Say not the struggle nought availeth, The labour and the wounds are vain, The enemy faints not, nor faileth, And as things have been, they remain. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . [But] not by eastern windows only, When daylight comes, comes in the light, In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly, But westward, look, the land is bright. ...
"For e'en tho' vanquished, he could argue still;" From The Deserted Village (1770) by Oliver Goldsmith . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . On June 23, 2020, Awais Aftab, MD, psychiatrist, published an interview with Ronald Pies, MD, also a psychiatrist, in Psychiatric Times. The interview was titled The Battle for the Soul of Psychiatry: Ronald W. Pies, MD. I critiqued Dr. Pies' responses here. In the light of a more recent publication by Dr. Pies, I would like to recall some comments concerning the notorious chemical imbalance deception that the learned doctor made in the earlier interview. ...
Overland describes itself as Australia’s only radical literary magazine. It was founded in 1954, and publishes a quarterly print journal (essays, stories, and poetry) and an online magazine (cultural commentary). In the current issue, Winter 2020, there is an excellent article by Samuel Lieblich, a consultant psychiatrist working in the Greater Melbourne Area. The essay is titled Ignorance is Bliss. Here are the first two paragraphs: "By now there is enough criticism of the mental health business out there that it seems to me most engaged readers have been informed about the problems: psychiatry makes a false equivalence of the brain and the person, psychiatry pathologises some of the normal problems of human life, psychiatrists enforce highly constrained norms of thought and behaviour, and psychiatrists don’t value patients’ autonomy. There is still however a lot of confusion about the status of the things that psychiatrists treat. These are by no means illnesses, and the medications doctors use to treat them are by no reasonable measure effective. I am going to have to risk setting up a straw man here, but the majority of people don’t believe the claims I’ve just made, even though they have been exposed to the same claims many times. Marcia Angell when she retired as head of the New England Journal of Medicine wrote a pair of scathing reports in the New York Review of Books to the effect that psychiatry is a pseudoscience; and these same claims are repeated in bestselling books like The Emperor’s New Drugs, and magazine articles too numerous to mention. If one moves carefully through the scientific evidence one finds too that a ‘chemical imbalance’ has never been substantiated for any of the things that have been called a ‘mental illness’, and that the prescription of medications for psychiatric problems is always tendentious. The abundance of scientific support for these claims is only equalled by the total absence of their accommodation in the practice of psychiatry and the lay discourse about mental health. Although science does not really support the use of many psychopharmaceuticals in the ways they are represented to be supported, and although there is no acceptable measure by which most of the things treated by psychiatrists qualify as illnesses, the cultural position of the medical profession and their medicines is such that even a scientific refutation of a medical claim appears unscientific. This position of the doctor as super-scientific is perpetuated and co-opted by pharma for profit, and by the state for the purposes of social control. Capital aggrandises the psychiatrist, whose job is to condition the citizens to their labour, or to excise a tax in the form of pharmaceuticals payments. Either way capital wins and we all play along because we have been so immiserated by budget austerity, social precarity and casualised over-employment that the only comfort we can afford is to indulge in a fantasy. ...
On June 30, 2020, Awais Aftab, MD, psychiatrist, published an interview with Ronald W. Pies, MD, also a psychiatrist, in Psychiatric Times. As an interview, the piece is somewhat unusual in that Dr. Aftab, as interviewer, does not confine his role to asking questions, but actually contributes substantially to the dialogue. So the piece is more like a conversation than an interview, and both parties express their positions fairly freely on the topics discussed. ...
On August 26, Shayla Love, senior staff writer, published a piece on VICE, an online magazine. The article is titled The Movement Against Psychiatry: The contentious debate of whether to fix—or completely overthrow—the way we treat mental illness. In her article, Ms. Love provides abundant quotes from people on both sides of the issue, including Awais Aftab, MD, an American psychiatrist, currently Clinical Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and Attending Psychiatrist at Northcoast Behavioral Healthcare. This agency is operated by the Ohio Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services (Ohio MHAS). ...
Here’s an interesting story from Australia, recently back in the spotlight. From 1962 to 1979, psychiatrist Harry Bailey, MD, serving as chief psychiatrist at Chelmsford Private Hospital in New South Wales, practiced “deep sleep therapy”, which involved keeping people in barbiturate-induced comas for days or even weeks. Twenty-four of the individuals who received this “treatment” died while still in the hospital. Many more died or showed permanent brain damage after discharge. ...
Ronald Pies, MD, and Mark Ruffalo, D Psa, were busy in June. They published two papers in defense of psychiatry: What Is Meant by a Psychiatric Diagnosis? (“Psychiatric diagnoses are not merely descriptive; they reflect genuine illness”); and Psychiatric Diagnosis 2.0: The Myth of the Symptom Checklist (“More on the meaning of psychiatric diagnosis”). Both were published by Psychology Today. Here’s their opening to the first paper: "It has become fashionable for some in the social sciences to assert that psychiatric diagnoses represent 'constructs' and not genuine disorders or diseases. During a recent Twitter exchange, one of us (Mark Ruffalo) was pointed to an article published here on Psychology Today in 2019 by the psychoanalytic psychologist Jonathan Shedler, Ph.D., titled, 'A Psychiatric Diagnosis Is Not a Disease.'" ...
On March 4, 2020, the very eminent Allen Frances, MD, published an article in Aeon, which according to its About page is “a digital magazine, publishing some of the most profound and provocative thinking on the web. We ask the big questions and find the freshest, most original answers, provided by leading thinkers on science, philosophy, society and the arts.” The article is called The lure of ‘cool’ brain research is stifling psychotherapy. The central theme is that prior to 1990, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) “appreciated the need for a well-rounded approach [to mental health] and maintained a balanced research budget that covered an extraordinarily wide range of topics and techniques.” However, since 1990, the opening year of the Decade of the Brain, the NIMH has “increasingly narrowed its focus almost exclusively to brain biology – leaving out everything else that makes us human, both in sickness and in health.” ...
The spurious chemical imbalance theory of depression is arguably the most destructive thing that psychiatry has ever done. Worldwide, millions of individuals are taking antidepressants, often with a cocktail of other drugs, because they have been told the blatant falsehood that they need the pills to combat a brain illness – a “real illness just like diabetes.” Many of these individuals were told the additional lie that they needed to take the pills for life and are now addicted to the products. ...
Samei Huda, MD, is a consultant psychiatrist with the British National Health Service. He has written a book called The Medical Model in Mental Health, An Explanation and Evaluation. It was published by Oxford University Press earlier this year. BASIC THEME In his preface, Dr. Huda tells us that he wrote the book to “explain the medical model and to evaluate its usefulness in mental health.” He also tells us that his inspiration was twofold: ...