Why psychiatry is bad

They will say it when it comes to claiming that they belong squarely in the field of medicine. But if you press them and ask if these disorders exist in the same way that cancer and diabetes exist, they'll say no. It's not that there are no biological correlates to any mental suffering -- of course there are.

But the specificity and sensitivity that we require to distinguish pneumonia from lung cancer, even that kind of distinction, it just doesn't exist. What are the most common misconceptions about the scientific nature of diseases such as depression? I guarantee you that in the course of our conversation a doctor is telling a patient, "you have a chemical imbalance -- that's why you're depressed.

Take Prozac. Research on the brain is still in its infancy. Do you think we will ever know enough about the brain to prove that certain psychiatric diagnoses have a direct biological cause? I'd be willing to bet everything that whenever it happens, whatever we find out about the brain and mental suffering is not going to map, at all, onto the DSM categories.

Let's say we can elucidate the entire structure of a given kind of mental suffering. We're not going to be able to say, "here's Major Depressive Disorder, and here's what it looks like in the brain. And psychiatry may very likely take very small findings and trump them up into something they aren't.

But the most honest outcome would be to go back to the old days and just look at symptoms. They might get good at elucidating the circuitry of fear or anxiety or these kinds of things. What is the difference between a disorder and distress that is a normal occurrence in our lives? That distinction is made by a clinician, whether it's a family doctor or a psychiatrist or whoever.

But nobody knows exactly how to make that determination. There are no established thresholds. Even if you could imagine how that would work, it would have to be a subjective analysis of the extent to which the person's functioning is impaired. How are you going to measure that? Doctors are supposed to measure "clinical significance. For many people, the fact that someone shows up in their office is clinical significance.

I'm not going to say that's wrong, but it's not scientific. And there's a conflict of interest -- if I don't determine clinical significance, I don't get paid.

You say one of the issues with taking these categories too seriously is that it eliminates the moral aspect behind certain behaviors. It's our characteristic way of chalking up what we think is "evil" to what we think of as mental disease.

Our gut reaction is always "that was really sick. Those guys in Boston -- they were really sick. Unless you decide in advance that anybody who does anything heinous is sick. This society is very wary of using the term "evil. It's circular -- thinking that anybody who commits suicide is depressed; anybody who goes into a school with a loaded gun and shoots people must have a mental illness.

There's a certain kind of comfort in that, but there's no indication for it, particularly because we don't know what mental illness is. One of the overlooked ways is that diagnoses can change people's lives for the better. Asperger's Syndrome is probably the most successful psychiatric disorder ever in this respect. It created a community. It gave people whose primary symptom was isolation a way to belong and provided resources to those who were diagnosed.

It can also have bad effects. A depression diagnosis gives people an identity formed around having a disease that we know doesn't exist, and how that can divert resources from where they might be needed. Imagine how much less depression there would be if people weren't worried about tuition, health care, and retirement. Those are all things that aren't provided by Prozac.

What are the dangers of over-diagnosing a population? Are false positives worse than false negatives? I believe that false positives, people who are diagnosed because there's a diagnosis for them and they show up in a doctor's office, is a much bigger problem.

It changes people's identities, it encourages the use of drugs whose side effects and long-term effects are unknown, and main effects are poorly understood. Kennedy and Siebert is reason to wonder if some of us in America are equally bad. When I told Dr. Thomas Szasz about my efforts, as a lawyer, to stop kangaroo court commitment proceedings in the U.

Otherwise, desist. Was Dr. Szasz correct about America having become a nation where asking for justice is asking for trouble? Florida Avenue Route 41 Inverness, Florida Institutionalizing Dishonesty Psychiatry is evil because dishonesty is a routine part of what psychiatrists and those who work with them do. Quinnett, Ph. Fuller Torrey, M. In later books and through his Treatment Advocacy Center , Dr.

He quotes Paul Applebaum, M. Torrey continues: Families also exaggerate their family member's symptoms to get the person committed to a hospital. In a study of 83 families in Philadelphia, 18 percent said they had lied or exaggerated to officials in order to get a relative committed. In fact a number of local officials with the Alliance for the Mentally Ill AMI , a nationwide support group for families, say they privately counsel families to lie, if necessary, to get acutely ill relatives hospitalized.

They say they were attacked when they weren't, they say their children tried to kill themselves when they didn't Thus, ignoring the law, exaggerating symptoms, and outright lying to get care for those who need it are important reasons the mental illness system is not even worse than it is. What Dr. This implies that people have a right to kill themselves if they wish. I believe this is so" Penguin Books, p.

In The Death of Psychiatry Dr. Torrey repeatedly puts the word disease , when referring to mental disease, in mocking quotation marks as I often do. On pages and of The Death of Psychiatry he puts quotation marks around the word disease six times to indicate he did not believe mental disease is real disease. He puts quotation marks around the words hospital and hospitals when referring to psychiatric or mental hospitals as a way of indicating they are really prisons e.

In at the Thomas S. Szasz, "Whatever happened to Fuller Torrey?! Szasz answered with a single word, "Funding", and suggested I ask another psychiatrist who was with us that night, Dr. Ron Leifer, who gave me the same answer. Szasz wrote an article about Dr. Although Dr. Torrey intended his above quoted words to be a critique of laws he says wrongfully protect the liberty of supposedly mentally ill people, the important lesson of what Dr.

Human nature being the same everywhere, this habitual dishonesty is probably a reality all around the world. This dishonesty undermines rule of law and makes America's or any democracy's promise of liberty a broken promise. Additional evidence of routine dishonesty in civil commitment of supposedly mentally ill and dangerous persons is found in The Clinical Prediction of Violent Behavior Jason Aronson, Inc.

The edition of this book was cited by the U. Supreme Court in Barefoot v. Estelle , U. Monahan] as 'the leading thinker on'" the question of whether psychiatrists have the ability to predict future human behavior. In the edition of this book, Dr. Monahan points out that in Baxstrom v.

Herold , U. Attorney General of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania , F. Supp court decisions caused the release of prisoners detained because of predictions by psychiatrists or psychologists they would be violent if released from custody.

Additionally, "Only 14 percent of the [ Dixon ] patients were discovered to have engaged in behaviors injurious to other persons within 4 years after their release" p.

In practice, patients were never permitted to remain at liberty until their commitment hearing. They were always certified as likely, because of mental illness, to cause injury to self or others if not immediately restrained and forcibly "hospitalized" imprisoned on the basis of an ex parte proceeding, meaning one about which they knew nothing prior to being taken into custody and incarcerated at the Hospital.

I thought it noteworthy that the second physician, who was required to concur with the first prior to the commitment hearing regarding mental illness and need for treatment in a mental hospital, usually did not make the statement about imminent dangerousness on the fill-in-the-blank form where he made the required statements that the proposed patient was mentally ill and needed hospitalization. The space in the fill-in-the-blank statement about the proposed patient being likely because of mental illness to cause injury to self or others if not immediately restrained was usually left blank.

Why tell a lie when you don't have to? Additionally, seeing and hearing the proposed patients at their hearings, and talking with them in the hallway outside the conference room where the commitment hearings were held, they never seemed dangerous. Many seemed old and senile and in need of nursing home care. Many seemed completely normal. I said to the Assistant Superintendent it was the intent of the Texas Legislature when drafting the Texas Mental Health Code to allow persons with mental illness who need treatment in a mental hospital but are not imminently dangerous to remain at liberty until their commitment hearings.

I asked him why doctors would tell lies to deliberately defeat the Legislature's intent. He said, "Because that's the way you dumb lawyers wrote the law!

Perlin, Professor of Law at New York Law School and for decades a leading scholar in mental health law, makes a similar observation This pretextuality—along with sanism [analogous to racism]—drives the mental disability law system.

This pretextuality is poisonous. It infects all players, breeds cynicism and disrespect for the law, demeans participants, reinforces shoddy lawyering, invites blase judging, and at times, promotes perjurious and corrupt testifying. In practice, this made and makes absolutely no difference other than requiring the committing physician, psychiatrist, or psychologist to take a few seconds to tell one more lie in his testimony: "Doctor, do you believe involuntary hospitalization is the least restrictive alternative?

Punishing Violators of Our Unwritten Laws In my essay Why the Myth of Mental Illness Lives On , I point out that we, as a society, employ psychiatry to impose what in reality are punishments for breaking society's un written rules of behavior.

Psychiatry is evil because its "treatments" are often more cruel than the punishments we inflict on those who violate our written laws, such as against bank robbery. If administered as punishment , psychiatry's physical or biological therapies would be soon declared a violation of the U.

Yet as "therapy" for supposed "mental illness", such "treatments" are inflicted on unwilling so-called patients. Undermining the Values of Democracy Psychiatry is evil because it makes alienable , or voidable, human rights that the U. Dictionary definitions of "unalienable" are cannot be taken away, surrendered, or given away; not transferable.

When doing research for his biography of actress Frances Farmer, who was probably America's most famous involuntary mental patient before her death in , William Arnold learned something most Americans never think about Frances Farmer—Shadowland , Berkley Books , p.

The mere accusation of insanity was all it took for the suspension of every single human right guaranteed under the Constitution. In the words a San Francisco, California emergency room ER psychiatrist— As time goes on, I become more and more aware of how awesome that power is. We're able to just grab people and say, "You have to be here for seventy-two hours," with no evidence other than our belief that it's the right thing to do; and we're empowered to do it.

We don't have to prove it to anyone. That's a tremendously abusable power Linde, M. I'm reminded of a justice of the peace in Kerrville, Texas in who in the conference room where hearings were held at the Crisis Stabilization Unit, a few minutes before hearing the first of four 4 cases, casually mentioned she was going to do whatever the doctor recommended, which is exactly what she did, committing all of the patients whose cases she heard.

Even where the right to trial by jury exists, it is seldom exercised because lawyers supposedly representing patients don't tell them they must demand a jury to avoid a kangaroo court hearing in which commitment is a virtual certainty see "'Assistance' of Counsel? Few Americans know how tenuous and uncertain is their freedom in America. Few Americans know they can be arbitrarily imprisoned at any time in a place called a hospital merely because someone often a family member is willing to pay a mental health professional to question their "mental health".

And he would know. Wyeth, later bought by Pfizer, gave him slides and took him to expensive conferences, where key opinion leaders in the field would lecture on the newest drug trials. And each time he did his talks, drug reps would listen in. In response to this and other incidents, just last week, National Institutes of Health director Dr.

As part of the new proposal, NIH-funded institutions would be required to post conflicts of interest on a public website. To start down that path, one of the solutions Carlat suggests in his book is a merger between talk therapy and psychiatry.

Perhaps it is for this reason that he says:. Keep me in temper, I would not be mad. The king has a premonition of the imminence of madness. He understands the perilous condition of his state of mind. He has an inordinate fear of madness, understandably so. One cannot help but be reminded of the Royal Bethlem Hospital or Bedlam, as it was later called. People would come to see the mad confined here.

People would flock to the hospital with the sole intention of watching the antics of the insane. All the visitors were charged a penny for the privilege. Custodial institutions today disallow this kind of prurient voyeurism, not out of humanitarian concern, but because the appalling conditions, lack of sanitation and the plight of the institutionalized have all the makings of a public scandal.

Michel[ 4 ] talks at length about the Ships of Fools, which he insists actually existed. Boats — carrying a cargo of the insane including wandering lunatics, vagabonds and the homeless poor — were a commonplace sight in the Medieval Ages. Madmen were placed on unpiloted boats — that had no destination or disembarkation point — and were left to drift downstream in search of their lost reason.

There is no documentary evidence for the actual existence of these ships of fools. Therefore, there is no reason to believe in the veracity of Foucault's claims, his insistence in the matter notwithstanding. This is not to say that Foucault was deliberately trying to sensationalize the unfortunate plight of the insane because he was writing from a specifically anti-psychiatric, anti-establishment point of view. Nor is this an attempt to discredit Foucault's work or, in any way, belittle its profound historical and philosophical significance.

Probably, Foucault was presenting as I understand it, an allegorical re-reading of history. He was speaking of the exclusionary ethos that society has always had toward the mentally ill.

He was seeking to make a point about the extradition of the insane. I am reminded of the Erwadi fire tragedy 6 August , India in which 28 mentally ill patients — manacled to their bedposts — were charred to death when a fire accidentally broke out. Responses have been ambivalent to say the least. Although it is true that there was much outcry by human rights groups, it is also true that there were several who heaved a huge sigh of relief at what had happened.

After all, the incurably insane had been a huge drain on public resources; were not serving a useful or productive role in society; would never be amenable to treatment; and were no good to anyone on the face of earth. One reason for such stigmatizing attitudes could be ignorance, but this only begs the question further.

Stigmatizing views about mental illness are not limited to uninformed members of the general public. Well-trained professionals, from mental health disciplines, very much subscribe to stereotypes about mental illness. I am reminded of the open talk by a clinical psychologist at a mental health nongovernmental organization NGO in Delhi. To cite another example, I can well imagine the distress of a woman — diagnosed with bipolar disorder — when her consulting psychiatrist asked her if she was inclined to promiscuity.