Psychologist on "mental illness": Psychiatry has it wrong.

www.cchrint.org...

This is an interview with one of many psychologists who think psychiatry is doing a huge public disservice by trying to treat mental health as a medical problem with "diseases" that can be treated with drugs.

In the note at the top it also mentions the film "A Beautiful Mind" about John Nash who won a Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences after turning away from the psychiatric approach to mental health and taking the matter into his own hands. The film apparently implies that he turned to newer drugs, whereas the truth is that his recovery was drug-free.

The film portrays Nash as taking “newer medications” at the time of winning his Nobel Prize, (which was false) thereby directly implying it was psychiatric drugs that cured him. Nash, himself, says this is pure fiction; he hadn’t take psychiatric drugs for 24 years and stated that he willed his own recovery.

This indicates that psychiatry has a direct influence on the film industry to portray their subversive technologies in a kinder light than is actually warranted.

I was introduced to the idea that psychiatry is full of it in 1981. I am now not only convinced of that, but am aware of data suggesting that it is much worse than that: They are on an active campaign to subvert honest and mentally healthy people to create a criminal, amoral society that agrees with their own ideas of life.

There is a lot of data about this out here. All reading this post should get themselves well-informed about this.

Yea I agree that alot of it is still unknown. It's a developing science and very hard to come to any specific conclusions with as the data can vary so greatly from one individual to the next. It's not like medical science where you see the problem, do the action, then see the result.

I have very little faith in the mental sciences at all.

People who rail against psychiatry often do so out of total ignorance or have had a bad experience with a practitioner. One bad apple does not a bad bunch make. And if you could even begin to see how the State run institutions functioned up until the early 1950s you would NEVER criticize psychiatry. Ok it may not be perfect, but what discipline IS!? Psychiatry (and the medications they use, particularly atypical antipsychotics and mood stabilizes) have given three generations of people with chronic mental illness a reason to LIVE. Rather than being locked away to slowly perish from the inside out is some cold, lonely institution or be hidden in a closet in the family home because ignorant people didn't know better. Moreover those who criticize psychiatry often have no experience of chronic mental illness in either themselves or their loved ones. Give it a try and you will soon change your mind about medications and psychotherapy...

Great post!

One such area of over-medication of perceived "mental disorders" is for ADD or ADHD (attention deficit disorder) that has seen a drastic increase in recent years of both it's diagnosis and medication. In my personal experience I have known many people that have this "disorder", yet I find it to be complete rubbish (I have kown a few that did have serious chemical imbalances; though I'm still not convinced it was ADHD). Many people who apparently suffer from ADD say they can't concentrate, yet given a video game can sit and play for hours on end, without a break, in my opinion disproving the "mental disorder". Rather than dealing with the issues of lack of attention, we are giving children drugs and building in them a reliance of medication which seems completely unnecessary. Children often don't have great attention spans, and kind find it hard to concentrate on boring schooling subjects. As a teacher, no child that has ADD lacks attention in my classes because I make the content exciting, and work hard to engage their attention. If they’re not engaged it is as much the teachers fault as any perceived learning disorders.

I get really annoyed at the laziness of parents and doctors using “medication” to control their children’s active minds!

Speaking as someone who has actively battled schizoaffective disorder for almost twenty years, I'll gladly confess that while there is merit to the stabilizing effects of antipsychotics, they are not in and of themselves a "cure all" for the condition.

Active therapy, changing negative thought patterns and a cognitive understanding of what triggers and accelerates dangerous delusional states within one's own mind are mandatory to helping combat the more debilitating aspects of the disorder.

The problem lies within the ability of the person who suffers under the weight of such a disorder to gradually come to terms with the cognitive thought processes that support and maintain delusional behaviors...not everyone who has this illness is "high functioning", or even willing to work through re-establishing a healthy mental state due to various reasons - be it lack of understanding of the cognitive process within themselves, or because they aren't receiving apt coping skills by way of their therapists.

In some cases, medication and therapy are actively denied because the patient simply refuses to believe that they "aren't normal" and they continue to buy into the delusional fantasies they conjure up.

Psychology and Psychiatry aren't perfect sciences by any means, as they stand - but speaking from personal experience, there is nothing more welcome when a particularly nasty episode rears up than being re-stablized on anti-psychotics - they're an absolute godsend, as far as the neurochemical aspect of the condition goes, but I cannot stress enough that these drugs are by no means the "complete cure" in and of themselves.

reply to post by l_e_cox


It's not just them, it's every corporation, take into account Big Pharma, there are so many natural remedies that they turn their heads away from, because "it's not profitable" damn shame when money rules over actually helping people..

reply to post by l_e_cox


Great post.

I have long been of the belief that psychiatrists are nuts.

To anyone in need of mental health care, I would advise seeing a psychologist (and definitely NOT a counsellor as they are not qualified enough and can do as much damage as psychiatrists).

reply to post by l_e_cox


One outright false statement was made: "it is impossible to see schizophrenia" (as in on medical imaging devices). That is false. Brains of schizophrenics have been observed, and there have been differences discovered. Maybe they only appear on the worst cases, but these image scans are used when people make comparisons of them to those images of drug users' brains (while they are on drugs).

This is really an interview. I don't know who this person is, but that false statement there is pretty obvious to anyone who has looked into schizophrenia.

As far as medication, trust me, some people need it. I've seen it among patient peers in a facility myself, including a state one. There are people who are so far gone that even with medication, they cannot come across as anything other than very obviously out of touch with their surroundings. (Notice I was careful not to deem it 'reality' out of respect for them.)

Now, I don't know what kind of person I would turn into if I didn't take the one medication I do. I have voluntarily asked for others when I needed it, and that was tough because the side effects were awful. But, I'm very glad they were available to me. As soon as I could, I quit taking them.

It is tough to talk about medication and psychiatry because there are abuses of prescription medication - doctors who give out too much, that is. I've seen that doctors will prescribe the newer, more expensive medications when the patient has insurance, even though a generic is available of the same drug, though it may lack some fancy release mechanism that amounts to a gimmick (aka, hasn't been shown not to be a marketing trick).

Then there is the issue of 'rehab centers,' which those with insurance can stay at...but those without get the boot within a few days max. If you ain't got the money to pay, get out of the way. I've seen coke heads get tossed out while someone else stays for alcohol and marijuana (against their will). So, there is a dirty side, and a lot of it is about money. And, the treatment you get is near crap. AA? NA? Crap. I could go on and on about this, so I should stop while I'm not ranting too much.