I wonder how people watch Gataca or Minority Report and come to the conclusions that they depict utopias instead of dystopias.
“Researchers have concluded that the âeffect sizeâ in the industry trials is 0.3 (effect sizes can range from 0 to 3.0).”
Just a slight correction here. There is no limit of 3 to Cohen’s d. It maps to [0,infty) if you look at the absolute value or (-infty, infty) if you don’t.
To be fair that could be possible if outside conditions had worsened a lot.
Imagine building tons of coal power plants so air poluttion worsens, which leads to respiratory diseases. Even if treatment for respiratory diseases improves, the overall situation could worsen.
This could also be classified as medical problems that need social social sollutions (less coal power plants).
Yeah, it’s complete BS.
Here’s a psychiatrist stating the chemical imbalance theory is true to 1.5milion viewers (in german, translation below).
reporter: and still I fell like it would be way better, if one could say, there is no need for medication, there are offerings of help.
psychiatrist: well, that is in fact a bit utopic, because what is true is: that it [the psych illness] is a metabolic disease of the brain, where we know there’s too much dopamine, for example in psychosis, or there’s serotonin missing, and that’s not going to just come back by going to the canary islands for two weeks.
They are lying to themselves first and foremost.
“passionate concernsâunderstood”
With all due respect: I don’t think you understand at all.
If someone wants to take psychopharmaca of his own volition and given an accurate picture of what is to be expected, that is entirely fine. I think most people on here agree with this view.
What very much isn’t fine is psychiatry using force completely arbitrarily and in blatent disregard for their victims rights.
Now I do not know what has happened to you in your life and there may very well have been hard to tolerate times, but for me, the week I was locked away in a psych ward for no reason, was the worst experience of my life by such a margin that I can’t even compare it to anything else I have experienced.
So, no, you do not understand. You do not understand the fear. You do not understand the pain. You do not understand the harm. You simply do not understand.
The pictures say it all. What an incredible tranformation. Welcome back among the living!
“If, in fact, medication helps SOME people SOME of the time (which is generally accepted), the only way for there to be no difference between the psychotherapy groups with and without meds is for there to be at least as many people harmed by drugs as helped (so that the averages for the two groups as a whole are the same).”
This would show up in higher standard deviations of symptom severity in the treatment group vs the placebo one. Now those are rarely given, but from what I’ve seen this is not the case.
Taking no responsibility whatsoever and feeling treated unfairly when held up to the same standards as everyone else. What do psychiatrists call that? Narcissistic personality disorder, I guess.
Well, people who don’t understand that their methodology means they will assume there is a needle in 5% of haystacks that do not contain a needle will look for needles in haystacks forever.
It’s an abuse of the double meaning of significant. A statistically significant difference does not have to be significant (in its colloquial meaning of meaningful).
There’s another problem with all these BS studies. Correlations are not transitive in the way these studies pretend them to be.
Let’s assume there is some physical illness we can call depression, and it’s correlated positively with the symptons in DSM or ICD, and those symptoms are correlated positively with diagnosis of depression, and that diagnosis is positively correlated to some brain anomaly.
These studies assume that a positive correlation between the depression and brain anomaly would follow. That’s not true in general.
What they claim to have found: differences in brains between people with and without MDD
What they actually found: very low effect sizes. I.e. hippocampus is smaller by 0.14 cohen’s d. That’s like an IQ difference of 2 points. It’s completely meaningless in the real world.
You actually could turn lead into gold with a particle accelerator. It would be insanely expensive and absolutely not worthwhile to do so, but it has been done with bismuth.
Because physics is an actual science that produces actual results.
2 Sigma means there’s a 5% chance to find a positive result even though there is no actual difference.
So if I did 20 studies on whether salt helps against cancer, on average one of them will find a statistically significant (to a 2-sigma or p=0.05 level of significance) difference between the group taking salt and the group taking placebo by pure coincidence.
Thanks.
The “stolen valour” and cheap rethorics by comparing psychiatrys “knowledge” to physics knowledge boggle my mind.
Psychiatry operates at 2 sigma significance. Physics at 7 sigma. That’s a difference of roughly 2000000 times less likelyhood of false findings.
“ADHD was a âvalid disorderâ and the fact that it could be reliably diagnosed was an essential part of the evidence establishing its validity. ”
Validity, reliability and objectivity are not the same. This mistake is okay to make for first year students. Not so much for MDs and profs.
Let me make up Pizza Eating Disorder PED for this. The only question to assesss for PED is “do you like pizza?” “Yes” implies PED.
Obvioisly that is a reliable and objective diagnosis. Does that make it a valid mental illness? Uhm … no.
Note that PED could most likely be treated with stimulants aswell, as they reduce appetite.
â—–â——
“Evidence that ADHD was a âreal medical condition,â they wrote, was so abundant that to question its validity was âtantamount to declaring the earth flat, the laws of gravity debatable, and the periodic table in chemistry a fraud.â
The shape of the earth, laws of gravity, and periodic tables are tested billions or even trillions of times per day, whenever you use any device reliant on them. Like the GPS on your phone.
The validity of ADHD is NEVER tested. There isn’t even a test.
—————-
Good job putting the effect sizes into a readily understood graph. Most psychiatric research is missing such graphs. Propably because it would show how BS said research is.
It get’s worse when patients internalize the biological explanations and think of themselves as genetically defect and unable to be helped by anything but medication.
A friend of mine died to a brain tumor that was misdiagnosed as depression at first.
It was over quite quickly, so I don’t think an ealier brainscan would have helped, but still…
“the legal standard for commitment is that the person be a danger to others or themselves, or âgravely disabledâ, defined as not able to meet their needs for food, clothing, and/or shelter”
It isn’t.
The actual standad is that a psychiatrist judges a person to be that way. This is completely arbitrary and at least for suicides the current state of knowledge is that psychiatrists are wrong 97% of the times they judge someone to be suicidal.
Just ask the proponents of ECT if you can conduct some ECT on them. Should be no problem, as it is completely safe, right?
This reminds me of the shill that claimed glyphosate was so harmless you could drink it. When offered a drink he backpedaled rather quickly.
You would need to conduct 40 trials on average to get two of them to show that salt is a statistically significant cancer medication.
Any approval process that could get salt approved for cancer treatment is obviously faulty.
Also, as I’ve written you per email, concluding that medication which lowers depression symptons treats depression is a non sequitur, as the correlation between depression and depression symptoms is unknown, even if you assume that depression exists.
This can be traced back at least to the four humours in ancient greece.
Probably the same reasons people fall for other scams.
Let me elaborate.
Most mental diagnoses are pure tautologies and hold no explanatory power whatsoever.
A kid has trouble concentrating in school so it “has” ADHD. Because it “has” ADHD it has trouble concentrating in school.
That’s just nothing of value and anyone who thinks that explains anything should take a course in basic logic.
The same isn’t true for stress reactions. Someone experienced extreme stress and their body got stuck in a stress reaction. That’s a theory that at least could be true and hold explanatory power.
“A more suitable standard would be danger to self/others and/or gravely disabled.”
That would change nothing as psychiatrists can just make up the conditions needed for coercion.
Involuntary hospitalization and treatment just need to stop.
I’d include PTSD and CPTSD on the list of real mental “illness”. They can probably be seen on physical markers like stress hormon level. The D needs to be dropped, tho. They are normal reactions to extreme stress.
I.e. when I was locked up in a psych ward, I had a “resting” heartrate of 114 on day one. That’s a real marker for the immense stress arbitrary deprivation of liberty causes. Stress level never normalized after that, even though it is somewhat better now.
When you’re looking for the criminally insane, head straight for the nearest psych ward. It’s the folks in white.
1) It’s time to just disregard anything with financial conflicts of interests. Advertisements are not science.
2) Anyone trying to repair a computer by random electric shocks would be rightfully considered insane. Brains are even more complex computers. There is no reason at all to assume that random electric shocks could do anything but damage to them.
3) 0.1% vs. 0.2%. Okay, unless your sample size is way into the tens of thousands, that’s not gonna be even 5% significant.
I’m quite certain the nursing staff played a large role in me getting out of hospitalization. Compared to the psychiatrists they were actually sane and decent. For the most part at least.
Nice example.
My question: does the non-disclosure violate FTC regulations?
You’re welcome.
That psychiatrist was also quite famous, wrote several books and toured the republics talkshows. I’d summarize his “thesis” as: children are bad because we treat them as human beings and we should abuse them instead.
May he rot in prison.
We had a similar case in Germany where a psychiatrist made up his own diagnosis and drugged hundreds of kids with neuroleptics.
Several of his victims accuse him of sexual abuse. He also got courts to take children away from their parents for “endangerment” like wanting a second opinion.
You can just read the study to see what exactly they measured…
Adverse life events cause both canabis consumption and psychosis.
Mystery solved.
Let me preface this with the following: I can’t believe you survived 17 years in hell. 8 days were more than enough for me. You must posses quite some level of mental fortitude.
Imo, the Medusa story points to the core of why psychiatrists in coerced psychiatry show such insane behavior. Goffman said it best: “the motivation for everything the psychiatrists do is to justify their own behavior”
That’s why she couldn’t accept you doing well off drugs. It attacked her justifications for her own behavior. Clearly in an environment of criminally insane people she has to be the sane and responsible one. A “patient” doing well off drugs questions her giving drugs to other patients as well. Maybe that would be the right thing to do. Maybe she is the criminally insane one. This thought is so egodystonic she can not accept under any circumstance.
A friend of mine “self medicated” with ketamine. The research into it as an antidepressive encouraged his drug addiction. At 29 years of age he commited suicide while under the influence.
100% agreed.
I’ve been quite selective about whom I disclose to. Answers typically fall into two categories: “you should see a psychologist about that” or “that sounds like a horror movie”. I cut anyone from the first group out of my life immediately. They do not get the trauma.
It can be very hard to even talk about the problems with psychiatry without using the language which is part of the problem in the first place.
I believe you and I care.
Most people aren’t evil, just anxious and ill-informed.
âYou have borderline personality disorder. Thatâs why the ECT didnât work?â
That’s like saying: It’s raining, because the glorbs didn’t zworble.
“According to some authors, the distinction between illegal and medicinal drugs may be far more arbitrary than most believe.”
It’s quite easy actually: amphetamine is a super dangerous drug that will kill you, while anphetamine is a super safe med which is great for kids.
Clear as cupcakes.
Neurobiological explanations are just magical thinking. They assume some neurobiological cause without ever having shown it to actually exist or even attempting to do so. Of the millions of people taking SSRI for depression exactly zero had serotonin levels actually measured, etc.
These neurobiological explanations are a fallback to prescientific reasoning.
Still won’t be able to discriminate between drug effect and withdrawl.
A pretty simple solution to find out what these drugs do is to just take them. Clearly taking a single SSRI or neuroleptic will not kill you. It should be required for anyone who wants to prescribe them.
I can not speak for neuroleptics, but the first pill of SSRI I ever took was an outlandish experience. I’ve never taken any of the classic upper street drugs, but I imagine them to be similar. I’ve never felt as strong in my life. Followed within a few days by the ralization that this was nothing but an illusion created by a drug, so I quit them right away.
I can understand people getting addicted to them with basically the first pill.
N=3 ….
It’s trash masquerading as science.
Some honesty in advertising would be welcome here:
“This pill might make you 5% less depressed/schizophrenic, but you will become lethargic, fat, asexual and drug addicted.”
Great deal.
Agreed.
You could also tell the truth without explaining.
“I had a horrible life event and needed time to recover.”
Some employers won’t want you then, but you don’t want to work for them anyway. Others will understand.
Half a world away yet was basically the same story for me.
I was lucky enough to have supportive friends although none of them really got it. That’s a good thing as I wouldn’t want them to experience such horrible trauma.
I agree that the loneliness from not being understood and the impossibility of justice are the worst parts.
If you need someone to chat, I’d be happy to.
Take care.
That’s some beautiful writing.
“many individuals admitted to a facility will either witness or become a victim of violence or aggression within the first twenty-four hours of arrival.”
That’s quite the understatement considering every single person locked up against their will is a victim of violence and aggression by virtue of being locked up against their will alone.
It strikes me as some kind of fawn reaction to stress or stockholm syndrom.
Anyway that’s none of my business. If they want to be locked up and drugged, than that’s their decision. I’d rather not be.
Lawsuits and Strafanzeige won’t help. I tried. You could still do it. Psychiatry lacks any insight and self-healing power, but the Staatsanwaltschaft might be annoyed enough by 200000 Strafanzeigen per year to demand law changes.
Great summary.
In related news:
From “Corke et al., Meta-analysis of the strength of exploratory suicide prediction models; from clinicians to computers'” data the number needed to harm for replacing psychiatrists in suicide prediction by monkeys throwing darts at an appropriately colored dartboard is around 300. (I couldn’t bother to calculate the exact number, so I simulated it.) On average one truly suicidal patient will be missed per 300 evaluated patients. So as monkeys work literally for peanuts this could save lots of money.
This also assumes the monkeys have no emotional intelligence whatsoever, which is obviously wrong and unfair, so in practice the monkeys would do better than calculated.
Gotta give it to psychiatrists. They are quite patient. Decades of fruitless search would have caused most people to conclude that there’s nothing to find.
You are expected to fulfill the role of pillpusher and if you do not do that you are going to find yourself in role conflicts all the time.
You’ll find a role where you can utilize your conscience and skills. In the mean time you sound like you should really go for a beer with some friends or whatever you do for fun.
There is no way to make this world a better place, but to engage your companions with compassion and kindness.
Psychiatry is a system of horror abusing everyone in it.
You will find your way out.
The “debate” with Zizek was quite hard to watch. Peterson came completely unprepared.
Peterson could use a good dose of humility and the strength to say “I don’t know” instead of pretending life can be broken down to 12 simple rules.
That sounds like a pretty out there claim. Surely we need more data on that.
Let’s try with some psychiatrists.
Mange tak for offentliggoerelse her, Peter.
Looking forward to this series.
Psychiatrists consider Tom Cruise’s character to be the bad guy in that movie, as he destroys their utopia.
The Star Wars character they identify with is the torture robot.
Etc
Also the false positive rate is probably an order of magnitude lower and generally people are in prison for something they actually did instead of something they might do.
If mental illness would exist and
If it could reliably be tested for and
If violence could reliably be predicted and
If violence could be prevented by treatment
Than forced treatment might be justified.
So that’s 4 ifs which currently aren’t satisfied.
The “last resort” part is just BS anyway.
Here’s a list of other resorts tried before I was involuntarily hospitalized for alledged suizidality:
As you can see it’s rather short.
I’m not a native english speaker, so my knowledge of english proverbs is limited. đ
Luckily most people with autism diagnoses do not get “medicated”.
What you said about dogs reminded me of a truth I had long forgotten. Thanks for that.
Fantastic post.
This will surely come in handy.
Disgusting.
Cool.
Have they considered leaving the doors open, so interested people can have a look at their nice building and leave when they want to?
âIt is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.â
That’s a good one. I hope you don’t mind me stealing it.
As someone who works at a boarding school for autistic adolescents, I agree with the text. Some decisions are clearly made with money being a higher priority than the wellbeing of the kids. Others seem rooted in some form of helpers complex.
Every last bit of mental distress gets attributed to autism. Even when it very clearly is caused by e.g. abusive parents.
Thanks for the info. =)
Philip,
Obviously I know neither you nor Mr. Pies personally. But the lengths you go to here seem a bit over the top.
The treatment doesn’t work so the diagnosis was wrong is quite a reasonable assumption.
Way better than psychiatrys norm of the treatment doesn’t work so let’s try more of the same and add some electroshocks.
Max Planck said: âA new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.â
Let Pies rest and focus on educating the next generation. You’re arguing with delusions.
Thanks.
I wish you all the best in your recovery from this barbaric practise.
Sorry for the offtopic, but it seems you really need a dose of this:
Super common theme there with psychiatrists insisting they know how you feel better than you do yourself. Was the same for me.
“You’re suicidal.” ” No, I’m not.”
It’s gaslighting and mental rape.
Glad you got out of there and found someone who is a real doctor and foremost a decent human being.
Yeah, let’s just induce random electric currents into this unbelievably complex system we only have the vaguest of understandings of. What could possibly go wrong?
/sarcasm
“One colleague put it well when she described DSM diagnosis and treatment plans as âhate language.â For this is the language one would use to describe people they not only did not believe but also disliked.”
QFT
“While we know this can save lives”
Nope, actually you don’t. There’s zero evidence of coercive hospitalizations lowering the number of suicides.
Actually the evidence points the other direction. I.e. between german states there is a positive correlation between number of suicides and number of coercive hospitalizations.
You actually give the reason for that right there, Mrs. Hughes: “coercion can also cause lasting trauma and distress”
A friend of mine died from a brain tumor which was missdiagnosed as depression at first.
I doubt an earlier MRT would have saved him, but it should still have been done before diagnosing a mental illness.
I have to wonder how many people getting a psych diagnosis actually have a real physical illness causing psych symptoms. This real illness will never get treated once a mental illness is blamed.
Clearly Stea at al. are suffering from delusions (e.g. they seem to forget that psychiatry locks people up and forces them to take drugs, while they suffer from the delusion that psychiatric “treatment” is usually accompanied by informed consent).
These delusions are caused by chemical imbalances in their brains. (Because I said so.)
5 years in a “protected” psych ward and 150mg chlorpromazine daily for life should fix them right up.
Putting aside that such as endeavour is grotesquely huxleyian for a moment.
I’ve written some python code to download psychiatric research from medrchiv.org and train a word2vec model on it. Even in psychiatric literature schizophrenia and mood disorders are not distinguishable entities. This is especially true for bipolar, which has a cosinus similiarity of ~0.6 to schizophrenia. That’s one of the highest similiarities found out of all diagnoses. Off the top of my head only anxiety and depression (~0.7) are more closely related.
Even assuming psychiatric dianoses were valid (as in corresponding to a physical thing) the current terms used would be highly correlated and fail to describe different things. Birnbaum et al are trying to run before they can walk.
Edit: test accuracy should always be given in two numbers. sensitivity and specificity. A specificity of 80% is in no way even remotely acceptable. It would mean that 20% of test subjects would be called schizophrenic, even tho they aren’t. For comparision: the current covid tests have a specificity (and sensitivity) of >99% and even they produce a lot of false positives, when covid is relatively rare in the base population.
Sorry Steve, should have taken a closer look at your pic, begore diagnosing xou with baldness. xD
Too much hair obviously causes mania.
In a bold move bald man Steve McCrea suggests baldness as a biomarker for depression. While research hasn’t been conducted yet, top psychiatric experts agree this could be a breakthrough in finding the biological causes of depression. They assume there is a chemical imbalance at the root of hair and depression.
Well, at least that particular one was smart enough to not document his own misconduct. In fact he wrote a total of zero pages of documentation. Or it has been withheld from me.
As he acted ex officio during my coercive hospitalization in 2016, I don’t consider this to be a breach of his privacy.
When pressed on what a depression is supposed to be, psychiatrist Kay-Wilko Schierhorn told me it was an imbalance of seretonin in the brain.
So yes, psychiatrists do that.
So that was what? Two decades ago?
It’s great that the diagnosis has helped you, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be overused now.
And where it is overused it masks real struggles and prevents needed solutions. Abused children don’t need therapy for autism. They need therapy for their parents.
I’d expect more compassion and humanity from the average cop over the average psychiatrist. Less “mental health training” will make it more likely they understand something as a normal emotional reaction than as a magic mental illness.
Involuntary commitments are a crime against humanity. They need to stop, not be done by different persons.
“Understand that if they are using this label for themselves, itâs likely because itâs serving them somehow. Instead, ask them what autism means for them.”
That’s from your informed adult perspective.
I work with adolescents with autism diagnoses and for a lot of them it has been forced onto them, is not serving them and is experienced as degrading. In many cases it also seems completely unjustified to me.
A lot of child and youth psychiatrists seem to know exactly two labels, ADHS and ASD, and stamp them on everyone crossing their paths. Right on the cutoff of ADOS is something I see more often than not. The fishing for a diagnosis is super obvious.
Morning,
That’s why activism for rights of people with mental illness should focus on judges and lawmakers. They need to be able to make informed dicisions instead of being entranced by psychiatries propaganda.
Yes Steve,
when there are known causes for maladjusted behaviours in the physical realm like thyroid ilness or abuse there is no reason to resort to magical explanations like ASD or ADHD.
I was thinking of one of “my” boys in particular. His behaviour is a catastrophy. He’s provoking all the other kids and it seems he wants to be beaten up. He has an ADHS diagnosis and he is going to get an ASD diagnosis most likely just so he can stay in our institution, as it’s a boarding school for autistics.
He does not show any behaviour that falls under the label autism in any way. The ADHS label is more fitting … BUT he has a father that beat him up so thoroughly that he even stopped fighting back as “the beatings are shorter this way”. This is the most likely cause of his behaviour. As many victims of abuse and especially children he still loves his father (and his mother who talked him out of involving the police).
Now: should he wrongfully get an ASD diagnosis, so he can stay with us, where he is safe from physical violence? Should he get a more fitting diagnosis like CPTSD so he can get help elsewhere? Should he go to a regular childrens home? Should he get send back to his abusive parents?
Sometimes all options suck.
I meant it in more of a linguistic way.
As in: even within their language of disdain and devaluation they fail to use the correct term.
Also not all psychiatric terms are on an equal level of invalidity. Addictions exist in the physical reality sense of existing. Trauma exists at least in the psychological reality of the traumatized person and in social reality. Maybe even in physical reality, provable by increased levels of stress hormones or elevated heartrate.
Autisms’ plane of existance is the social one or with Wittgenstein: its meaning is it’s use in language. It doesn’t appear to have an underlying physical existance. The same is true of many other psychiatric terms. For example ASPD is basically the same term as “asshole” (the insult, not the physical thing đ ). It has a use in communication, but no physical existance.
I work with adolescents with autism diagnoses.
The points you bring up here mirror my experiences. I think autism is a useful word to describe a set of challenges some people face in life. To me there appears to be a distinct autistic way of problems with understanding social reality and thoughts of others. Still this makes autism a word to describe human behaviour and not a disease.
About half of the adolescents I work with do not show that at all. They might still have an “abnormal” way of social communication, but not in the autistic sense. It can usually be pointed down to abuse suffered during childhood and should be spoken of as CPTSD in the language of diagnostics or attachement disorder in the language of paedagogics.
Unfortunately a lot of psychiatrist suck at differential diagnostics and a lot of parents continue their abuse by seeking a diagnostic label for their child.
“We hospitalize people at risk of suicide, even though we donât have any evidence that hospitalizing them is particularly helpful.”
So how about you don’t do that? It’s not that hard not to do.
Maybe you should teach your operators about the reality of it. Out of a 100 persons they want to call the cops on 1 will commit suicide anyway, 1 will be saved, 1 will be driven into suicide by the very measure that’s supposed to help them, 96 would have not commited suicide anyway, but you will traumatize at least half of them, and if you’re in the US 1 will get killed by cops or nurses.
If any of your operators still want to call the cops after that, fire them. They are clearly sadistic pos.
To a psychiatrist any belief you could have, that’s wrong in their eyes, can qualify as a delusion. That includes obviously true believes about facts outside the psychiatrists knowledge.
When I was locked up, I was allegedly psychotic. At no point in the documentation is there even a hint of what was supposed to be my psychotic belief. In a later court revision one of the psychiatrists explained it by me stating that I heard voices in the hallway before cops entered my appartement. Well, there were cops in the hallway who tried to annouce themselves. I just didn’t understand them as I was taking a shower. Reality is a delusion to those idiots.
One of the doctors (not a psychiatrist) asked me if I thought I was being locked up just for the money. I did neither hold nor express that belief. At least not until I was asked. Fucking psychiatrists confusing their own thoughts for my delusions.
It’s a good write up.
Yeah Steve,
The percentage of wrong convictions is also waaaaay lower. >95% of alleged suicidals who get hospitalized involuntarily would not have killed themselves anyway. If a judge would have a rate of >95% of his convicted being not guilty, I’d expect him to quit his job on the spot.
Exactly.
She got lucky and doesn’t even know it.
ââŠlacking direct experimental confirmationâŠâ
That’s not how science works. To test a hypothesis you try to prove it wrong. You don’t confirm it.
Also the chemical imbalance theory dates back to the 4 humors in ancient greece.
Who let these pseudointelectuals anywhere near a university?
There is no ethical dilemma.
That would require working treatments. There are none. If there were working treatments, you’d get the dilemma of helping someone against their will. That’s not the case. Coerced psychiatry is harming people against their will, while under the delusion of helping. That’s abuse. It is the same thing abusive parents do, when they hit their child to “fix” it.
Death penalty is barbaric.
Every life saved from it is a good thing, even if it was done for the wrong reasons.
I wonder how people watch Gataca or Minority Report and come to the conclusions that they depict utopias instead of dystopias.
“Researchers have concluded that the âeffect sizeâ in the industry trials is 0.3 (effect sizes can range from 0 to 3.0).”
Just a slight correction here. There is no limit of 3 to Cohen’s d. It maps to [0,infty) if you look at the absolute value or (-infty, infty) if you don’t.
To be fair that could be possible if outside conditions had worsened a lot.
Imagine building tons of coal power plants so air poluttion worsens, which leads to respiratory diseases. Even if treatment for respiratory diseases improves, the overall situation could worsen.
This could also be classified as medical problems that need social social sollutions (less coal power plants).
Yeah, it’s complete BS.
Here’s a psychiatrist stating the chemical imbalance theory is true to 1.5milion viewers (in german, translation below).
https://youtu.be/g8WACQMkAmU?t=388
reporter: and still I fell like it would be way better, if one could say, there is no need for medication, there are offerings of help.
psychiatrist: well, that is in fact a bit utopic, because what is true is: that it [the psych illness] is a metabolic disease of the brain, where we know there’s too much dopamine, for example in psychosis, or there’s serotonin missing, and that’s not going to just come back by going to the canary islands for two weeks.
They are lying to themselves first and foremost.
“passionate concernsâunderstood”
With all due respect: I don’t think you understand at all.
If someone wants to take psychopharmaca of his own volition and given an accurate picture of what is to be expected, that is entirely fine. I think most people on here agree with this view.
What very much isn’t fine is psychiatry using force completely arbitrarily and in blatent disregard for their victims rights.
Now I do not know what has happened to you in your life and there may very well have been hard to tolerate times, but for me, the week I was locked away in a psych ward for no reason, was the worst experience of my life by such a margin that I can’t even compare it to anything else I have experienced.
So, no, you do not understand. You do not understand the fear. You do not understand the pain. You do not understand the harm. You simply do not understand.
The pictures say it all. What an incredible tranformation. Welcome back among the living!
“If, in fact, medication helps SOME people SOME of the time (which is generally accepted), the only way for there to be no difference between the psychotherapy groups with and without meds is for there to be at least as many people harmed by drugs as helped (so that the averages for the two groups as a whole are the same).”
This would show up in higher standard deviations of symptom severity in the treatment group vs the placebo one. Now those are rarely given, but from what I’ve seen this is not the case.
Taking no responsibility whatsoever and feeling treated unfairly when held up to the same standards as everyone else. What do psychiatrists call that? Narcissistic personality disorder, I guess.
Well, people who don’t understand that their methodology means they will assume there is a needle in 5% of haystacks that do not contain a needle will look for needles in haystacks forever.
It’s an abuse of the double meaning of significant. A statistically significant difference does not have to be significant (in its colloquial meaning of meaningful).
There’s another problem with all these BS studies. Correlations are not transitive in the way these studies pretend them to be.
Let’s assume there is some physical illness we can call depression, and it’s correlated positively with the symptons in DSM or ICD, and those symptoms are correlated positively with diagnosis of depression, and that diagnosis is positively correlated to some brain anomaly.
These studies assume that a positive correlation between the depression and brain anomaly would follow. That’s not true in general.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1198/000313001753272286
What a waste of money.
What they claim to have found: differences in brains between people with and without MDD
What they actually found: very low effect sizes. I.e. hippocampus is smaller by 0.14 cohen’s d. That’s like an IQ difference of 2 points. It’s completely meaningless in the real world.
You actually could turn lead into gold with a particle accelerator. It would be insanely expensive and absolutely not worthwhile to do so, but it has been done with bismuth.
Because physics is an actual science that produces actual results.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-lead-can-be-turned-into-gold/
2 Sigma means there’s a 5% chance to find a positive result even though there is no actual difference.
So if I did 20 studies on whether salt helps against cancer, on average one of them will find a statistically significant (to a 2-sigma or p=0.05 level of significance) difference between the group taking salt and the group taking placebo by pure coincidence.
Thanks.
The “stolen valour” and cheap rethorics by comparing psychiatrys “knowledge” to physics knowledge boggle my mind.
Psychiatry operates at 2 sigma significance. Physics at 7 sigma. That’s a difference of roughly 2000000 times less likelyhood of false findings.
“ADHD was a âvalid disorderâ and the fact that it could be reliably diagnosed was an essential part of the evidence establishing its validity. ”
Validity, reliability and objectivity are not the same. This mistake is okay to make for first year students. Not so much for MDs and profs.
Let me make up Pizza Eating Disorder PED for this. The only question to assesss for PED is “do you like pizza?” “Yes” implies PED.
Obvioisly that is a reliable and objective diagnosis. Does that make it a valid mental illness? Uhm … no.
Note that PED could most likely be treated with stimulants aswell, as they reduce appetite.
â—–â——
“Evidence that ADHD was a âreal medical condition,â they wrote, was so abundant that to question its validity was âtantamount to declaring the earth flat, the laws of gravity debatable, and the periodic table in chemistry a fraud.â
The shape of the earth, laws of gravity, and periodic tables are tested billions or even trillions of times per day, whenever you use any device reliant on them. Like the GPS on your phone.
The validity of ADHD is NEVER tested. There isn’t even a test.
—————-
Good job putting the effect sizes into a readily understood graph. Most psychiatric research is missing such graphs. Propably because it would show how BS said research is.
It get’s worse when patients internalize the biological explanations and think of themselves as genetically defect and unable to be helped by anything but medication.
A friend of mine died to a brain tumor that was misdiagnosed as depression at first.
It was over quite quickly, so I don’t think an ealier brainscan would have helped, but still…
“the legal standard for commitment is that the person be a danger to others or themselves, or âgravely disabledâ, defined as not able to meet their needs for food, clothing, and/or shelter”
It isn’t.
The actual standad is that a psychiatrist judges a person to be that way. This is completely arbitrary and at least for suicides the current state of knowledge is that psychiatrists are wrong 97% of the times they judge someone to be suicidal.
Just ask the proponents of ECT if you can conduct some ECT on them. Should be no problem, as it is completely safe, right?
This reminds me of the shill that claimed glyphosate was so harmless you could drink it. When offered a drink he backpedaled rather quickly.
https://youtu.be/QWM_PgnoAtA
You would need to conduct 40 trials on average to get two of them to show that salt is a statistically significant cancer medication.
Any approval process that could get salt approved for cancer treatment is obviously faulty.
Also, as I’ve written you per email, concluding that medication which lowers depression symptons treats depression is a non sequitur, as the correlation between depression and depression symptoms is unknown, even if you assume that depression exists.
This can be traced back at least to the four humours in ancient greece.
Probably the same reasons people fall for other scams.
Let me elaborate.
Most mental diagnoses are pure tautologies and hold no explanatory power whatsoever.
A kid has trouble concentrating in school so it “has” ADHD. Because it “has” ADHD it has trouble concentrating in school.
That’s just nothing of value and anyone who thinks that explains anything should take a course in basic logic.
The same isn’t true for stress reactions. Someone experienced extreme stress and their body got stuck in a stress reaction. That’s a theory that at least could be true and hold explanatory power.
“A more suitable standard would be danger to self/others and/or gravely disabled.”
That would change nothing as psychiatrists can just make up the conditions needed for coercion.
Involuntary hospitalization and treatment just need to stop.
I’d include PTSD and CPTSD on the list of real mental “illness”. They can probably be seen on physical markers like stress hormon level. The D needs to be dropped, tho. They are normal reactions to extreme stress.
I.e. when I was locked up in a psych ward, I had a “resting” heartrate of 114 on day one. That’s a real marker for the immense stress arbitrary deprivation of liberty causes. Stress level never normalized after that, even though it is somewhat better now.
When you’re looking for the criminally insane, head straight for the nearest psych ward. It’s the folks in white.
1) It’s time to just disregard anything with financial conflicts of interests. Advertisements are not science.
2) Anyone trying to repair a computer by random electric shocks would be rightfully considered insane. Brains are even more complex computers. There is no reason at all to assume that random electric shocks could do anything but damage to them.
3) 0.1% vs. 0.2%. Okay, unless your sample size is way into the tens of thousands, that’s not gonna be even 5% significant.
I’m quite certain the nursing staff played a large role in me getting out of hospitalization. Compared to the psychiatrists they were actually sane and decent. For the most part at least.
Nice example.
My question: does the non-disclosure violate FTC regulations?
You’re welcome.
That psychiatrist was also quite famous, wrote several books and toured the republics talkshows. I’d summarize his “thesis” as: children are bad because we treat them as human beings and we should abuse them instead.
May he rot in prison.
We had a similar case in Germany where a psychiatrist made up his own diagnosis and drugged hundreds of kids with neuroleptics.
https://newsrnd.com/life/2021-09-16-bonn-public-prosecutor-s-office-is-investigating-michael-winterhoff.BJXiteTe7K.html
Several of his victims accuse him of sexual abuse. He also got courts to take children away from their parents for “endangerment” like wanting a second opinion.
You can just read the study to see what exactly they measured…
Adverse life events cause both canabis consumption and psychosis.
Mystery solved.
Let me preface this with the following: I can’t believe you survived 17 years in hell. 8 days were more than enough for me. You must posses quite some level of mental fortitude.
Imo, the Medusa story points to the core of why psychiatrists in coerced psychiatry show such insane behavior. Goffman said it best: “the motivation for everything the psychiatrists do is to justify their own behavior”
That’s why she couldn’t accept you doing well off drugs. It attacked her justifications for her own behavior. Clearly in an environment of criminally insane people she has to be the sane and responsible one. A “patient” doing well off drugs questions her giving drugs to other patients as well. Maybe that would be the right thing to do. Maybe she is the criminally insane one. This thought is so egodystonic she can not accept under any circumstance.
A friend of mine “self medicated” with ketamine. The research into it as an antidepressive encouraged his drug addiction. At 29 years of age he commited suicide while under the influence.
100% agreed.
I’ve been quite selective about whom I disclose to. Answers typically fall into two categories: “you should see a psychologist about that” or “that sounds like a horror movie”. I cut anyone from the first group out of my life immediately. They do not get the trauma.
It can be very hard to even talk about the problems with psychiatry without using the language which is part of the problem in the first place.
I believe you and I care.
Most people aren’t evil, just anxious and ill-informed.
âYou have borderline personality disorder. Thatâs why the ECT didnât work?â
That’s like saying: It’s raining, because the glorbs didn’t zworble.
“According to some authors, the distinction between illegal and medicinal drugs may be far more arbitrary than most believe.”
It’s quite easy actually: amphetamine is a super dangerous drug that will kill you, while anphetamine is a super safe med which is great for kids.
Clear as cupcakes.
Neurobiological explanations are just magical thinking. They assume some neurobiological cause without ever having shown it to actually exist or even attempting to do so. Of the millions of people taking SSRI for depression exactly zero had serotonin levels actually measured, etc.
These neurobiological explanations are a fallback to prescientific reasoning.
Still won’t be able to discriminate between drug effect and withdrawl.
A pretty simple solution to find out what these drugs do is to just take them. Clearly taking a single SSRI or neuroleptic will not kill you. It should be required for anyone who wants to prescribe them.
I can not speak for neuroleptics, but the first pill of SSRI I ever took was an outlandish experience. I’ve never taken any of the classic upper street drugs, but I imagine them to be similar. I’ve never felt as strong in my life. Followed within a few days by the ralization that this was nothing but an illusion created by a drug, so I quit them right away.
I can understand people getting addicted to them with basically the first pill.
N=3 ….
It’s trash masquerading as science.
Some honesty in advertising would be welcome here:
“This pill might make you 5% less depressed/schizophrenic, but you will become lethargic, fat, asexual and drug addicted.”
Great deal.
Agreed.
You could also tell the truth without explaining.
“I had a horrible life event and needed time to recover.”
Some employers won’t want you then, but you don’t want to work for them anyway. Others will understand.
Half a world away yet was basically the same story for me.
I was lucky enough to have supportive friends although none of them really got it. That’s a good thing as I wouldn’t want them to experience such horrible trauma.
I agree that the loneliness from not being understood and the impossibility of justice are the worst parts.
If you need someone to chat, I’d be happy to.
Take care.
That’s some beautiful writing.
“many individuals admitted to a facility will either witness or become a victim of violence or aggression within the first twenty-four hours of arrival.”
That’s quite the understatement considering every single person locked up against their will is a victim of violence and aggression by virtue of being locked up against their will alone.
It strikes me as some kind of fawn reaction to stress or stockholm syndrom.
Anyway that’s none of my business. If they want to be locked up and drugged, than that’s their decision. I’d rather not be.
Lawsuits and Strafanzeige won’t help. I tried. You could still do it. Psychiatry lacks any insight and self-healing power, but the Staatsanwaltschaft might be annoyed enough by 200000 Strafanzeigen per year to demand law changes.
Great summary.
In related news:
From “Corke et al., Meta-analysis of the strength of exploratory suicide prediction models; from clinicians to computers'” data the number needed to harm for replacing psychiatrists in suicide prediction by monkeys throwing darts at an appropriately colored dartboard is around 300. (I couldn’t bother to calculate the exact number, so I simulated it.) On average one truly suicidal patient will be missed per 300 evaluated patients. So as monkeys work literally for peanuts this could save lots of money.
This also assumes the monkeys have no emotional intelligence whatsoever, which is obviously wrong and unfair, so in practice the monkeys would do better than calculated.
Gotta give it to psychiatrists. They are quite patient. Decades of fruitless search would have caused most people to conclude that there’s nothing to find.
You are expected to fulfill the role of pillpusher and if you do not do that you are going to find yourself in role conflicts all the time.
You’ll find a role where you can utilize your conscience and skills. In the mean time you sound like you should really go for a beer with some friends or whatever you do for fun.
There is no way to make this world a better place, but to engage your companions with compassion and kindness.
Psychiatry is a system of horror abusing everyone in it.
You will find your way out.
The “debate” with Zizek was quite hard to watch. Peterson came completely unprepared.
Peterson could use a good dose of humility and the strength to say “I don’t know” instead of pretending life can be broken down to 12 simple rules.
That sounds like a pretty out there claim. Surely we need more data on that.
Let’s try with some psychiatrists.
Mange tak for offentliggoerelse her, Peter.
Looking forward to this series.
Psychiatrists consider Tom Cruise’s character to be the bad guy in that movie, as he destroys their utopia.
The Star Wars character they identify with is the torture robot.
Etc
Also the false positive rate is probably an order of magnitude lower and generally people are in prison for something they actually did instead of something they might do.
If mental illness would exist and
If it could reliably be tested for and
If violence could reliably be predicted and
If violence could be prevented by treatment
Than forced treatment might be justified.
So that’s 4 ifs which currently aren’t satisfied.
The “last resort” part is just BS anyway.
Here’s a list of other resorts tried before I was involuntarily hospitalized for alledged suizidality:
As you can see it’s rather short.
I’m not a native english speaker, so my knowledge of english proverbs is limited. đ
Luckily most people with autism diagnoses do not get “medicated”.
What you said about dogs reminded me of a truth I had long forgotten. Thanks for that.
Fantastic post.
This will surely come in handy.
Disgusting.
Cool.
Have they considered leaving the doors open, so interested people can have a look at their nice building and leave when they want to?
âIt is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.â
That’s a good one. I hope you don’t mind me stealing it.
As someone who works at a boarding school for autistic adolescents, I agree with the text. Some decisions are clearly made with money being a higher priority than the wellbeing of the kids. Others seem rooted in some form of helpers complex.
Every last bit of mental distress gets attributed to autism. Even when it very clearly is caused by e.g. abusive parents.
Thanks for the info. =)
Philip,
Obviously I know neither you nor Mr. Pies personally. But the lengths you go to here seem a bit over the top.
The treatment doesn’t work so the diagnosis was wrong is quite a reasonable assumption.
Way better than psychiatrys norm of the treatment doesn’t work so let’s try more of the same and add some electroshocks.
Max Planck said: âA new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.â
Let Pies rest and focus on educating the next generation. You’re arguing with delusions.
Thanks.
I wish you all the best in your recovery from this barbaric practise.
Sorry for the offtopic, but it seems you really need a dose of this:
https://youtube.com/c/ThreeArrows
Super common theme there with psychiatrists insisting they know how you feel better than you do yourself. Was the same for me.
“You’re suicidal.” ” No, I’m not.”
It’s gaslighting and mental rape.
Glad you got out of there and found someone who is a real doctor and foremost a decent human being.
Yeah, let’s just induce random electric currents into this unbelievably complex system we only have the vaguest of understandings of. What could possibly go wrong?
/sarcasm
“One colleague put it well when she described DSM diagnosis and treatment plans as âhate language.â For this is the language one would use to describe people they not only did not believe but also disliked.”
QFT
“While we know this can save lives”
Nope, actually you don’t. There’s zero evidence of coercive hospitalizations lowering the number of suicides.
Actually the evidence points the other direction. I.e. between german states there is a positive correlation between number of suicides and number of coercive hospitalizations.
You actually give the reason for that right there, Mrs. Hughes: “coercion can also cause lasting trauma and distress”
A friend of mine died from a brain tumor which was missdiagnosed as depression at first.
I doubt an earlier MRT would have saved him, but it should still have been done before diagnosing a mental illness.
I have to wonder how many people getting a psych diagnosis actually have a real physical illness causing psych symptoms. This real illness will never get treated once a mental illness is blamed.
Clearly Stea at al. are suffering from delusions (e.g. they seem to forget that psychiatry locks people up and forces them to take drugs, while they suffer from the delusion that psychiatric “treatment” is usually accompanied by informed consent).
These delusions are caused by chemical imbalances in their brains. (Because I said so.)
5 years in a “protected” psych ward and 150mg chlorpromazine daily for life should fix them right up.
Putting aside that such as endeavour is grotesquely huxleyian for a moment.
I’ve written some python code to download psychiatric research from medrchiv.org and train a word2vec model on it. Even in psychiatric literature schizophrenia and mood disorders are not distinguishable entities. This is especially true for bipolar, which has a cosinus similiarity of ~0.6 to schizophrenia. That’s one of the highest similiarities found out of all diagnoses. Off the top of my head only anxiety and depression (~0.7) are more closely related.
Even assuming psychiatric dianoses were valid (as in corresponding to a physical thing) the current terms used would be highly correlated and fail to describe different things. Birnbaum et al are trying to run before they can walk.
Edit: test accuracy should always be given in two numbers. sensitivity and specificity. A specificity of 80% is in no way even remotely acceptable. It would mean that 20% of test subjects would be called schizophrenic, even tho they aren’t. For comparision: the current covid tests have a specificity (and sensitivity) of >99% and even they produce a lot of false positives, when covid is relatively rare in the base population.
Sorry Steve, should have taken a closer look at your pic, begore diagnosing xou with baldness. xD
Too much hair obviously causes mania.
In a bold move bald man Steve McCrea suggests baldness as a biomarker for depression. While research hasn’t been conducted yet, top psychiatric experts agree this could be a breakthrough in finding the biological causes of depression. They assume there is a chemical imbalance at the root of hair and depression.
Well, at least that particular one was smart enough to not document his own misconduct. In fact he wrote a total of zero pages of documentation. Or it has been withheld from me.
As he acted ex officio during my coercive hospitalization in 2016, I don’t consider this to be a breach of his privacy.
When pressed on what a depression is supposed to be, psychiatrist Kay-Wilko Schierhorn told me it was an imbalance of seretonin in the brain.
So yes, psychiatrists do that.
So that was what? Two decades ago?
It’s great that the diagnosis has helped you, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be overused now.
And where it is overused it masks real struggles and prevents needed solutions. Abused children don’t need therapy for autism. They need therapy for their parents.
I’d expect more compassion and humanity from the average cop over the average psychiatrist. Less “mental health training” will make it more likely they understand something as a normal emotional reaction than as a magic mental illness.
Involuntary commitments are a crime against humanity. They need to stop, not be done by different persons.
“Understand that if they are using this label for themselves, itâs likely because itâs serving them somehow. Instead, ask them what autism means for them.”
That’s from your informed adult perspective.
I work with adolescents with autism diagnoses and for a lot of them it has been forced onto them, is not serving them and is experienced as degrading. In many cases it also seems completely unjustified to me.
A lot of child and youth psychiatrists seem to know exactly two labels, ADHS and ASD, and stamp them on everyone crossing their paths. Right on the cutoff of ADOS is something I see more often than not. The fishing for a diagnosis is super obvious.
Morning,
That’s why activism for rights of people with mental illness should focus on judges and lawmakers. They need to be able to make informed dicisions instead of being entranced by psychiatries propaganda.
Yes Steve,
when there are known causes for maladjusted behaviours in the physical realm like thyroid ilness or abuse there is no reason to resort to magical explanations like ASD or ADHD.
I was thinking of one of “my” boys in particular. His behaviour is a catastrophy. He’s provoking all the other kids and it seems he wants to be beaten up. He has an ADHS diagnosis and he is going to get an ASD diagnosis most likely just so he can stay in our institution, as it’s a boarding school for autistics.
He does not show any behaviour that falls under the label autism in any way. The ADHS label is more fitting … BUT he has a father that beat him up so thoroughly that he even stopped fighting back as “the beatings are shorter this way”. This is the most likely cause of his behaviour. As many victims of abuse and especially children he still loves his father (and his mother who talked him out of involving the police).
Now: should he wrongfully get an ASD diagnosis, so he can stay with us, where he is safe from physical violence? Should he get a more fitting diagnosis like CPTSD so he can get help elsewhere? Should he go to a regular childrens home? Should he get send back to his abusive parents?
Sometimes all options suck.
I meant it in more of a linguistic way.
As in: even within their language of disdain and devaluation they fail to use the correct term.
Also not all psychiatric terms are on an equal level of invalidity. Addictions exist in the physical reality sense of existing. Trauma exists at least in the psychological reality of the traumatized person and in social reality. Maybe even in physical reality, provable by increased levels of stress hormones or elevated heartrate.
Autisms’ plane of existance is the social one or with Wittgenstein: its meaning is it’s use in language. It doesn’t appear to have an underlying physical existance. The same is true of many other psychiatric terms. For example ASPD is basically the same term as “asshole” (the insult, not the physical thing đ ). It has a use in communication, but no physical existance.
I work with adolescents with autism diagnoses.
The points you bring up here mirror my experiences. I think autism is a useful word to describe a set of challenges some people face in life. To me there appears to be a distinct autistic way of problems with understanding social reality and thoughts of others. Still this makes autism a word to describe human behaviour and not a disease.
About half of the adolescents I work with do not show that at all. They might still have an “abnormal” way of social communication, but not in the autistic sense. It can usually be pointed down to abuse suffered during childhood and should be spoken of as CPTSD in the language of diagnostics or attachement disorder in the language of paedagogics.
Unfortunately a lot of psychiatrist suck at differential diagnostics and a lot of parents continue their abuse by seeking a diagnostic label for their child.
“We hospitalize people at risk of suicide, even though we donât have any evidence that hospitalizing them is particularly helpful.”
So how about you don’t do that? It’s not that hard not to do.
Maybe you should teach your operators about the reality of it. Out of a 100 persons they want to call the cops on 1 will commit suicide anyway, 1 will be saved, 1 will be driven into suicide by the very measure that’s supposed to help them, 96 would have not commited suicide anyway, but you will traumatize at least half of them, and if you’re in the US 1 will get killed by cops or nurses.
If any of your operators still want to call the cops after that, fire them. They are clearly sadistic pos.
To a psychiatrist any belief you could have, that’s wrong in their eyes, can qualify as a delusion. That includes obviously true believes about facts outside the psychiatrists knowledge.
When I was locked up, I was allegedly psychotic. At no point in the documentation is there even a hint of what was supposed to be my psychotic belief. In a later court revision one of the psychiatrists explained it by me stating that I heard voices in the hallway before cops entered my appartement. Well, there were cops in the hallway who tried to annouce themselves. I just didn’t understand them as I was taking a shower. Reality is a delusion to those idiots.
One of the doctors (not a psychiatrist) asked me if I thought I was being locked up just for the money. I did neither hold nor express that belief. At least not until I was asked. Fucking psychiatrists confusing their own thoughts for my delusions.
It’s a good write up.
Yeah Steve,
The percentage of wrong convictions is also waaaaay lower. >95% of alleged suicidals who get hospitalized involuntarily would not have killed themselves anyway. If a judge would have a rate of >95% of his convicted being not guilty, I’d expect him to quit his job on the spot.
Exactly.
She got lucky and doesn’t even know it.
ââŠlacking direct experimental confirmationâŠâ
That’s not how science works. To test a hypothesis you try to prove it wrong. You don’t confirm it.
Also the chemical imbalance theory dates back to the 4 humors in ancient greece.
Who let these pseudointelectuals anywhere near a university?
There is no ethical dilemma.
That would require working treatments. There are none. If there were working treatments, you’d get the dilemma of helping someone against their will. That’s not the case. Coerced psychiatry is harming people against their will, while under the delusion of helping. That’s abuse. It is the same thing abusive parents do, when they hit their child to “fix” it.
Death penalty is barbaric.
Every life saved from it is a good thing, even if it was done for the wrong reasons.