The Psychiatric Point of View

Do they really know what they're talking about?

"What's happening in the training of psychiatrists and in the quality of a psychiatrist is that they have become drug pushers. They have ... forgotten how to sit down and talk to patients as to what their problems are."

"... in 40 years, 'biological psychiatry' has yet to validate a single psychiatric condition/diagnosis as an abnormality/disease, or as anything 'neurological', 'biological', 'chemically imbalanced', or 'genetic'."

"Everyone is neurotic. I have no trouble giving out diagnoses. In my office I only see abnormal people. Out of my office, I see only normal people. It's up to me. It's just a joke. This is what I mean by this fraud, this arrogant fraud ... To make some kind of pretension that this is a scientific statement is ... damaging to the culture."

"... modern psychiatry has yet to convincingly prove the genetic/biological cause of any single mental illness ... Patients [have] been diagnosed with 'chemical imbalances' despite the fact that no test exists to support such a claim, and ... there is no real conception of what a correct chemical balance would look like."

"We do not have proof either of the cause of the physiology for any psychiatric diagnosis ... In the absence of any verifiable diseases, in recent decades, psychopharmacology has not hesitated to construct 'disease models' for psychiatric diagnoses."

"Hyperactivity is not a disease. It's a hoax perpetrated by doctors who have no idea what's really wrong with these children."

"Freud was wrong in almost every important respect."

"What do you do when you don't know what to do? No wonder there are more suicides among psychiatrists than in any other profession."

"Over the years it [the National Committee for Mental Hygiene] has championed for the promotion of 'mental health' despite the fact that nobody knows what it is or how to do it."

"The basic question with which psychiatrists and particularly those interested in mental hygiene start is -- What are the causes of mental and nervous disease? This question has been repeatedly raised during the twenty-two years of organized mental hygiene until it has almost become a ritual and like a ritual has led to nothing except repetition -- not even a start."

"Many psychiatrists have had, at least to some degree, the unsettling and bewildering feeling that what they have been doing has been largely worthless and that the premises on which they have based their professional lives were partly fraudulent"

How do they plan to get where they want to go?

"Through strong, painful impressions we capture the patient's attention, accustom him to unconditional obedience, and indelibly imprint in his heart the feeling of necessity. The will of his superior must be such a firm, immutable law for him that he will no more resist it than he would rebel against the elements."

"The reduction of intelligence is an important factor in the curative process ... The fact is that some of the very best cures that one gets are in those individuals whom one reduces almost to amentia [feeblemindedness]."

"If we are to infiltrate the professional and social activities of other people I think we must imitate the Totalitarians and organize some kind of fifth column activity. If better ideas on mental health are to progress and spread we, as the salesmen, must lose our identity ... Let us all, therefore, very secretly be 'fifth columnists'."

"Our Committee on Preventive Psychiatry is recommending that we assume citizenship responsibilities for policy forming at whatever level we can -- in the Board of Education, City Council, civic clubs, welfare groups, legislative committees, Congressional hearings ... We can exert an effective influence on the betterment of mental health ..."

"[it is] a high class kind of subversion, very high class. We're not second story burglars. We go right in the front door."

How do they do what they do?

"I produced painful, though otherwise fortunately harmless, spinal fractures (2 of them multiple) in 3 patients in fairly rapid succession."

"an area essential to the human being - his personality - is forever destroyed."

"Today in Russia, children who have difficulties with studying are not placed into parents' or teachers' hands, but into psychologists' ones. From there they go to psychiatrists who cannot offer anything better than psychotropic drugs. I have ever seen a teenager helped by them, but I know of a great number of incidents where such drugs have led to dependence and depression ..."

"...years of medication ... have done nothing except reify in them an identity as a chronic patient with a bad brain. This identification as a biologically-impaired patient is one of the most destructive effects of biologic psychiatry. At the level of the individual patients this means a growing number of over-diagnosed, overmedicated and disarticulated people less able to define and control their own identities and lives."

"In emergencies we offer [a major tranquilizer]; if refused, we stand several staff around and re-offer. If again refused, it is 'grab and jab'."

"..[E]ven one or two ECT treatments risk limbic damage in the brain leading to retarded speed, coordination, handwriting, concentration, attention span, memory, response flexibility, and re-education. On the psychological side, fear of ECT has produced stress ulcers, renal disease, confusion, amnesiac withdrawal, and resistance to re-educative or psychological therapy. The research thus indicated that ECT was a slower-acting lobotomy with the added complications of shock-induced terror."

"The brain for a while, is so injured that the patient is too confused to know or remember what was troubling him ... when the brain begins to recover ... the problems usually return since electricity has done nothing to resolve them."

"The fact remains that electric shock to the brain is a haphazardly applied, brain-damaging procedure."

"The changes one sees when electroshock is administered are completely consistent with any acute brain injury, such as a blow to the head from a hammer. In essence, what happens is that the individual is dazed, confused, and disoriented, and therefore cannot remember or appreciate current problems."

"[the ideal psychiatrist] must be a kind of superman, one with higher ideals, more potent inhibitions, and wiser in life and wider in outlook than those whom he is trying to guide."

"...every person who comes into this office who has had an experience with another therapist has some kind of horror story to tell, about some major failing on the therapist's part, including, quite often, sexual abuse, verbal abuse, things that cross the boundary of mere bad technique and come pretty damn close to the criminal."

"We have given a great deal of cocaine to many individuals..."

"I made the preparations for this war ... If I hadn't created this emotional strain in the Serbian people, nothing would have happened."

If it were true, then they'd know it, right? RIGHT??

"The facts of the matter are that we have known for a long time that diagnoses are often not useful or reliable, but we have nevertheless continued to use them. We now know that we cannot distinguish insanity from sanity."

"We are going in there [the brain] with the equivalent of a bulldozer to knock down roads and tear up rail lines and pull down telegraph exchanges. You have to ask, do we know enough to play these kinds of games with other people's brains?"

"We don't have an independent, valid test for ADHD; there are no data to indicate that ADHD is due to a brain malfunction ... and finally, after years of clinical research and experience with ADHD, our knowledge about the cause or causes of ADHD remains speculative."

"Psychiatric diagnosis in many quarters today has deteriorated from being a fine and useful craft into an ill-regulated, superficial, unconvincing, and therefore often useless procedure."

"There is not one iota of evidence that addiction is a brain disease."

"Finally, why must the APA pretend to know more than it does? DSM IV [the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, Edition 4] is the fabrication upon which psychiatry seeks acceptance by medicine in general. Insiders know it is more a political than scientific document. ... It is the way to get paid."

"The field of mental health is highly subjective, capricious, and dominated by whims, mythologies, and public relations. In many ways it is a pop culture with endless fads but with no real substance."

"...the best [psychiatric] diagnoses are provisional and somewhat fictional."

"Despite the proliferation of child guidance clinics and their popularity, no evidence was brought forth to suggest that the clinics prevented mental illness."

The fundamental agreements on behavior that form the basis of society.

"If the race is to be freed from its crippling burden of good and evil, it must be psychiatrists who take the original responsibility."

"ECT on minors is never appropriate ... [it] is a corruption of fundamental human rights."

"... psychiatry promotes a certain form of morality that is a deviant morality in regard to many areas including sexual behavior ..."

A social flashpoint where psychiatry shows its true colors

"It's simply too expensive, too slow and too risky. Africans appear to be more susceptible to the effects of anaesthetics and because we treat more Africans than Whites, we would have to double our staff if we used anaesthetics."

"However well they [black people] appear to be satisfied with their color, there are many proofs of their preferring that of the white people."

"The Jews are specialized for a parasitical existence upon other nations. ... The average intellectual standard of the negro [sic] is some two grades below our own."

"Even for their own good the blacks must be treated as what they are, an absolutely subordinate, inferior, lower type of men, incapable themselves of culture. That must once and for all be clearly stated."

"I'm certain that racism is embedded in the roots of medicine and psychiatry."

"The Jew is such an alien and, therefore, when he wants to insinuate himself, he must be warded off. This is self-defense. In saying this, I do not characterize every Jew as inferior, as Negroes are, and I do not underestimate the greatest enemy with whom we have to fight ..."

"[it was] cheaper to use Niggers than cats because they were everywhere and cheap experimental animals."

"Serbs by nature possess the qualities of authority with certain aggressive and open elements... Muslims are fixated on the anal phase ... Their character tends to appropriate things, dominate like a boss, value people by their possessions, their money, their social position, etc....[Croats] are fixated on the castration complex ... under perpetual fear of castration, losing something that belongs only to himself."

What is this brave new world they have in store for us?

"To achieve world government, it is necessary to remove from the minds of men their individualism, loyalty to family traditions, national patriotism, and religious dogmas."

"That a radical cure of the evils incident to the dependent mentally defective classes would be effected if every feeble-minded person, every imbecile, every habitual criminal, every manifestly weak-minded person, and every confirmed inebriate were sterilized, is a self-evident proposition. By this means we could practically, if not absolutely, arrest, in a decade or two, the reproduction of mentally defective persons, as surely as we could stamp out smallpox absolutely if every person in the world could be vaccinated."

"Those who are physically and mentally unhealthy and unworthy must not perpetuate their suffering in the body of their children."

"Authorizing the sales of [methylphenidate] for children is like physically torturing them ... it is like ECT ... even if it were true that three percent of children need it, I would rather see them treated with alternative methods."

"[psychiatrists had been] active in and primarily responsible for the different euthanasia organizations [in Nazi Germany]."

"The young and the old are defenseless against relatives who want to get rid of them by casting them into the role of mental patient, and against psychiatrists whose livelihood depends on defining them as mentally ill."

"Meaning is but little with these men [artists], all they care about is line, shape, agreement of contours."

"Actors are almost impossible to treat successfully."

"The child psychiatrist's authority is altogether beyond the reach of his denominated patients. This elementary fact makes the child psychiatrist one of the most dangerous enemies not only of children, but also of adults who care for the two precious and most vulnerable things in life - children and liberty. Child psychology and child psychiatry cannot be reformed. They must be abolished."

"Today, hundreds of thousands of children are imprisoned in psychiatric hospitals, most of them, even according to psychiatric authorities, unnecessarily."