Topic on Talk:Psychiatry

> I agree in full with Wisconcom. While there are certainly criticisms to be made of DSM-V, the American Psychiatry Association and Psychiatry in general, this does not mean Psychiatry has some valuable scientifical contributions which can be arrested through practice...

well, what are the valuable scientific contributions?

> For instance, psychiatry has achieved outstanding advances in helping people who are facing anxiety issues, schizophrenia and psychotic crises. It helps people with depression stay on their ground.

(NOTE: Are you referring to the anxiety, schizophrenic, and depressive disorders or emotions? I will be referring to the disorders, to clarify.)

This doesn't seem to be the case in reality.

1. 1. 1. Oppressive tools.

First, most of the oppresive tools of Psychiatry are still alive today, and in fact more prominent than they have been in the past.

• Psychiatric drugs have been proven to be as effective as placebo; the studies on them only cover the drugs in a short duration (in months); have harmful side effects that deal tons of damage; and even cause the very same symptoms that they were supposed to cure.^[1]

 * Antidepressants have been known to cause people to become murderous (and thus increase mass shootings); increase suicide rates;[2] and often give sexual dysfunction (referred to as post-SSRI sexual dysfunction, abbreviated to PSSD).
 * Antipsychotics have a load of side effects.[3]

• Electroconvulsive therapy has been proven to be absolutely useless for Major Depression Disorder;^[4] yet it's abused by psychiatrists *today*. The FDA *tried* to ban ECT; but higher courts overruled the ban because "the FDA does not have jurisdiction over Psychiatry."
• Psychiatric wards are arguably just prisons for innocent persons under a different name; they are full of abuses and the managers running them are often unchecked.

These oppresive arms have killed a lot of innocent people;^{[5][6][7][8][9][10]} (References taken from this post.) while resolving none of the original problems.

Meanwhile, average health tips like changing your diet and giving people homes and security, have successfully improved the mentality of people, more than psychiatrists can ever do; so these oppressive tools are unneccessary and unreliable.

Lobotomies may be banned; but psychiatric drugs seem to serve the same functions.

1. 1. 2. What are mental disorders?

The second problem is that psychiatric disorders are defined through subjective analysis; they depend on the psychiatrist's interpretation of the disorders: For schizophrenia as an example, there are varying ideas as to what is considered "delusional".

Psychiatric disorders are based on the notion that there is an order to conciousness; the fully‐recursed definition of mental disorder is an opposition of intellectual order. The problem is, we do not know what, and if there, is an order to intellect. Humans do not understand the brain as a whole; which is neccessary to make conclusive judgements on it.

Quoting an r/antipsychiatry post:

The diagnostic process of psychiatry is highly subjective, frivolous, arbitrary, and contingent on interpretation, which makes it necessarily subjective, because it depends on the psychiatrist’s opinions. The psychiatric definitions of mental illness, as defined by the DSM, are vague and overbroad so much so as to cast the widest possible net to target people for psychiatric enslavement. Their hypotheses of mental illness are unsubstantiated: have consistently failed to be confirmed. The theoretic entities of psychiatry are bogus, their conceptualizations of mental illness and what makes people “mentally ill” are ill-formed, fallacious, cognitively biased, and are not supported by scientific evidence. Their research findings suffer from systematic error: ex., confirmation bias and refusing to publish studies with unfavourable outcomes: counting only the hits and disregarding the misses. Psychiatry is a fraudulent profession of conscious liars and charlatans, delusional pretend doctors that have the hubris to have identified the very molecule that causes mental illness (dopamine in the case of schizophrenia and serotonin in the case of depression): yet science does not support either case. Psychiatry is not something worth reforming, it is something rotten to its core that needs to be abolished, overcome, and surpassed by civilized societies.

> Unfortunately, like Wisconcom said, the problem is that our mode of production conditions the development of science and technology, and psychiatry is also developed following bourgeois interest. For instance, addiction is a very common side effect for several pharmaceuticals, and the industry producing it benefits much by addiction, so they very likely "ignore" these side effects. Allied with the Fordist production line of psychiatric clinical trials of 8 minutes per person exams, this usually means a very desirable margin of profits for the pharmaceutical industry. So their business model depends on the constant consumption of medication for it to continue existing.

Yep.

> This means that psychiatry tends to favor persistent medication use. I have a family member which is a psychiatrist and they have received numerous offers from pharmaceutical industries to produce receipts for certain medication. Brazil has a massive monopoly called Pague Menos, the company which has bought another giant, ExtraFarma.

It also favors psychiatric wards.

> Besides all of that, psychiatry unfortunately also has indeed fringe elements, such as the case for considering being gay a "disorder" until the 70's and some supposed mental disorders which relies on the subjective experiences of the doctor, often subjecting the patients to bias. Being trans was considered a disorder until the 2015, which begs the question, who and what decides that one behavior is a disorder and what is not? How come a disorder stops becoming a disorder? So Psychiatry needs to be seen in historical context.

> The struggle to abolish the oppressive structure of mental asylums should also be mentioned, as it's a struggle against oppresion and should be something that ProleWiki should definitely stand for.

Absolutely!

r/antipsychiatry posts have much better explanations for my points than I do. (It's a subreddit, so watch out for liberal B.S.)

(I might edit my comment to improve on it.)