Can psychiatry make medicine better? Michael Sharpe, 29 Nov 2022

[rvallee]

In order to make psychiatry better, the discipline has to acknowledge, recognize and address the fact that they have caused massive catastrophic harm to millions. Despite medicine's motto of "do no harm", it's basically the only profession that has ever directly harmed people as intended, officially, rather than through individual failure. It's just not going to happen until then.

I'm not entirely sure if we mean the same things, though. Considering the medication-oriented quip, which isn't the problem so much as using medications without understanding a damn thing about them and ignoring almost all issues they cause. But especially the behavior woo. Third-party perception of behavior simply doesn't work, it's superficial and almost completely arbitrary.

I've been practicing psychiatry for 38 years. I love my job, my peers, and my patients. But I've come to the conclusion that I'm participating in the biggest intellectual scam of this era. We claim to be a science, but have no understanding how thought or behavior is generated.

Many billions of dollars are spent each year in an industry built on a corrupt body of pseudoscience, cultivated and exploited by monied interests for decades. This scientific fraud has been more successful than any other of our day. Our diagnoses are contrived by our guild, the APA, with the collaboration of monied interests--and are so unrelated to actual science that they are copyrighted and published to profit that organization.

In the process of selling a corporatist, medication-oriented model of treatment, psychiatry has been stunningly successful in redefining what it means to be a human being. Meanwhile, 20 years of peak psychiatry has resulted in a 30% increase of suicide in the United States--and American psychiatry has absolutely nothing constructive to say about it. Please tell me what I've missed.

 

[Sean]

Psychiatry remains primarily a means for social control, not healing the sick.