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"Psychiatry now admits It's Been Wrong in Big Ways - But Can It Change?"

SilverbladeTE

Senior Member
Messages
3,043
Location
Somewhere near Glasgow, Scotland
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/...-its-been-wrong-in-big-ways-but-can-it-change

very good article

snippet form start

When I interviewed investigative reporter Robert Whitaker in 2010 after the publication of his book Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America, he was not exactly a beloved figure within the psychiatry establishment. Whitaker had documented evidence that standard drug treatments were making many patients worse over the long term, and he detailed the lack of science behind these treatments.
Whitaker's sincerity about seeking better treatment options, his command of the facts, and his lack of anti-drug dogma compelled all but the most dogmatic psychiatrists to take him seriously.
For Anatomy of an Epidemic, Whitaker won the 2010 Investigative Reporters and Editors Book Award for best investigative journalism. This and other acclaim made it difficult for establishment psychiatry to ignore him, so he was invited to speak at many of their bastions, including a Harvard Medical School Grand Rounds at Massachusetts General Hospital, where he faced hostile audiences. However, Whitaker's sincerity about seeking better treatment options, his command of the facts and his lack of anti-drug dogma compelled all but the most dogmatic psychiatrists to take him seriously.

In the past four years, the psychiatry establishment has pivoted from first ignoring Whitaker to then debating him and attempting to discredit him to currently agreeing with many of his conclusions. But will Whitaker's success in changing minds result in a change for the better in treatment practices?

I was curious about Whitaker's take on the recent U-turns by major figures in the psychiatry establishment with respect to antipsychotic drug treatment, the validity of the "chemical imbalance" theory of mental illness and the validity of the DSM, psychiatry's diagnostic bible. And I was curious about Whitaker's sense of psychiatry's future direction.


personally though I think it would take the Ten Plagues of Egypt to turn the minds/hearts of folk like Wessely, who're so deeply involved, caused so much harm etc
 

Martial

Senior Member
Messages
1,409
Location
Ventura, CA
I hope so that is one seriously fucked up system they have as of now... I was put on super high dose anti convulsants and anti depressents for panic attacks for over five years.. I cured myself using simple CBT and recovered from the anxiety issues in just a few short months..

The most frustrating drugs are the psychotropics that can completely disable people alongside dealing with their mental health challenges, at least with long term use...
 

WillowJ

คภภเє ɠรค๓թєl
Messages
4,940
Location
WA, USA
the problem with that is he is still criticizing the "disease model" of mental health which is only true to a partial extent (some normal things like grief are being classified as mental illnesses, and some secondary things are being classified as discrete mental illnesses when they are really the effects of other diseases which would normally be classified as organic... plus there is the whole problem of coopting actual medical diseases and pretending they are emotional or behavioural in origin when there is no evidence for that and may actually be evidence for medical involvement).

I think the problem with diagnostics, lack of effective drugs, etc., is that they have been looking primarily (or even almost exclusively) at the wrong things for so long.

If they're looking at stuff as emotional problems with the primary physical change being neurotransmittors (which are notoriously difficult to measure) so they end up categorizing based on symptoms but it turns out all of these assumptions are wrong and their symptom-based classificaiton systems have failed, it's hardly surprising that they didn't succeed in finding the right pathology or useful classification, because they were looking in all the wrong places.

When they've been looking at it all wrong, they nullified their working assumptions like emotional illness, neurotransmittor problems, and the disease labels. It's perhaps not possible to nullify the medical model because it's probably not possible to prove a behavioural or emotional model.
 
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akrasia

Senior Member
Messages
215
Last week, there was an obituary for Sherwin Nuland, author of How We Die. He was one of the pioneers in the U.S. who challenged both the practice of keeping patients in ignorance of their deaths, "fighting" to the last, even when the odds were all but hopeless, and the horribly oppressive idea of the "good death." The book was a graphic description of just what happens when you die.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/05/u...dignified-death-dies-at-83.html?emc=eta1&_r=0

Before he was an author, he was a professor of surgery at Yale. Following the death of his father, with whom he had a complicated and troubled relationship, he succumbed to depression.

By his early 40s, his depression had become so severe that he was institutionalized for more than a year. Senior psychiatrists recommended a lobotomy, but they were overruled by the young resident psychiatrist who had been assigned to his case, who insisted on electroshock therapy.


As a professor of surgery at Yale, his psychiatric care was overseen by the elite of the psychiatric establishment, who even in the early 70's, were prepared to do a lobotomy on him, basically signaling that they had given up on his care. And they were prepared to do it on one of their own.

Status, intelligence, accomplishment, even social class, wouldn't help you, not that it should of course.

This illustrates something important I think, that once you enter the realm of the psychiatric, you lose the right to claim rights, and your advocates are likely to be intimidated and easily manipulated by authority. It was another psychiatrist who saved him from the operation not his family.

One of several reasons why psychiatry is so weak is its inability to allow knowledge of its own history and its mistakes and cruelties to inform its current practices. In the ongoing CBT wars do you ever hear them admit that the discipline, in its various expressions has ever been horribly wrong? Often, if not joyfully effusive, it represents itself as being the best option in terms of efficacy. Of course, because it colludes with and champions the status quo its claim on critical thinking is very weak.

As a side note, one of the ways Wessley et al. have taken possession of the field is through a very selective, and often mistaken, view of the history of psychiatry. His rendition has been a self serving recitation, a creation of a lineage of mental suffering that leads inevitably, you guessed it, to him and his associates. A story for another day


Psychiatry is not alone here, of course, there are other disciplines which share the same problem. But it stops it from acknowledging its will to power and the frequent collapse of the ideas of cure, management, and control into each other.

This is from wikipedia's entry on lobotomy:

I fully realize that this operation will have little effect on her mental condition but am willing to have it done in the hope that she will be more comfortable and easier to care for.

Comments added to the consent form for a lobotomy operation on "Helaine Strauss",[n 19] "a patient at an elite private hospital".[126]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobotomy

The various models of the brain and its relation to emotional life adduced to justify lobotomy eventually were found to be false and ceased to be recommended practice anywhere.

Interestingly the Soviet Union were among the first to ban it, concluding that the procedure was "contrary to the principles of humanity" and "through lobotomy an insane person is changed into an idiot."

Sadly, we all know the uses the Soviets made of psychiatry just a few decades later.

Another interesting tidbit from the wikipedia article is that Scandinavian hospitals lobotomized 2.5 times as many people per capita as hospitals in the U.S.

The entire article is well worth a read.