Is Psychiatry Based On Valid Science?

[Satchmo Distel]

Throw drugs at people and hope they work?

Make up illnesses based on symptoms rather than any real investigation of mental processes?

Provide places where victims of capitalism can be hidden from view?

Define acts as pathological - when carried out by stigmatized groups - which get a free pass when carried out by people with power?

Suppress dissent by drugging the dissenters until they are semi-comatose?

[Stumpy Pepys]

You are L Ron Hubbard and I claim my £5

[Satchmo Distel]

I am channeling Thomas Szasz

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qj7GmeSAxXo

[Satchmo Distel]

Not being ironic at all. I pose these questions to my students and ask them to keep an open mind.

[Toby Gymshorts]

Tangential, but I react badly to Codeine and even in my most space cadet moments I've never had to resort to racist bullshit.

Not to say that she wasn't affected, but the truth will out.

[Lang Spoon]

Yep, but the same time, the (some) drugs and other therapies do work, at least on some people, some of the time. Professional liar Johann Hari(sp probs) and his sweeping bullshit fact light book is dangerous.

[Toby Gymshorts]

I don't want to hijack the thread with how much of a hateful shit Roseanne Barr is, BTW. Just to clear that up.

[ursus arctos]

I thought this was about this article from the NYT

Many famous studies of human behavior cannot be reproduced. Even so, they revealed aspenner lives that feel true.

[adams house cat]

A great many psychiatric disorders have no cure and the SOP is to prescribe drugs as a controlling mechanism. That these often lead to other problems is recognized but the psychiatric community is at a loss as to what to do.

In the US there is an anti smoking drug called Chantix. Heavily advertised as a way to reduce the urge to smoke. It can cause a whole raft of terrible side effects; aggression, violence, depression, suicide. Still aggressively marketed. I knew someone who took it and had to stop after 3 weeks after he tried to strangle his wife and hang himself.

[ursus arctos]

NYC is almost certainly ahead of the national curve, but the distinction has actually become sharper here, as psychiatrists increasingly rely almost exclusively on pharmacology.

[adams house cat]

I think that that is nationwide if not world wide ursus. I also think that it has been true for a long time apart from horrifying digressions into shock therapy, lobotomies and similar tortures.

[ursus arctos]

It certainly has been a feature of mental health care in this country for decades, but it seems.to have become even more pronounced in the last 20 years or so (essentially comparing the situation before we left for Europe in 2001 to that today).

[Stumpy Pepys]

… apart from horrifying digressions into shock therapy, lobotomies and similar tortures.

A friend of my mother's swears by electroconvulsive therapy.

[adams house cat]

None of my business but how would she know?