Comments by Philip Hickey, PhD

Showing 100 of 311 comments. Show all.

• pkolpin,

  You’re welcome, and best wishes in your endeavors.

  Leg-breaking is a nice analogy, particularly because psychiatry studiously avoids addressing the true causes of the problems they “treat”. It’s called cause-neutrality“: it doesn’t matter how you got this “illness”; now that you’ve got it, we’ll “treat” it for you.

• Sam,

  You’re welcome; and thank you for your support.

• Dr. Caplan,

  And thank you for your support and encouragement.

• oldhead,

  Your points above are nicely put!

• Frank,

  Thanks for this clarification.

• Steve,

  Thanks for your detailed reply above.

• Magdalene,

  1. The essential message of the DSM is that an ever-widening group of people are sick and need the “care” of psychiatrists.
  2. I’m not sure, but I suspect that there is a lot of mutual referral going on. You send him/her to us for drugs. We’ll send him/her back to you for counseling.
  3. Probably. It’s easy to agree with a position that increases one’s perceived prestige and earning power.
  4. I hesitate to use the word “diagnose”, but those of us in the anti-psychiatry movement are the only real dissenters at present.
  5. Tragically, I think that the training you speak of is more likely to encourage collaboration with psychiatry than challenge or dissent.
  6. Psychiatric disease-mongering has been a phenomenally successful endeavor largely thanks to pharma-funded advertising and corruption of the regulatory agencies.

• Fiachra,

  None whatsoever. Thanks for pointing this out.

• Steve,

  Wow! Wow!

• Slaying_the_Dragon_of_Psychiatry,

  Wow!

• Rachel777,

  Beautiful!

• Richard,

  Thanks. The world is indeed a very oppressive place.

• boans,

  Thank you.

• oldhead,

  Agreed wholeheartedly!

• Rosalee,

  And thank you for coming in.

• anomie,

  Good points. Thanks.

• Rachel777,

  The surgery metaphor is frighteningly apt!

• Steve McCrea,

  Absolutely best psychiatric science!

• Steve,

  Yes! Definitely!

• KateL,

  The “urban legend” drivel came from the eminent and scholarly Ronald Pies, MD. And yes, they will say anything to maintain their place in the hierarchy and their earning power.

• Rachel777,

  I think it is almost always the case that psychiatric pills cause more harm than good. This is especially true in the long term, but devastating reactions can also occur in the short term.

• psmama,

  Thanks for this.

• KateL,

  Nicely put.

• IBTworks,

  Thanks for coming in. Two thoughts come to mind. Firstly, depressive feelings can be relieved by addressing the issues that maintain them. Secondly, have you checked out the long-term consequences of inhibiting serotonin reuptake? Again, thanks for your perspective.

• KateL,

  Thanks. But in fact, Dr. Kendler handed it to me on a plate with the “enduring commitment” quote.

• Rachel777,

  Psychiatrists have integrated themselves so well into our culture that parents who refuse to take their child to a psychiatrist can find themselves in serious legal trouble.

• Sam Plover,

  I agree. The only source of the stigma is the “diagnosis”.

• Miranda,

  Nice!

• Someone Else,

  Thanks for this. We need to continually chip away at their credibility by exposing the hoax and the blatant conflicts of interest.

• Andrei,

  Yes. There probably are some psychiatrists who believe the hoax. But they should know better. Thanks for coming in.

• Bradford,

  Thanks for your encouraging words. “A catalog of billing codes” – that’s perfect!

• Rosalee,

  You’re welcome.

• Someone Else,

  Thanks. You’re correct in pointing out that psychiatric drugs can produce these “psychiatric illnesses”. But the primary psychiatric position is that these “illnesses” arise spontaneously in treatment-naïve individuals.

• Oldhead,

  Good points!

• Steve,

  Thanks.

• Sam,

  Thanks!

• Fiachra,

  Very astute!

• Anomie,

  You’re welcome.

• Slaying_the_Dragon_of_Psychiatry,

  Thanks.

• Bonnie,

  Thanks for a very compelling, though disturbing, article. It’s always enlightening to read your material.

• Sandra,

  I don’t idealize real medicine. My general point is that real medicine discovers its illnesses in nature; psychiatry invents its “illnesses”, and its “treatment” of these “illnesses” differs little from street drug pushing. Real medicine is a valid, bona fide profession. Psychiatry is a hoax.

• Rachel777,

  And a very pointed satire. Thanks.

• Miranda,

  I agree. The good doctor doth protest way too much!

• CatNight,

  “Trauma defines us all…” That’s a very helpful concept. We need to address these things, not occlude our self-perception with pills. Thanks.

• Rosalee,

  Thanks for coming in and for your encouragement.

• Steve,

  I agree.

• Frank,

  Beautiful!

• [email protected],

  You’re right. Chemical imbalance is a marketing slogan.

• Steve,

  Absolutely never!

• Brett,

  So the hoax has, literally, gone round the world!

• PacificDawn,

  I’m not sure what this means: perhaps that we’re all a little different neurologically? I would agree with that. We’re all a little different in almost every respect.

• Slaying_the_Dragon_of_Psychiatry,

  Thanks for your support.

• johnbitz,

  I don’t, routinely or otherwise, “erase the experiences of those who *have* found meds helpful”, though I do challenge the notion that psychiatric drugs can be considered meds.

  I have never claimed that “everyone agrees that other medical diagnoses are entirely homogenous with clear cut etiologies”.

  My position is really very simple: that the loose collections of vaguely-defined problems of thinking, feeling, and behaving that psychiatry calls mental illnesses are not illnesses in any ordinary sense of the term, and that the drugs that psychiatry dispenses so liberally to “treat” these so-called illnesses almost always do more harm than good, especially in the long term.

  Feel free to critique my work, but please confine your critiques to material that I have actually written. I make myself very clear.

• Phoebe,

  Thanks for coming in. You’re absolutely right – sadness is the natural response to loss and adverse experiences. The distinction between “endogenous depression” and “exogenous depression” was always a hoax. Endogenous depression was, by definition, sadness for which psychiatrists couldn’t identify a precipitating event(s). It was a very pure kind of arrogance (unique, I think, to psychiatry) to conclude that therefore no precipitating source of the sadness exists. As you so correctly say, they didn’t find these sources because they didn’t look hard enough. And they didn’t look hard enough because it suited their purpose not to find them. As you say: money and power.

• Salimur,

  You’ve identified a major issue. A chemical process is not necessarily pathological.

• Rachel777,

  Yeah, right. Lol.

• bcharris,

  Very true. Thanks for this important point.

• Lawrence,

  Nice!

• Rosalee,

  I think that’s a good answer. At present, psychiatry has a stifling effect on these kinds of creative ideas. Psychiatry says: Send them to us – we’ll take care of them. And society shrugs, and says OK. Take psychiatry out of the picture, and we’ll find that there are other non-medical ways to help people.

• KateL,

  Helping people to cope with depression is not a hi-tech activity. People have been doing it successfully for thousands of years. As psychiatry fades, I expect we’ll see a return to these ways.

• KateL,

  Thanks.

• Rachel777,

  It would also be great if the real doctors would start to point out psychiatry’s flaws.

• Slaying the Dragon,

  Thanks.

• Rosalee,

  Putting dents in the façade of psychiatry. That’s a perfect description. Enough dents, and the thing breaks.

• Frank,

  Thanks for the correction. And yes, the quackery, with its disastrous results, continues.

• Julie,

  Psychiatry has lost the intellectual and moral arguments. All they have left is PR – spin. Calling us deniers is just another example of this. But spin can only take one so far.

• KindRegards,

  Thank you for the encouraging words.

• Fiachra,

  Thanks. It’s nice to be back.

• Stephen,

  Her name is Paula Caplan. She wrote an article titled Diagnosisgate: Conflict of Interest at the Top of the Psychiatric Apparatus, published in Aporia in 2015. http://www.oa.uottawa.ca/journals/aporia/articles/2015_01/commentary.pdf

  There’s a link to this in my post.

• Bramble,

  Thanks for the info and the link.

• Eric,

  Thanks.

• Frank,

  Nice!

• Auntie,

  Nice summary of psychiatric defense strategy!

• Rosalee,

  Thanks.

• Oldhead,

  I do indeed think there will come a time when people will look back on this era and shake their heads in disbelief and horror.

• Oldhead,

  Yes. They make great use of the word “may”.

• Richard,

  Thanks.

• teegee,

  When they ridicule you, you know you are having an effect.

• Lawrence,

  Maybe.

• Frank,

  Yes. And he never came clean about the Risperdal scandal.

• Auntie Psychiatry,

  Yes. It seems unlikely that he’ll abandon the ship he has sailed so long and for such profit.

• streetphotobeing,

  Thanks for the link.

• Markps2,

  Thanks.

• Rachell777,

  You’re probably right.

• ConcernedCarer,

  Thanks for coming in, and for your words of encouragement.

  Best wishes.

• Rachel777,

  Yes. But I still have hope. Perhaps a deluded hope, but hope nonetheless. The hope that psychiatry, with its fake illnesses and destructive “treatments”, will perish from the land.

• Lawrence,

  Beautiful analogy!

• Oldhead,

  “So has society lost its ability to recognize false logic, or are people too intimidated to reveal their inner suspicions when they pick up on any of the disingenuous contradictions permeating such thoroughly mediocre propaganda?”

  That’s a great question. How can they continue to get away with this drivel? My hope (belief?) is that as more and more people join the ranks of anti-psychiatry, we’ll reach a sort of critical mass that will be hard for psychiatrists to ignore.

  Of course, they’re already positioning themselves for this. Remember the great psychiatrist Ronald Pies, MD, asserting that psychiatry never really promoted the chemical imbalance theory! And currently Allen Frances is busy pushing the fairy tale that it was not psychiatry that was doing all the damage, but rather the mean ol’ GPs, and of course, pharma.

• Fiachra,

  Yes. Some things don’t change.

• astrong,

  Sorry to learn of your tardive dyskinesia. Interestingly, virtually every member of the general public with whom I’ve discussed this has expressed the belief that the tardive dyskinesia and the akathisia are “symptoms of the illness”. When I explain that they’re adverse effects of the drugs, the response is invariably one of utter disbelief. But psychiatry has done nothing to dispel this misperception.

• Danzig666,

  Thanks for coming in. Certainly the dogmatism and the spurious nature of the “diagnoses” are dehumanizing, destructive, and disempowering.

• Slaying_the-Dragon_of_Psychiatry,

  Thanks.

• PatH_America,

  Thanks for the encouragement.

• Rachel777,

  I’m long retired. But I well remember the time when psychiatrists argued vehemently against “schizophrenics” finding any kind of productive, independent life, on the grounds that they couldn’t cope with the stress. A self-fulfilling prophecy; especially when the hapless individuals were loaded with neuroleptics.

• Someone Else,

  Yes. And a lot more besides.

• bcharris,

  Nice!

• astrong,

  It would be interesting if someone could conduct a study to see how many psychiatrists or their children/spouses take these pills.

• Oldhead,

  Yes. They are annoying. They won’t take their pills as ordered by THE DOCTOR. The fact that they know intuitively that the pills are destroying them is irrelevant. What a farce!

• Rachel777,

  Nice!

• Steve,

  Dr. Lieberman has also, on another occasion, described us anti-psychiatry activists as “rabid ideologues” (https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/879623). Rationality is not his strong suit.