Patients, psychologists, psychiatrists, other mental health professionals and the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) alike all independently of one another continue to express concerns that something is very, very wrong with modern psychiatry, including the lack of sound science to back it.
Many critics of psychiatry say the profession "creates unhappiness." The Royal College of Psychiatrists also admits that many doctors "don't think we're 'real doctors.'" And when a trainee psychiatrist was asked why psychiatry has become so unpopular, he responded that "one of the most common fears is of ceasing to be a 'real doctor.'"
In medical schools around the world, the psychiatry major is seeing increasingly less enrollment. An article in the journal European Psychiatry adds to the conversation that "[u]nlike other medical specialties, psychiatry has often been seen as unscientific, touchy-feely and without proper scientific basis."
Despite all this, governments continue investing billions in a "non-science" psychiatry, which they claim improves mental conditions but never actually cures them. Even though psychiatry was hatched as an authority on all things "mental health," rates of mental health disease continue to soar.
(Related: Be sure to check out our earlier report from 2013 discussing the problems with the then-new DSM-5 and how it unleashed a wave of over-medication.)
Psychiatry is pseudoscience
Most government funding for psychiatry goes towards the DSM, also known as the Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. It has had numerous editions over the years, the latest being DSM-5.
"Psychiatrists 'wonder' why the DSM gets so maligned and why psychiatry has such a poor reputation, for which they blame everyone but themselves," writes Jan Eastgate, president of CCHR International. "They lump all who are opposed to psychiatry's coercive and unscientific practices as 'anti-psychiatry,' as though this were pernicious instead of necessary."
According to retired psychologist Philip Hickey PhD, psychiatrists generally never acknowledge their errors, nor do they back down from spreading erroneous information stemming from the profession's screwed-up doctrines.
"They will not even seriously debate the issues," Hickey is further quoted as saying.
"Instead, they've gone on the offensive. This offensive is two-pronged. Firstly, they attack those of us who speak out against them, and secondly, they are actively developing links to the media in the hopes that this will encourage reporters to portray them in a more favorable light."
Psychiatrists generally try to deflect their criticism by accusing their critics of not believing in "mental illness," which is both wrong and right at the same time. While it is true that people do, indeed, suffer from mental and behavioral issues, i.e., depression and anxiety, such problems are not biological problems.
"There are no tests to confirm mental illness is an 'illness,'" Eastgate says. "But there are those psychiatrists that are egregiously dishonest and negligent when they tell patients their problems are the same as a medical disease, or the result of an uncontrollable chemical imbalance in the brain, when there are no physical or scientific tests to confirm that behaviors and emotions are physical illnesses or are caused by imbalanced chemicals."
"This is not a unique view. Even psychiatry has its 'heretics.'"
The DSM, which is soon to morph into its sixth edition, is "not scientific but a product of unscrupulous politics and bureaucracy," another expert added.
"In place of scientific findings, the DSM uses expert consensus to determine what mental disorders exist and how you can recognize them. Disorders come into the book the same way a law becomes part of the book of statutes. People suggest it, discuss it and vote on it."
More related news coverage can be found at BadMedicine.news.
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