Psychiatry is a joke

Post Reply New Topic

My first doctors name was disco. I just wanted to know what always has been wrong there with me. A quit funny but also quite hard way to go. Now I'm my own doctor and as far as I know there exists no better one for me.
(May be exept the pretty therapist with the red hair in the autism support group who started to flirt with me once I visited the group? Or the beautyful girl in the drugstore today? But she seems a little bit too young and I think nobody would accept it ... )

When we were growing up it was the era of Freudian psychology which said mothers were to blame for whatever ailed you and the cure was hours upon (billable) hours on the couch. In recent years chemical imbalances are blamed and drugs are supposed to fix these. Also, the culture has changed. Psychotherapy is a long process and people want fixes NOW.

It seems so unfair to me how people blame the mothers for whatever is wrong in an adult's life. Fathers don't seem to get as much blame and yet they're the ones who usually walk away from their families like mine did.

Attention in the rest of the medical world has substantially shifted to a raised awareness of inflammation as a causative factor, and meta analyses of multiple research has been piling up for several years now, completely ignored by psychiatrists who will insist that they are "scientists". However I have noticed many times that the only science they appear interested in is claims from their peers with the same bias toward "broken brain" ideologies of depression. Because inflammation often results from infection, auto immune illness and allergies, the evidence that inflammation is causative is a danger to the huge money stream of the psychiatric industry. They will continue to ignore it, hoping it will go away.

However the evidence for it is already far better than the unproven serotonin hypothesis which has never been well established. The low SSRI theory really caters to pockets of the drug companies and psychiatrists on the paid per prescription model. It should be a scandal, though sadly people seem to give anything psychiatrists claim the automatic status of fact.

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/313551.php

I'm not sure I understand this "scandal" but a lot of these medicines DO work when they are taken the right way. If it wasn't for my meds I might be in jail, homeless, or dead by now. People with conditions like Bipolar Disorder and Schizophrenia really do need these medications because they cannot function in life without them and they can even become a danger to themselves and to others.

My comment was specific to depression, which is far more common, and their main money stream..

Some psychiatrists do some good, and some don't, and some probably do some good and some harm without awareness of the latter. They too can suffer from cognitive bias.

In professions where there is a huge imbalance of power between client and provider, there is more risk of the professional misusing that power. Psychiatry has a particularly terrible history of misusing power. The deliberate slashing of patients' brain lobes is not just an invention in movies like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest; if the Nazis had done this, the world would have realised how evil and dehumanising it was; but when USA doctors did it as an experiment on many many patients without their consent, it was "science"....

Oh ok.

However I have chosen to add some more general comments to that post.

Have you read about Unit 731? Makes our experiments look like a walk on the beach

To be honest medical science wouldn't be where it is today if it wasn't for all the live human test subjects that were being experimented on. It was very cruel but in the long run it has helped to save a lot of lives.

At least nowadays we let people volunteer as test subjects instead of forcing it on them. Lately I've been thinking that when I die I might want to donate my body to science because I do believe that science can make the world a better place.

It is good that patients now - mostly - have the power to consent or not. However this can be over-ridden in some instances in the mental health field, and though most probably use this power responsibly, there will always be some rogues.

I don't think the human race gained anything scientifically from the horrific practice of leucotomies; it was just brain butchery. It didn't save lives then or since.

There's nothing to be gained (in my view) from trying to sugarcoat the dreadful parts of past psychiatric abuse of patients. There was a lot of it in various forms.

Yes. I differ about a few details, but definitely agree with the main thrust of your description of how shrink culture has evolved since then.


My dad got at least as much "blame" as did my mom, if not more. Lol! And rightfully so. We were a rather neurotic family. Pure "Freudian analysis" was passe' long before the Sixties. But you're right that in general way Freud still dominated the thinking of therapists then, and that (a) folks put up with long years of talk therapy with only microscopic results back then, and (b) the mental health communityg adhered to the theory that everything is the result of bad parenting. So putting your kid into therapy always started off with the focus being on what is wrong with the kid, and then always progressed to focusing on what is wrong with the both parents, and then always ended up with focusing on what was wrong the grandparents.

It also meant they didn't dispense pills as freely as they do today ( that might have been a good thing that they didn't do that so much then. I don't know).

But it also meant that no therapist would ever consider the possibility that you might have some inborn condition like adhd, or like being on the high end of the autism spectrum ( and this was LONG before autism was even thought of as a spectrum). Everything is environment, and everything is bad parenting. Had to be. If you go by analogy to computers it was as if they treated everything as a software problem, and never treated anything as a hardware problem. So they spent long hours on talk therapy to change your programming from the original bad software presumably put into you by bad parents. Today they go right to the hardware and give you pills to change the actual chemistry of your brain. But also they entertain the notion that you could be something like dyslexic, or autistic, which is a wiring problem, and not a software problem.

I really wasn't trying to sugarcoat it it's just that sometimes I feel like it's better to think about why things now are better compared to what they used to be. I depress myself thinking about all the bad and inhumane things that go on in the world lol. Sometimes you just have to find a silver lining.

You mentioned having other worsening health problems in the OP. I’m curious as to what they are, if you don’t mind sharing. (I didn’t read the entire thread to see if you mentioned anything.)

I wasn't diagnosed with Asperger's until the age of sixteen despite having told my doctors that I believed I had the condition several times before.

On top of that, I've seen about four or five psychologists over the years and not one of them was able to help with my anxiety, which I consider my real problem.

I think a lot of medical professionals can't help Aspies because anxiety is actually caused by issues they can't really fix, like getting you a job that doesn't suck or improving your living conditions. It may also be that you have very legitimate issues for being anxious, like wanting to have kids but can't even get a date. Or worrying about how you will live after your parents pass, given that you can't live independently.