by Kieron McFadden
Of what exactly are mental "disorders" a symptom?
Clearly people do have difficultly from time to time. They do become unhappy, get depressed, lose hope, suffer anguish. This is not in question.
What is in question is whether a psychiatric drug is a remedy for it. Can the person's difficulty be better and MORE SAFELY resolved than by giving the person a drug.
Modern advances in medicine and nutrition tell us very emphatically that yes, there is. We must first ask this question, a question incidentally that psychiatry does NOT ask when diagnosing a pateint as suffering from some mental disorder......
What Causes Mental Symptoms?
The psychiatric answer is that the person has a disorder or imbalance in the brain or nervous system. It does not really explain how this disorder came about and does not PROVE the existence of the alleged disorder; it merely asserts it. If a doctor tells you you have pancreatitis or a broken arm, he does so after taking tests, looking at X rays, analyzing blood and so forth. He arrives at his diagnosis on the basis of the body's tangible physical evidence. He can point to the X RAY for example and say "There, see? Hairline fracture of the Ulna. Caused when you fell off your bike most likely."
In the case of a psychiatric diagnosis of, say, "depression, caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain," the psychiatrist makes the diagnosis without tests or X rays. He cannot point to anything tangible that proves the existence of "Depression: there, see that?" In other words, the diagnosis is an assumption or opinion and similarly he cannot explain how the alleged disorder came about.
Of course, a person may be sad or depressed for very tangible reasons: his beloved grandmother just died for instance. However, his emotions are ENTIRELY NATURAL AND SANE. He has just had a loss, he feels sad. This is a sane reaction, it is NOT the symptom of a diseased brain or diseased anything.
If however, the person feels depressed for no apparent reason, then yes, something is wrong. The psychiatric reaction is "Ah! Diseased brain! Mentally ill! Here's a prescription...." And off the person goes on a life sentence of psychiatric drugs that usually cause complications and worsening mental difficulties and these things DO damage the brain and nervous system.
This is all very profitable for psychiatry and the pill manufacturers and it does save the psychiatrist from having to do any work: a proper examination and tests the way a real doctor would do or some real but time consuming counseling for instance. However, it does not cure anything.
By long experience psychiatry found that its pills did not actually make a person well and often made him WORSE, just as earlier barbarities such as ECT or lobotomy merely killed or maimed but did not cure. Of course psychiatry was trying to cure something that did not exist (a diseased brain) with a remedy that did not work except to embark the patient on a lifelong career of pill taking. This lack of ability to actually make anyone well became embarrassing. Therefore. it decided that a cure for "mental illness" was not possible and abandoned all pretense at trying. It progandized the incurability of mental disorders while at the same time expanding the definition of mental disorder to embrace almost every nuance of human behaviour. It touted the idea that mental illness was, alas, in the genes and embarked upon containment or management of the alleged "disease."
What psychotropic medications do at best and usually imperfectly, is mask or deaden the symptoms.
But symptoms of what?
Psychiatry has alleged the symptoms are of a diseased or deranged brain and sought to "re-arrange" it with chemicals (and without by the way ever establishing what an "arranged" brain is supposed to look like for each individual patient or how you would even detect an "arranged" condition).
It had gotten nowhere. Human unhappiness, crime, broken relationships and erraticness of behavior are on the rise. The complications (often manifest in suicide and homicidal rages) caused by psychiatric medication are notorious.
Put flatly, in terms of making the mentally or emotionally unwell, well again, we have been barking up the wrong tree and the whole approach had been a catastrophic failure.
So what is the right tree?
