Great Strides in Psychiatry: What Are They and Qui Bono?

Considering the 'great strides’ we have made? With the billions of dollars donated to the psychiatric industry; there are few, other than an astonishingly high rate of diagnoses of so-called mental disorders that are often created out of thin air and the prescription of often catastrophically dangerous medication for such disorders.

Psychiatrists no longer dip their patients in ice cold water, perform psychosurgery to destroy healthy brain tissue, give Metrozol, insulin and electric shock therapies to induce seizures to control behavior; hammer ice picks behind the eyes of patients to sever brain tissue; use Ovary Compressors to crush the ovaries of hysterical woman nor induce bleeding to relieve the "excessive action" in their brain. They've eliminated cauterizing the spine and genital of patients as first encouraged by the "father of American psychiatry,” Dr. Rush in 1812. Conditioning experiments employed by Pavlov, Watson and Skinner on people and animals to prove Wundt’s ‘man-is-an-animal’ theory have been debunked. Unfortunately, Galton’s invention of ‘eugenics’ was adopted even by Hitler and its idea carried on into 1999 with the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo.

Each day, a new disorder is invented, such as ‘shopaholicism’ or a disorder premised on the concept that road rage is a mental disorder and not just a manifestation of boorish behavior. We still have no blood test, x-ray, CT scan to prove any authenticity, yet billions of dollars in drugs are prescribed. When there are objective standards to which psychiatry is held, just as any other branch of medicine is, then ‘great strides’ will have been made---until then, it will remain a labeling and drug dispensing mechanism, with no more reliability than tarot cards, palm readings and ouija boards and just about as much connection to the practice of “medicine.”

Tell me, is the disorder ‘Drapetomania’ still found in the DSM?


By: Kathrine Nisley

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