Psychiatry EXPOSED!

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I've always been suspicious of psychiatry... But this video in particular looks like Scientologist propaganda. It's one thing to say that the industry can be exploitative, but quite another to claim that chemical imbalances don't exist.

I watched the whole video the second time. It states at the end that it was made by the CCHR. Which "...is regarded by the United States Government as part of the Church of Scientology's network of corporate entities". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CCHR
The first Dr. on the Video is Dr. Fred Baughman who is a paid medical expert for the CCHR.
The second Dr. on the Video is Thomas Szasz, who cofounded the CCHR.
The third Dr. is unknown to me.

The three major contentions of the video are that;
1)Mental disorders are diseases
2)There are no tests for mental disorders
3)There are no cures for mental disorders

I would counter with my limited science background that:
A) Mental disorders are not diseases
B) There are no tests, like a blood test for any brain disorder. If you have a blood test for a condition then isn't it a disease?
C) Yup, I would agree that there are no cures. Does this make the classification of life impairing behaviours irrelevant?

There are really two questions that this raises for me:

Firstly: are people unscrupulously making money out of psychiatric disorders?

I think the answer is undoubtedly yes. There must be psychiatrists out there who are making a fortune out of mental illness and disorders. It doesn't meant that there aren't decent & honest practitioners trying their best for their patients. Medical practioners aside, pharmaceutical companies make vast amounts of money and not always necessarily ethically. There was recently an expose on GlaxoSmithKline selling an anti-depressant (Seroxat), despite the fact they had evidence of it causing suicide, especially in adolescents & children.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/p ... 310197.stm

This doesn't mean that there aren't meds out there that can help with psychiatric conditions.

Secondly: does it really matter if there isn't a "biological test" for mental illness or disorders?

No of course not. Our condition, and that of other people with a range of disorders, is no less real just because it can't been seen in a test-tube or under a microscope. Before the advent of bacteriology & virology, did that make infectious diseases any less real before the 20th Century?

The trouble is, anyone calling themselves a psychiatrist, or perhaps more pertinently, a psychologist, seems to be able to invent a condition which is not peer-reviewed or properly verified (e.g. Cassandra Affective Disorder). This gives all the psychiatry / psychology sector a bad name.

My experiences with mental health professionals were anything but beneficial.
Most of the psychiatrists I was sent to were Freudian hacks.
Most of the psychologists I saw were behaviorists. Not one thought to take
an electro-encephallogram (EEG, brainscan) of me.