Is the entire science of Psychiatry a fraud?

originally posted by: Xcal2k3
All mental disorders are just the relevance of thoughts to man made ideals. Every mental disorder can be traced to an event in life where it involves the idea or existence of a man made concept or idea. Without rules, regulations, concepts and/or theories of life, there would be nothing to relate your thoughts to, in turn would neutralize any reaction weather it be negative or positive to said relationship, aspect or idea. All in all, many who develop mental disorders live there life striving and/or trying to achieve and please the status quo of the societies of which they were born.

So you are saying mental disorders are the result of not being able to cope with this life, or they were unprepared for this incarnation (this cannot be true because you script your life path before entering a body). Perhaps these folks chose to experience mental illness in this go around; including the most detrimental, schizophrenia which is genetic (that takes guts).

a reply to: pl3bscheese
Just wanted to reply to you and say, yes, you are right, and thank you for teaching me something and making me consider and think about it.
tetra

originally posted by: the2ofusr1
I would think that Psychiatry is more of a Pseudoscience en.wikipedia.org... created by big Pharma .When I was growing up dad would say "whats wrong with that kid " to my mom . Today they call it ADHD and probably have a pill to deal with it . Heck I think I read somewhere that teacher can actually compel parents to put the kids on medication .The teachers retirement portfolio just happens to have investments into Pharma so it becomes a win win for them come retirement . a reply to: UnderGetty

I tend to think "big pharma" is certainly involved but they're basically useful idiots. In the big picture, the motive is more than just profit and the people who really control everything are interested in much more than just selling things and making money.

I think it all comes down to control. Every time. Money is a big motivating factor in many things but money is more of a means to an end. In the end, what everyone really wants is power and control. If you control everything, you can have all the money you want. Assuming it's money you want.

Too often, people make the mistake that there couldn't possibly be any other motive other than money. I disagree. I think some people value their ideology and their ideological goals more than money. They just know they need money in order to get there.

"Mental health" is the perfect mechanism for authoritarianism. They can go almost anywhere they want with it. They can neutralize their critics by calling them crazy. They can render their political opponents illegitimate by calling them nuts. They can make people fear their critics by making them out to be dangerous. And finally, they will eventually be able to put people in asylums for political unorthodoxy. They won't call it that (of course).

In therapists and associated mental health workers, they will have the perfect thought police. If you believe there's something wrong in your mind, you go and talk to these folks and spill your guts. At what point have you been told that you need therapy? Well, I'll tell you one thing that'll cause people to tell you that you need a shrink absolutely every time. "Paranoia" (that would be a condition in which you believe there's anything shady going on. Ever. Unless it is an officially acknowledged conspiracy).

Anyway, quite conveniently, I think these people will eventually probably be required to report anything unusual. Not just dangerous people. Because they'll make some kind of excuse where they can't always spot the dangerous people and they need to be on the lookout for signs of complete insanity that should not be signs of complete insanity. So they need to take every little thing as a warning sign. Incrementally, I believe they'll get there eventually. The dangerous people are probably going to get more and more normal until there were absolutely no warning signs whatsoever. They'll literally have us all watching each other and reporting absolutely anything out of the ordinary.

The EU intelligence is capable of provoking calluses to people's feet, to cause walking difficulties and other issues related to a correct walking pattern.

Regarding Psychiatry, it is not a science, it's a fraud invented by European intelligence. That's because the illnesses are fake and were also caused/invented by EU intelligence.

originally posted by: Hecate666
Eh? There is plenty of evidence for chemical imbalances and resulting mental illnesses. This is absolutely 100% proven and can be measured. Serotonin is just one of them. Too little and you get depressed, too much and you'll suffer from anxiety. Lets not even start on the others. This article is the biggest lot of crock I've ever seen. Ref: I have a BSc [Hons] in Neuroscience.

The problem with the chemical theory of psychiatric illness is that it is overgeneralised.
We have only a limited number of neurotransmitters and they do not all do one thing.
What is worse is that the theories put forwards by the psych/pharma industry actually neglect or cannot acount for many of the neurotransmitters that are around.

The more nuanced understanding of brain function is that it involves loops betweenparticular functional areas of the brain and habitual and preferred patterns of firing.

Certainly there are some psychiatric illnesses which can involve chemical imbalances-- but they are a minority.

For instance ADHD - (which I have and am treated for) is not so much a "Dopamine deficiency syndrome" as a defect in the brainstem/cerebellum that floods the basal ganglia (dopamine dependent) with too many stimuli and too many decisions to make about which is the relevant one. The end result-- a relative dopamine deficiency that is partially relieved by stimulants- which improve dopaminergic transmission.

Now in my experience (and I work in this area) the whole idea of psychiatric illness as chemical deficiencies is a classic example of trying to retrofit an explanation to the observed phenomenon that these psych meds sometimes work well.

Now to the broader question of whether psychiatry is a science-- it is more an art than a science, but it has some scientific elements.
The real trouble is that the behavioral syndromes we see described in DSM (whatever version) do not describe entities that are distinct either clinically, biochemically or on neuroimaging ( I will make the one exception of PTSD- which is a very discrete entity caused when natural threat response mechanisms are overwhelmed). So we struggle with inadequate models of what is going on and, what is worse, end up trying to jam people in to these syndromes- and then misapplying medications and other therapies.

However for many people, mainstream psychiatry is the best we have to offer.

originally posted by: GetHyped
a reply to: WhatWeNeedToday

No, a paper in a peer-reviewed journal would be a scientific source. Not a biased blog.

The ugly truth is that less than 25% of published scientific papers can be replicated, and that percentage is worst in the biomedical sciences. There has been massive fraud in the area of drug studies.
I would not get too precious about science.
Now this paper is only the one that started the controversy:
journals.plos.org.../journal.pmed.0020124

originally posted by: pl3bscheese
a reply to: GetHyped

Try reading the actual blog. You're reading it out of context. His assertion is absolutely correct. There is no established baseline for various neurotransmitters within the brain. It's an incredibly complex organ, and tinkering around with a whole neurotransmitters values by way of ingesting exogenous pharmaceuticals is highly unethical, considering there is no actual neurobiological testing given in nearly all cases before hand. There is no one way a human being is designed. We are all different, due to different genes interacting with different environmental stressors over time. To think that a baseline could actually be established, is ludicrous. Talk about the death of individuality. Not on my watch.

Rappaport repeats the theory that because no lab tests can be found that identify these illnesses that they are not real.
Lab tests and radiology are really useful for physical conditions, but we are talking about mental illness here, not physical illness.
While the mind can be conditioned by the body ( including a huge range of traumatic, toxic and infectious causes), the mind is not just the body. The mind operates sometimes as a software program sitting on top of a functional physical platform, sometimes as a software program sitting on top of a dysfunctional physical platform.

Near death experience studies are now very clear: indicating that the mind can operate independent of a functioning brain ( an insight utterly consistent with basic Buddhist theory).

So the Mind does not necessarily equate with the body, though our mental perceptions and our actions are surely conditioned by the body (have half a bottle of scotch and tell me I am wrong ).

So- given that, why on earth would any sane person think that any MENTAL (of the mind) illness should be detectable by a lab test, and that if it cant be detected by a test then psychiatry is not scientific. There is no logic to it- and there is a huge gaping fallacy right in the middle of it.

DSM is far from perfect. It gives some guidance as to what we are dealing with, and some guidance as to treatment options, but it is the best we have so far.

Psychiatrists are not saints and they care about money just as you and I and the next guy. It's not just the psychiatric system, it's also the parents who somehow get their children in there. Sometimes intentionally because the parents are just abusers with little good in them, sometimes because the parents are just too dumb, incapable of raising their children or capable as long as no problems emerge. Which is somewhat understandable because society is about specialists, a parent can't have 2 jobs like a normal one and psychiatry.

What is wrong about psychiatry I think is the lack of control institutions, who would objectively verify stories about a patient. Did a patient really say suicidal things or is a relative using psychiatry to abuse that person. Are the chances of that patient in getting and holding a job really as low as the psychiatrist says, or should we have professionals like recruiters who can provide a realistic outlook for that persons career? Heck, even the current president got a slew of mental illnesses according to some. So even if you are capable of providing for your own and hold the most powerful position on the planet you might still have some mental illness which needs treatment. Obviously this has little to do with healthcare but more with power and politics, the psychiatrist as the pinnacle of mental health and sanity, the one who never have mental illnesses themselves AND can see them in other people, nobody thinks there is anything wrong with this?

Also there are parents who abuse their own children. Some are just really clever and use psychiatry for this. Very few children are able to see their parents don't love them and fall into the role of the victim hoping they would still get love from their parents. Afterall they are doing it for their childs best interest, they are not psychiatrists and just can't cope with their childs difficult behaviour. Almost nobody who would suspect child abuse. And I have to say I don't know what could be worse; living with unloving parents or mentally ill patients.

Psychiatrists need patients for their income, farmaceutical industry the same. It would be more fair if the psychiatrist would get a job for life and get paid regardless of the number of patients. Also patients should get money if a psychiatrist used them in a research which was funded, like a cut in fundings. Lastly psychiatry needs more objective methods, like having tests where 10 people are in a warden and a psychiatrist has to pick out the mentally ill one. I know this is all unrealistic because of the money it would cost, but it might be there would be less patients in a decade which would cut down on costs.

Also they should do more about their PR so less people will believe in stigma's like all psychiatric patients are ticking timebombs which need to be treated or else. We already have enough fear in the world because of terrorists like ISIS, climate change, unemployment, resource shortages etc.
And just my personal unscientific unexperienced opinion but if a person is suffering from depression, locking them up in a depressing place like a warden on mind numbing drugs, well I can imagine such a person would take their own life the first chance they get. Which is more gruesome if the person wasn't suicidal before admission, then psychiatry creates it's self fulfilling prophecies. Although I understand it would sound ridiculous to send people with mental illnesses to tropical resorts to recover where they are pampered and everybody would treat them really nice.

In the long run, we shouldn't do drugs to solve our problems. We need talk, education and understanding, dialogue and working together to get our long term goals of getting into space. On the current path, we'll be a spiritually dumbed down race of people who can only communicate about physical things, because the nonphysical (emotional) was suppressed for centuries and thus unused, undeveloped and even forgotten perhaps because psychiatry deems them to be potentially dangerous, except to perhaps a chosen few. Basically the majority will become fleshrobots without critical thinking, with little emotions and feelings, imagination, all the things make up humanity.