An Unscientific Science?

Think again before you book your next visit with your local psychiatrist
An Article by James Walther

At first glance, psychiatry liberates. It was through

psychiatry that I had some semblance of control over my
life, says Richard, 17, an international high-schooler who
has taken medications for depression before. When asked
if he saw psychiatry as a science, Richard says I see
psychiatry, to be presently a field of science as there are
some physical effects one can monitor through
observation. This has become the adopted view of the
majority of educated people throughout the world, and
perhaps, not unjustly.

Yet every year, millions of people are involuntarily

hospitalized for mental illnesses. Schizophrenia,
chronic depression and other conditions have entered
our everyday jargon as scientific terms relating to a
illness. The medicalization of deviant or strange
behaviors is now considered scientific and even
patronizing at times. This has caused psychiatry to
become a dominant and an unquestioned field.
But what is psychiatry? The easiest and simplest
definition is the study and medicalization of abnormal
behaviour. It came about during the late 19th century,
but its real influence has increased during the last 100
years. Psychiatry has always been a controversial
field. This was the field that once deemed
homosexuality to be a mental disorder, and that
attempted to treat hysteria via electrocution. However,
over the last three decades, psychiatry has become
more subtle and in many ways, more patronising.
However, few remember that this has not always
been the case. During the 1950s, the Anti-Psychiatry
movement first made its appearance on the
intellectual
field,
throwing
the
psychiatric
establishment into disarray. Anti-Psychiatrys aims
were not to destroy the field of psychiatry per se, but
to destroy the myth of medicalization. And even
though the movements arguments are now largely
forgotten, it is perhaps time to revive this explosive
philosophy.

The Revolt
ANTI-PSYCHIATRY STARTED AS A REVOLT from
within. Most of the major names of the antipsychiatric movement are, or were, practicing
psychiatrists. Thomas Szasz, the author of the
influential book Myth of Mental Illness, was a
practicing therapist when it came out. Many
psychoanalysts, including the famous Jacques Lacan,
have voiced opposition to the mental illness myth,
perhaps ignoring that their movement actually came to
being via the diagnosis of these particular illnesses.
This is perhaps ironic, but it just goes to show how
influential the movement actually was.
So, what did these anti-psychiatric psychiatrists
argue?
Many psychiatrists started by attacking the Diagnostic
and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).
The DSM is a diagnosis bible used by psychiatrists all
over the world to diagnose mental disorders. The
DSM was initially released by the US Army in the
Second World War to measure the effects of the war
on the minds of the soldiers. The first edition, DSM-1,
was released in 1952. By 1994, four editions of DSM
had been released. There were many problems with
the DSM. The main one was the ignoring of human
factors in the process of diagnosis. As prominent

psychiatrist and professor Bob Johnson has argued,

who can seriously doubt that stress plays a central
role in mental breakdown? Well, the DSM-IV for
one. The DSM-IVs diagnosis standards for many
mental illnesses seem to be terribly detached from the
human experience. In the pages of the DSM, we see
statements that say Neither deviant behavior (e.g.,
political, religious, or sexual) nor conflicts are
mental disorders unless the deviance or conflict is a
symptom of a dysfunction in the individual.
However, the concept of dysfunction of the individual
assumes that there is some equilibrium, some normal
accepted human behavior. And to go beyond this
mean is to become deviant, but also at the same time
dysfunctional. Because of this, it is easy to see that
deviance behaviors are considered dysfunction of the
mind. Apart from this, mental illnesses in the DSM
are immaterial, with the boundaries of categories are
determined in APA committees, not by the phenomena
being described, as noted by psychiatrist Karl Tomm,
a professor of psychiatry.
However, the most problematic about psychiatry
was not the how behind psychiatry, but the practice
of psychiatry itself. The involuntary detention of
mentally ill patients and the psychiatric drug
prescriptions were the main targets. In the Mental
Health Act of 1983, the United Kingdom allowed for
the involuntary detention of those who were mentally
ill. Claiming a paternalistic moral high ground, those
with disorders in the UK were forced into
institutionalisation, violating their very right to
liberty. Other countries also have similar policies. The
story of Ignaz Semmelweis, a 19th century Hungarian
doctor whose cure for childbed fever was simply the
washing of hands, is probably well known. When
Semmelweis presented his evidence, he was seen as
mad and unjustly institutionalise. His breakdown in an
insane asylum and his premature death is often seen to
be a result of a ineffective treatment method. Modern
attempts at medicalising and treating a mentally ill
patient have been similarly inhumane and perhaps,
much more unsuccessful. Psychiatric drugs, for
example, have led to the quadrupling of mental illness
diagnosis rates in Japan. The science behind
psychiatric drugs is also pretty shallow. Harms
brought by psychiatric drugs, notes Phil Barker of
the University of Dundee, are commonly described
as side effects but many of these might, more
honestly, be described as intended effects. This was
due to the fact that the use of Chlorpromazine, a main
ingredient in many psychiatric drugs, was intended to
confuse and pacify the persons emotions. According
to a widely accepted theory in psychiatry, the reason
for mental illness is an imbalance of chemicals in the
brain. However, in a classic 1996 study by MIT
Professor Steven E. Hyman showed that the long term

usage of psychotic drugs do not actually restore

chemical balance within the brain, but create a general
confusion in the brain.
The revolt from within has largely subsided. Many
psychiatrists now has submitted to the diagnostic
powers of the DSM, and now largely overlook these
many arguments brought against their practice. But,
nevertheless, these anti-psychiatry concerns have not
been adequately addressed by the psychiatric
establishment, and still remain a unforgettable
challenge against the rising clinicization of the
mentally ill.

Harms brought by psychiatric

drugs are commonly described
as side effects but many of
these might, more honestly, be
described as intended effects.Phil Barker, University of
Dundee

The Disease
YOU MAY BE ASKING so what? So what if these
doctors attempt to drug up everyone? This seems like
the concerns of intellectuals, not ordinary people like
me.. What does this have to do with me?
Well, let me capture your attention first. Cure to
cancer! There, I have it. Now what does this have to
do with the cure to cancer? It might be that the person
who has the knowledge and the intelligence to create
it is a mentally ill person. For example, remember
Semmelweis, the inventor of the cure for childbed
fever? His deviance was what led him to share his
genius with the world. Intellectuals, such as Friedrich
Nietzsche and John Nash, were mad. Yet their
contributions to the understanding of the world are
unequal. If it werent for the schizophrenia of John
Nash and his famous Nash equilibrium, economics
and game theory would have been much different.
And if it werent for Nietzsches explosive
philosophising, then we would have been stuck with
the view that there is one objective, all-encompassing
truth. But in the current day and age, we would have
drugged these deviants up. Mainstream mental
healths leading authorities on ADHD says that those
afflicted with ADHD have deficits in what they calls
rule-governed behaviour, Bruce E. Levine, a noted
opponent of mainstream psychiatry notes. But Albert
Einstein didn't pay attention to his teachers, failed his
college entrance examinations twice, and had
difficulty holding jobs. He had textbook ADHD and
ODD. However, Einsteins problems did not stem

from attention deficits but rather from his hatred of

authoritarian, Prussian discipline in his school.
Modern psychiatry has not only destroyed deviance,
but it has shut it and repressed it so much as so that
the deviants do not feel different, but rather, ill.
With this comes the medicalization and the
elimination of all the potential that these mentally
ill geniuses may have.
Ultimately, psychiatry is a form of social control.
Social control basically means how much you follow
a set of societys norms. In previous generation, those
who were deviants were seen as a rebels. But they
were still seen as perfectly fine human beings. Under
modern psychiatry, everyone is told to subtly to
conform, and those who do not conform are
medicalized. As University College London professor
Jonna Moncrieff notes, psychiatric diagnosis appears
to act as a political device to enable the application of
various social arrangements. Using two teenagers as
an example, Moncrieff notes that both of these
teenagers symptoms appears to represent an
example of people who end up in the psychiatric
system because no other institution appears to be
capable of, or willing to deal with them. Quite
simply, these teenagers were in a psychiatric asylum
not because they had textbook mental illnesses, but
rather, they had certain types of behaviour that were
considered deviant and needed to be shunned from
society. There are many more cases like this from
history. One cannot forget that, ultimately,
the
famous historian Michel Foucault was once
institutionalised for chronic depression. Once he
became free from institutionalised suffering, he wrote
more than a dozen books that scathingly critique and
devastated the entire philosophical field. And this was
a man whom we considered dysfunctional.

The End?
GREEK PHILOSOPHER ARISTOTLE, in his great
works De Anima, writes if we were to compare, we
should naturally be led to place in the front rank the
study of the soul. Psychiatry is not dying. In fact,
this age rightfully belongs to psychiatry. Resistance to
psychiatry has never been lower, and in an age where
one out of four people can claim to have a disease of
the soul, psychiatry will thrive. Medications that are
harmful to your health may still produce large
revenues for the big pharmas, and the arguments of
nerdy sounding men in suits from famous universities
will still be triumphed by the satisfaction at knowing
that we finally have an actual science that studies the
universal experience of mankind.
Remember Richard? Amidst all this, he still sees
psychiatry as a helpful tool. I have had experience
with many psychiatric drugs, and I would say they

do their job, he says. Perhaps psychiatrists attempt,

to the best of their abilities, to do their job and to
service the world. This is reflected in Richards
declaration that according to my experience with
psychiatry and psychiatrists themselves, I would say
overall it has been effective.
Anti-psychiatry remains in a relatively dormant
stage today. Only a few specialised people know
about it (except for the Scientologists, but we dont
believe those freaks anyways). And those who do
either keep it quiet, or profess publicly to not believe
in it. But behind anti-psychiatry is a whole field of
people from diverse fields of study with diverse aims
who attempt to improve the conditions of deviants.
And perhaps their arguments should not be so
effortlessly ignored.
Ultimately, your life is a weighting game. You
make your own decisions accordingly to your
situation. You may have some ideals that you profess
to believe in which dictates your decision making, or
you may have what is real and pragmatic in your
mind. Just make sure that the next time you go to the
drugstore for some anti-depressants or anti-neurotics,
just ask yourself: do I really need this?

STILL
FIGURING
OUT WHAT TO
DO WITH THIS