the Others.

  • Thank you much! I do not live in US but in Romania and I was abused by psychiatrists by clear law infringement (laws of Romania) and I still have to suffer from the diagnoses they put me and which theoretically I can contest legally, but in practice I have no chances, as are other psychiatrists that decide if the diagnoses were right and they help each other. And that is not my supposition but something a psychiatrist told me.

  • Let me present my experience. At one point in my life, I had a period when hearing voices. I was a very isolated, asocial 20 years old. I was believing that people on streets were commenting about me, or that neighbors in the apartments around me were talking about me and I was hearing them through vibrations of the water pipes. Delusions is something inevitable, if you don’t have a social life or education.

    Someone in whose guidance I was believing (and who was not a psychiatrist but an educated priest) told me that those voices were just illusions and for a moment I hesitated to believe him, but then I made the effort of trusting him. From that moment, I never had such auditory hallucinations any more and this happened 28 years ago. That person also convinced me that astrology is pseudoscience.

  • Psychiatric hospitals are a hell nobody should be taken to against his will.

    People with cognitive problems should be cared AT HOME, as they have fragile psycho-emotional condition which in most cases hospitalization and psychiatric “treatment” only worsens.

    Check out the tragedy of actress Vanessa Marquez. Have not the authorities tried to ‘help’ her by taking to mental hospital, she would be alive today:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVOjJf6gYuw

  • Is delusional to believe that following an university can make you understand the millennia old secret of human nature and can make able to express considerations about others.

    Who wrote the books after which they learn and who taught their teachers the knowledge which supposedly makes them have a superior vision? Some extraterrestrial civilization?

    These guys are among the less read segments of the population, otherwise would realize they are just a ridiculous and infantile know-it-all ‘professional’ group. Psychiatry gave nothing to humanity, not even as cultural contribution.

  • The classification of perceptual disorders as diseases helps the psychiatrists, not the patients. It caused and causes enormous amount of suffering to people who have had a history of going to psychiatrist and being put a psychiatric diagnose. Like me, they may desperately have tried to hide this experience to other people, as most people change completely their attitude if they hear someone has such a label. When someone finds that you’re “mentally ill”, they suddenly become patronizing, arrogant, even aggressive, if you don’t show renouncement to your status as normal person.

    And what is worse, in many cases such labeling causes even more distortion of reality, as people with little reference tend to abandon their own judgement for the judgement of their psychiatrist. During my staying in mental hospital, I have noticed that most people brought there was entering with mild problems that lately turned worse, even disastrous and I attributed this to the acceptance of diagnose by those patients.

    It may be only a terminological problem, but for the sake of peoples’ feelings and health, the current terminology should be abolished.

    The excuse that “psychiatric disease is a disease like any body disease” doesn’t help at all. If psychiatrists want to protect their patients from marginalizing and stigma, they should accept the proposal mentioned in this article

  • Very true but I’m afraid it can be understand only by those that already suffered from psychiatry or studied enough the phenomenon to realize is bogus science and that psychiatrists are lying on a daily basis about their profession.

    Lately, I’m watching interviews with psychiatrists on Youtube and you can not only see how they’re lying but also you can understand how these lies have penetrated the entire society, as reflected in the attitude the interviewer has toward his/her guest

  • This is heartbreaking.

    Don’t you know about Dr. Breggin, or maybe even Mr. Whitaker? I don’t know anything about them but what I can find online. I don’t know if they have time for that, but you should have tried to contact them, to obtain at least some advice what to do.

    Most psychiatrists are out of their minds, you shouldn’t expect anything rational or humane from them, but the worst. They seem incapable of realizing the harm their drugs do, or don’t want to accept that.

  • At such young age, the child may suffer irremediable emotional – cognitive damage from the experience of confining and neuroleptic medication.

    Must be determined what or who is at the root of this antidemocratic and destructive public system that allows such practices. I think most people are against it, so why is left to stay in place?

    It seems to me that the law-making people are misinformed about the nature of antipsychotics, about their real purpose and way of action at biological level.

    I think the law-making people should be targeted in first stance by the anti-psychiatry activism, not the general public or the scientific community. Changing the laws is the #1 emergency.

  • Antipsychotics have not been created for the benefit of the patients but for the benefit of the hospital personnel and families of the patients. This is why little to no people take these drugs by their initiative, but forcedly. As such, they aren’t medicines. Their classification as medicines is a fraud.

    People are confused by this classification, inclusively the law makers and the psychiatrists deliberately maintain this confusion and take advantage of it.

    There must be a campaign informing the public about 1). the real purpose of antipsychotics and about 2). the physically and psychologically harmful effects of this category of toxic substances.

    – Reducing dopamine activity by 70% means every function in organism is disturbed. Forcing someone to ingest such substances should be criminalized. In fact, even their voluntary use should be made illegal.

    – The very idea of reducing the brain activity is criminal, an infringement of human rights, a crime against humanity. Psychiatrists are no less monsters than mengele or other nazies

    – Short term use of antipsychotics produces unimaginable suffering. Long term use of antipsychotics destroys the health and cognitive abilities

  • Superb and very helpful article revealing the complex aspects of the fraud of psychiatry, as result of contribution of countless psychiatrists, people from drug industry and maybe others as well.

    Like some religions, psychiatry in fact is not fully a fraud but PARTLY A FRAUD, PARTLY A DELUSION. Like religions, psychiatry has not a single author but a collective authorship and its authors have not had the same intentions or beliefs. Some were sincerely believing in these lies, some were half believing half doubting and some were fully knowing is a fraud.

    In psychiatry’s aspects as a fraud, this article makes a great service by revealing that psychiatry’s deception is not so spontaneous but a deliberate act of robbing the people at the expense of ‘patients’ quality of life, health and even survival.

    So we have with psychiatry a real case of CONSPIRACY concocted by thousands of psychiatrists and other kind of doctors (because I hardly can believe there are no doctors capable of seeing the unscientific foundation of psychiatry and the financial greed behind the psychiatric medication). i’m pretty sure that many, if not most of these psychiatrists and doctors lie themselves as they lie others, about the possibilities of their so-called profession.

    The question that concerns me is how can the public be made to understand all this fraud? Like psychiatrists, they tend to believe there is a single cause of each thing while psychiatry is result of many factors, some deliberate, some not. For that reason,it has a great power of convincing the uninformed, unthinking masses.

  • That’s quite a double standard and dehumanizing view. For the physical illnesses, drugs or other kinds of treatment seek the improvement of patient’s life quality.

    In Psychiatry are treated the symptoms, like the patient is an object, not subject. They just seem to think that once declared “mentally ill”, you’re no more a person, what you wish or feel doesn’t matter, maybe because is thought you lack judgement.

  • What exactly do they call “ëffectiveness” in psychiatric treatment? Is this regarded from patient’s pov or from hospital and family’s pov?

    Psychiatric drugs, like lobotomy too, have been invented in order to reduce the government expenses or to make the private psychiatric establishments profitable. They are sedatives, or tranquilizers, aiming at keeping lower personnel numbers in these hospitals. They cure nothing, is not healing why they’re created.

    Most of those who take dopamine – inhibiting drugs perceive this as horrendous, sometimes even as the most horrible experience of their lives.

    Check out the comments here (scroll down a little):
    https://www.drugs.com/comments/haloperidol
    https://www.drugs.com/comments/risperidone

  • I wasn’t referring to their ‘professional’ practice but to the practices of protecting the image and credibility of their profession and of the adequacy of the drugs they use (in articles, interviews, speeches and so on).

    They try to paint the anti-psychiatry movement as something peripheral to science and scholar consensus, lacking credibility and so on. Unfortunately, association of Scientology with anti-psychiatry helps them.

  • I had some experiences common with yours. I would like to say that you shouldn’t ever hope they (hospital staff, authorities, parents) will consider you sane again. Forget it. The problem is not with you but with them. You can exploit this fixation of them in your advantage. Time will show you how.

    As for losing weight, I can bring my own example. I have the opposite problem, I’m too thin, I have a BMI between 16 and 17. This because of exclusively vegetal diet and not eating much vegetal fats either.

    Also, physical activity is very helpful if done for several hours daily. Not sport or other kind of effort and not with the idea of “burning calories”. Easy things, like house maintenance or so. Effortless movements makes organs, tissues, parts of locomotor system change their position and by that circulation and other processes are improved.

  • Dear Robert, you fight against a huge, well perfected MANIPULATING MACHINE. I hope you won’t see as patronizing what I’m going to say.

    They’re still almighty because the masses always believe them, not you. The masses perceive those like you or Ms. Burstow as impostors (or better said sort of usurpers), even if is the other way around. They think is you who manipulate.

    Until now, you fought with the weapons of Truth and you convinced those people still able to recognize the Truth through the use of the Reason, but they’re a minority, the masses don’t act like that.

    Most people have a strong blind trust in doctors and drugs because they don’t read, don’t think, they let others think for them if it appears those who they trust have an authority.

    For the masses, is not important what someone says but the appearance, the body language, dressing and so. This is why psychiatrists use so much theatrical means in their interactions with their believers. Is exactly the same principles used by priests in order to impress.

    The masses suffer of sort of faith that there is a “divine order” in the ways the society is organized and is not possible that such a big institution like the Psychiatry to be a hoax, or that most of the people to be delusional. Is the bandwagon effect.

    If you want to succeed in these just cause efforts, you have to change a little the strategy. On one hand, continue to spread the Truth for those able to see it. On another hand, seek how you can strip the Dragon of its power given to them by the blind trust of the masses.

    In this SECOND FRONT, or direction, do not make any move until you didn’t virtually evaluate its outcome. Take in consideration any variables, factors that can intervene and change the premises. I think this is how they proceed too, because manipulators are forced to not act haphazardly.

    The battle is won or lost before it starts.

    If you believe you have a strategy that will win the battle, be careful, as may not work as you expect. Take failure into consideration.

  • This is heart breaking. As one that too I was hospitalized against my will, I can intuitively quantify thre amount of suffering you experienced. It was much much higher than mine.

    I disagree thought that the today situation is good. It’s still a monstrosity in US, from what I can learn online (as I I live and lived only in Romania). These dehumanized & dehumanizing monsters called psychiatrists must be stopped before they destroy or harm more people. Their insanity is a reflection of general insanity among masses. We live in a society of zombies, people whose’ minds do not function proper, most are desensitized, manifest mimetic thinking etc.

    These zombified masses are dangerous because of their lack of connection with reality. We must find a way of defending ourselves against them. Treating them as they would be normal will expose us to their power.

  • Beliefs have very strong psychological and even physiological effects. If you believe the psychiatrist telling you that you are mentally sick, you really damage your cognition.

    This why most people enter mental hospitals with mild affection and come out with severe, irreversible mental impairment.

    As for psychiatrists, I can’t say how sincere is their belief in their profession. It would be interesting to know how many of them take dopamine-inhibiting drugs themselves or prescribe them to their family’s members.

    In Romania I’ve read years back about a psychiatrist giving himself electroshock therapy but beside being tragic, is something rather peculiar.

  • There are not such suffixes of Greek origin (to match the psych-iatrikos part which is in Greek) to sound familiar enough (to be used in other scientifical terms). Other choices would be to change the meaning, like pseudopsychiatry or psychiatromania.

    Nevertheless, the essence is that psychiatry is imo an expression of a state of confusion among most people, including those who become psychiatrists. Such a deep and apparently unrecoverable (for most of them) confusion that may be considered insanity.

    For a specialist to be helpful for others in cognitive problems, he needs to have a more complex understanding of what the human mind, in fact the human being is. I think it would require extended philosophical and theological studies. I hope not be intrusive if I would refer to Eastern Christian ascetic literature, which may be an interesting lecture (if you don’t know it already), as it contains sort of humane psychology discovered by the life of contemplation of some hermits. It has nothing to do with organized religion, official churches just stole this spiritual – cultural heritage and made it theirs. Also, in its psychological approaches at least, it contains observations that are not religious but just “psychoanalytic”. I speak about works like The Ladder of John Climacus, Apoftegmata Patrum, Philokalia etc. And from contemporary authors, Sophrony Sakharov, who speaks about the “microcosmos” human nature and about the subtilities of mental “movements” and their effects in the overall structure of the personality.

  • What are the best ways to slaughter the dragon of psychiatry? Rational arguments may convince a minority who still have sane thinking (like people reading & writing on MIA). Most people seem to be driven by unchangeable false beliefs, including most psychiatrists. Most psychiatrists prove themselves to be shallow intellects (see Rosenhan experiment), not any superior level of understanding, as one would expect from people invested with the legal power of deciding what’s right and wrong in how others think.

    I have doubt the masses will ever start thinking. I rather believe their attitude toward psychiatry (or anything else) can better be changed by deprogramming and reprogramming them with a new set of beliefs, through what could be called brainwashing. Sorry for sounding immoral / unethical. I do not instigate to anything, I just am saying what I think can have a positive outcome.

  • The medical science (all of it, not just the psychiatry) is harmful by that it describes the diseases as resulting from chemical – mechanical dysfunctions. In reality, most of the diseases and even aging are results of autosuggestion.

    For example, when someone hears from a doctor that he/she is diagnosed with cancer, he/she enters a psychological chain reaction, literally self-destroying and dying sometime in less than an year. Imagine same person not hearing that diagnose. Wouldn’t he/she survive more, maybe not even having any serious issues?

    Psychiatry even more, creates confusion by presenting mental conditions as resulting from biological, chemical processes. This trivializes the perception of the intellectual and spiritual activities and even the perception of the purpose of life, making it to be seen as an exclusive material phenomenology.

    While chemistry seems to influence the state of awareness and psychological comfort, I think is not scientifically proved the theory that chemistry can change the way we think. The matter as support for mental processes has not real scientific evidence on its side.

  • Yes, but who gonna understand this? The psychiatrists have already chosen to be on one of the two side, the side of Truth or side of Falsehood. Unfortunately, the majority for the latter.

    The public has sort of religious trust in doctors, falling to their manipulation.

    I’m sorry to say, but such message as the one of this article has little good ending, as it addresses the reason, which most people avoid to use.

    Unfortunately, it seems to me that the way things can be changed is by constant demonizing of the psychiatry and psychiatric science. Only this way people will start realizing there is something wrong with this discipline