BY SOFO ARCHON
What’s wrong with psychiatry?
Watch the video to find out (or scroll down to read the transcript).
Transcript
Psychiatry is deeply problematic, and that’s because of many reasons. In this video, I’m going to share with you the three most important ones.
The first one is that psychiatry tends to pathologize and medicalize normal human experiences.
One great example of that is grief. According to DSM-5, that is, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders that pretty much all psychiatrists in the United States consult, if an adult is grieving over the loss of a loved one for over a year, or if a child is grieving over the loss of a loved one for over just six months, then that person is suffering from prolonged grief disorder.
Anyone who has loved knows that grief is a necessary and, in fact, inevitable process of healing after the loss of a love d one. And that that grief knows no timetable, that that grief often lasts for a long time—sometimes for months, sometimes for years, sometimes for decades, even for one’s entire lifetime.
If you think about it, grief is love after loss, and if one keeps on loving the person that one has lost, then one is going to feel grief to one degree or another for his or her entire lifetime. Now, imagine a little child who has lost, let’s say, his or her mother. Are six months enough for that child to grieve over his mother? I don’t think so. But psychiatrists disagree. They say, “You have a disorder. You are grieving for over six months. Take this drug to become healthy.”
A person who is grieving is not suffering from a mental disorder, and telling that person that he or she is not helpful at all. Because what that person needs the most during that time is acceptance and compassion and care.
On top of that, giving that person drugs would most likely be counterproductive, because drugs would only make that person numb to his or her feelings of sadness, and thus they will not be able to process their sadness, and heal from their pain, and move on with their lives.
Another example, and in fact, my favorite one of how psychiatry tends to pathologize normal human experiences, is what psychiatrists call ODD, which stands for Oppositional Defiant Disorder. That disorder is often assigned to children who are angry and argumentative towards authority figures like their parents or school teachers, and who don’t obey the rules that authority has imposed upon them.
But children love freedom, and that kind of behavior is often the result of children living in very oppressive environments. If a parent or the educational system is trying to limit the child’s freedom, then naturally some children are going to rebel against that. But psychiatrists say, “No, the problem is not the relationship between parents and children. It is not the educational system. It is the individual child!”
I’m reminded of a physician who. I think in the mid-19th century, came up with a disease that he called drapetomania, which referred to African slaves who tried to flee from slavery, who tried to flee from their white masters. That physician, as well as a lot of other doctors during that time, thought that African slaves are better off being enslaved. So only a mad person would try to flee from captivity!
Another big problem with psychiatry is that it tends to reduce complex mental health issues to mere biological functions and chemical processes. More specifically, psychiatrists say that most of the mental illnesses that people have result from dysfunctional brains. They say, for example, that if you suffer from depression, that’s because there is a chemical imbalance in your brain. You’re lacking serotonin or some other neurotransmitter. And you can fix your condition by taking a chemical drug. This will tweak your chemistry, and it can restore balance and thus bring you health.
But that approach ignores the fact that human beings are multidimensional beings. Yes, they have a biological, genetic, biochemical dimension, but they also have a social dimension and a psychological dimension and an ecological dimension.
When it comes to depression, for example, research has shown again and again that people who suffer from depression are people who went through tremendous traumatic experiences, usually during their early childhood, that left lifelong wounds in their psyche from which they have not yet recovered.
Research has also shown that a great number of people who are suffering from depression come from low socioeconomic classes. They come from conditions of poverty and strife. Conditions that result in tremendous stress and trauma and suffering.
I’m not saying that the brain does not play any role, but to say that the brain is the only cause of depression is plain wrong. But this is how a lot of psychiatrists think. Not all of them, but many of them. They say, “This is where your problem lies, you need to take a drug to fix it.”
Of course, studies show that taking antidepressants is quite ineffective for most mild to moderate cases of depression. In fact, they’re usually as effective as taking a placebo, a fake drug. And it makes sense because those drugs address the symptoms of depression, but not its root causes. On top of that, those drugs have very severe side effects, and often they are causing way more harm than good.
Another example of the reductionistic mindset of psychiatry is ADHD, that is, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. And here I’m going to focus on ADHD as it relates to children, and more specifically to school children.
One of the primary reasons that ADHD is assigned to children is because many children have been found to be inattentive and hyperactive at school. Psychiatrists say, “Well, you cannot focus on what your teacher is teaching you. You’re constantly distracted. Take this stimulant, and you’re going to be a good student. Your attention deficit issues are going to be resolved.”
But they never question, “What if the school system is the problem?”
If you think about it, children are bursting with energy, and most of them don’t care about what they are being taught at school. Most of the things that they are being taught, they find uninteresting and boring. So is it any wonder that many children don’t pay attention to their school teacher? And is it any wonder that their attention is moving from here to there all the time, that they cannot sit still? You confine a child that is full of energy in a small classroom, and you force that child to stay seated for hours upon hours—sometimes six, seven, eight or more hours.—and you think that the child is the problem?
In most cases, those children who are suffering from ADHD can pay a lot of prolonged attention to things that they enjoy doing, to things that they care about, to people that they truly admire. But “No,” psychiatrists say. “The problem is not the school system. The problem is you, because you don’t fit into the system.”
I’m reminded of a quote that is often attributed to the great spiritual teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti. He said, “It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” I’m also reminded of something that the great psychologist Erich Fromm said. He said that in a healthy society, it is not the individual that needs to adapt to it, but that society itself adjusts to the needs of individuals, so that those individuals can healthily fit into it.
The third and the last major problem with psychiatry that I want to mention here is the tremendous power and control that pharmaceutical companies have over it.
Pharmaceutical companies fund psychiatric research. They influence the diagnostic manuals. They influence governmental policies that relate to medical care. They influence doctors by bribing them—by giving them gifts or by offering them free trips around the world where they can attend medical conferences—something that happens so often but not many people are aware of. It also misleads people through manipulative advertising that exaggerates the positive effects of their products—that is their drugs—and downplays or hides their side effects.
Pharmaceutical companies have been caught again and again to conduct fraudulent research, to engage in selective publishing—that is, to publish only research that shows their drugs under a positive light and not publish research that does the opposite. To pay tremendous amounts of money to psychiatrists who are popular and respected to sign scientific papers that were ghostwritten by somebody else, as well as to pay those who write the diagnostic manuals so that they can expand the diagnostic criteria so that they can create more markets to sell their drugs.
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