Despite a long debated idea about the abolishment of psychiatry and the futuristic dream for the once known mentally ill and ex mental health population of America and elsewhere, has left me dazed and confused about a lot of things. As Ex mental health patient culture to me wasn’t very helpful, I was expecting more of a professional environment, ready to help you start your career, open up flexible opportunities to make money by business networking, etc, and become a happy, successful individual and not a slave to the sadistic culture known as psychiatry. ...

I know from my own experience and from emails I receive from readers that a great many non-psychiatrists who work in the mental health system have seen through the psychiatric hoax. These individuals, who are growing in number, realize that the problems for which clients seek help are not illnesses in any meaningful sense of the term. They also realize that the psychiatrically-controlled mental health system, with its emphasis on drugs and electric shocks, is doing enormous harm to the people it purports to serve. ...

I’ve spent my adult life working in mental health services. I worked for 15 years in residential treatment with adolescents, and another 15 years in large outpatient programs with adults. I’ve been in clinical roles and leadership roles, primarily as a group therapist. I am a strident cognitive behaviorist. I’ve been a passionate and sincere student of human behavior for as long as I can remember. I respect the scientific method, and try to maintain critical thinking. ...

INTRODUCTION On May 23, the very eminent psychiatrist Allen Frances, MD, published on the HuffPost blog an article titled Conclusive Proof ADHD is Overdiagnosed. The general theme, that various “mental illnesses” are being “overdiagnosed” is gaining popularity in recent years among some psychiatrists, presumably in an effort to distance themselves from the trend of psychiatric-drugs-on-demand-for-every-conceivable-human-problem that has become an escalating and undeniable feature of American psychiatric practice. The assertion in Dr. Frances’s title – that the label “ADHD” is being applied to too many people – is obviously true. But the implicit assumptions – that there is a correct level of such labeling, and that the label has some valid ontological significance – are emphatically false. But Dr. Frances affords no recognition to this aspect of the matter. ...

On May 7, Allen Frances, MD, posted an article on the HuffPost site. The piece was titled Antidepressants Work, But Only For Really Depressed People. Superficially, the article presents itself as a call to limit the prescribing of the so-called antidepressant drugs to severe cases; but the piece can, I suggest, be more accurately characterized as Dr. Frances’s latest attempt to distance himself, and psychiatry in general, from the pill-peddling frenzy that has characterized the profession for the past thirty or forty years ...

At the risk of stating the obvious, ADHD is not an illness. Rather, it is an unreliable and disempowering label for a loose collection of arbitrarily chosen and vaguely defined behaviors. ADHD has been avidly promoted as an illness by pharma-psychiatry for the purpose of selling stimulant drugs. In which endeavor, they have been phenomenally successful, but, as in other areas of psychiatry, the hoax is unraveling. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ...

INTRODUCTION On March 27, 2014, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill published a press release titled Dr. Cynthia Bulik of UNC leads multinational anorexia genetics project. Cynthia Bulik, PhD, according to Wikipedia, is the “Distinguished Professor of Eating Disorders in the Department of Psychiatry in the School of Medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a Professor of Nutrition in the Gillings School of Global Public Health, and Founding Director of the UNC Center of Excellence for Eating Disorders. Dr. Bulik is also professor in the Department of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden and holds an adjunct appointment at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health. She is ranked #2 in the Expertscape list of world experts in eating disorders.” ...

It saddens me that there appears to be 6 distinct camps on mental illness's validity. I am convinced that Camp 1, the APA and their DSM, allow or add so many disorders, and constantly rewrite diagnosis criteria to pump up business. Camp 2: The "worried well" that feed this machine by seeking help for normal human behaviors that disturb them and they request or demand to be "cured." Camp 3: Big Pharma, encouraging the above 2. (Advertising symptoms to advertise "cures.") Camp 4: The dissenters , often those who have been misdiagnosed and fed the "cure" only to find out later (or hopefully sooner) that they never needed drugs to alleviate their "symptoms" of their "abnormality. This camp also includes those affected by a loved one's misdiagnosis and altogether unnecessary "treatment" with drugs. Sometimes these include those who have opinions, but no experience. Camp 5: Those who have experienced the horrors of living with EXTREME and valid symptoms of some abnormality that cannot be verified with any medical tests. Most of these do not seek help, usually because they don't believe they are abnormal or hope against hope that these "problems with living" will pass and their own form of normal will return and stay. (Normal can and does indeed fall on a spectrum, which often falls far to either pole.) Let’s not forget Camp 6. The dead due to suicide. They cannot defend or even explain their “stance” on it. The almost MISSING Camp is the balanced view. They (I) take ALL of the above into consideration. I know nothing of any of the many many disorders in the DSM. (DSM 5 is frighteningly LITTERED with old and new.) I do know quite a bit about Bipolar 1, Manic Depression, WHATEVER you wish to label it.. I have 30 years of experience in and out of each camp. Your take on the various symptoms as simply being a result of adults never outgrowing childish behaviors is probably 99% accurate. The other 1% are the only ones that are rarely mentioned, described, or outspoken about the growing controversy. ...

It’s been almost 3 months since I have ingested any antidepressants or benzos. Almost died after drinking a large amount of vodka with the daily does of pills. Went to a rehab for a month and have been clean since. This is after over 27 years of benzos and prozac. I am 60 years old and am finally coming a awake. The Withdrawals, notably the restless leg and horrible cramping have been horrid at night, but I am totally committed to staying off the evil pills! Thanks for listening! ...

Psychiatry is a hoax. Its fundamental concepts are spurious to the point of inanity. Much of its research is blatantly fraudulent. And its treatments are destructive, disempowering, and stigmatizing. Psychiatry has no coherent or logical response to the criticisms that it attracts, other than the repetition, mantra-style, of unsubstantiated assertions of safety and efficacy, coupled with unwarranted attacks on its critics. Psychiatry would long since have gone the way of phrenology and mesmerism but for the financial support it receives from the pharmaceutical industry. This support comes in two forms. Firstly, pharma provides generous largesse to psychiatric researchers and “key opinion leaders”, to provide a continuous stream of psychiatry-favorable copy. Secondly, and more importantly, pharma uses the clout of its enormous advertizing budget to effectively dissuade the mainstream media from exposing the truth about psychiatry. ...