antipsychiatry

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I've not visited that site, but I run an anti-psychiatry discussion group on another site. My problem, and I know I'd wind up sounding ableist, is that I wish I could have a forum for people with no perception disorders who are labelled Schizophrenic. In reality, the group I run is full with delusional people.

Here is another very interesting and, imho, objective article: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archive ... tion=false

The author, an American MD and editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, describes how the DSM came about. The diagnostic criteria were more or less pulled out of thin air in an attempt to give psychiatry the semblance of a real medical profession. While it has been improved, there is still more guesswork than actual medical research involved, and the main incentive nowadays seems to be the marketing of psychoactive pharmaceuticals (even to young children).

Now, I'm not saying that mental diseases and disorders don't exist. They undoubtedly do, and some psychoactive drugs really do improve the life quality of many people with very real problems. But that doesn't change that modern psychiatry is mainly an effort to match overpriced medication to a list of more or less arbitrarily grouped symptoms, often after a mere ten-minute talk with the patient, and wait to see what happens. If the patient is no longer bothered and agitated (about the very real problems in his life that are the true cause of his symptoms, or about being unjustly imprisoned in a mental institution), the drugs appear to "work".

The pharmaceutical era of psychiatry is another sad, shameful chapter in the long history of a profession that was riddled with fraud and patient abuse from its early beginnings. Think of the hysteria diagnosis of abused women, the attempts to "cure" homosexuality and transgenderism, the classification of masturbation as both a symptom and cause of mental disease, institutionalized genital mutilation, mass lobotomies, electroshock "therapy", or the widespread eugenics efforts in form of forced castration and sterilization of mental patients. Some of these abominations are still practiced in various countries, sometimes (in case of electroshock torture) even in the developed world.

Another great article on the disturbing history of psychotherapy: http://www.richardwebster.net/freudandcharcot.html

Btw, I wonder how many people with autism spectrum disorders have been misdiagnosed as schizophrenic, schizoaffective, bipolar, or obsessive-compulsive, simply because psychiatrists rely on questionable diagnostic manuals and their own subjective impressions rather than actual medically relevant data gathered from objective medical analyses such as brain CTs.

That is my main problem with psychiatry. You can't base a reliable diagnosis on a chat with the patient. Other fields of medical science, such as neurology and neuroendocrinology, would probably be much better suited to diagnose and treat so-called mental disorders, which are ultimately physiological (i.e., neurological and/or neurochemical) conditions.

More interesting reading material: http://www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/atypic ... ptics.html

This article deals with the messed-up financial incentives for the pharmaceutic industry, particularly in regard to neuroleptics (antipsychotics). The author -- an MD and Professor of Theoretical Medicine at the University of Buckingham, not a conspiracy theorist -- argues that the main reasons for the development of modern atypical neuroleptics, as well as typical neuroleptics back in the day, were new patents and increased profits. He points out that oldfashioned sedative antihistamines have the exact same effect as neuroleptics, but far fewer side effects. According to the author, the only reason that neuroleptics are prescribed rather than antihistamines is that pharmaceutic corporations control and finance medical research, and are therefore in a position to dictate psychiatric practice.