Psychiatry: An Agency of Torture and Death

A recent study takes on the psychiatric profession. It has become little more than an agency of death and torture, its victims people who have been trapped by arbitrary diagnoses into lives shortened by the torture of their drugs.

The harm induced by psychiatric drugs is … well, mind boggling. As the marvelous painting by Amy Smith shows, they can put you into a state of limbo while inducing harm that can only be called torture—as evidenced by their use for precisely that purpose in communistic Russia.

Phil Barker and Poppy Buchanan-Barker have taken a hard look at the application of psychiatric drugs in First, do no harm: Confronting the myths of psychiatric drugs, published in the medical journal, Nursing Ethics. They focus on those who are in the front lines of forced drugging, the nurses. Few punches are pulled in this well documented take-down of modern psychiatry.

The paper makes four primary points, as summarized in the abstract. To clarify, the abstract is included, word for word, but itemized in a numerical list:

1. The enduring psychiatric myth is that particular personal, interpersonal and social problems in living are manifestations of ‘mental illness’ or ‘mental disease’, which can only be addressed by ‘treatment’ with psychiatric drugs.
2. Psychiatric drugs are used only to control ‘patient’ behaviour and do not ‘treat’ any specific pathology in the sense understood by physical medicine.
3. Evidence that people, diagnosed with ‘serious’ forms of ‘mental illness’ can ‘recover’, without psychiatric drugs, has been marginalized by drug-focused research, much of this funded by the pharmaceutical industry.
4. The pervasive myth of psychiatric drugs dominates much of contemporary ‘mental health’ policy and practice and raises discrete ethical issues for nurses who claim to be focused on promoting or enabling the ‘mental health’ of the people in their care.

We’ll examine these issues one by one.

1. The enduring psychiatric myth is that particular personal, interpersonal and social problems in living are manifestations of ‘mental illness’ or ‘mental disease’, which can only be addressed by ‘treatment’ with psychiatric drugs.

Notice that the authors do not pull back from the fact that the entire concept upon which modern psychiatry is based is nothing more than a myth. In support of this claim, they state:

The critique of psychiatric power and authority is well-established and awareness continues to grow, even among psychiatrists, that the phenomena commonly diagnosed as psychiatric ‘disorders’ are personal, social or moral problems in living, rather than ‘illnesses’ or indeed any kind of “health” problem. … despite more than a century of searching, the biological or biochemical basis of ‘mental illness’ remains elusive.

In other words, none of the so-called diseases that psychiatry claims to treat even exists!

Psychiatric diagnoses are little more than constructs that create the reason for psychiatry’s existence.

The authors then point out that many so-called psychiatric disorders are no longer considered such. Homosexuality and “sexual deviations” are no longer in the bible of psychiatric diagnosis, the Diagnosis and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Though not discussed by the authors, the DSM is itself a fraudulent document, starting with the title’s use of the term statistical. There are no statistics in the manual and little, if any, reference to them. It was simply stuck into the title to give the impression of being scientific and legitimate. It is, of course, neither—but it’s used to justify both psychiatrists’ payment and the forcible drugging, not to mention incarceration, of people labeled with DSM diagnoses.

The DSM is even set up so that refusing to accept the treatment a psychiatrist wishes to impose results in yet another diagnosis: treatment resistance. So, if a psychiatrist has diagnosed you as abnormal in some way and you refuse to be treated, you are slapped with yet another diagnosis, which allows them to subject you to further treatment, often against your will.

Let’s just take the first DSM diagnosis by alphabet. That’s Academic Problem. Yes, that really is a psychiatric diagnosis! So, the psychiatrist decides that you have an Academic Problem and need to take a certain drug for it. You go ahead and try it, but find that it causes a host of terrible effects, so you decide to stop taking it and stop seeing the psychiatrist. You could then be labeled as treatment resistant, which is used to further condemn you to more drugs. If you continue to refuse treatment, you might find yourself arrested and tossed into a psychiatric hospital, stripped of all rights and forcibly medicated. You could also be forcibly medicated without even being placed in such an institution.

This example may sound extreme, but the reality is that the drugs can literally push people into psychotic states all by themselves. So, bad drug reactions are often used by psychiatrists to rediagnose people with more extreme conditions and force them into treatment. The person labeled as a psychiatric patient loses all rights to self-determination.

2. Psychiatric drugs are used only to control ‘patient’ behaviour and do not ‘treat’ any specific pathology in the sense understood by physical medicine.

An open secret among people pathologized as psychiatric patients is that the drugs serve no purpose beyond controlling them. They treat nothing. In fact, as the authors point out, the purpose of the drugs seems not so much to cure or even quell symptoms deemed psychotic, but instead to produce the adverse effects!

Adverse effects of psychiatric drugs are devastating and often permanent, even destroying a person’s ability to function in society by causing deforming physical tics. Effects cited by the authors include, “pseudo-Parkinsonism (involuntary movements of the tongue, mouth or limbs, shuffling or drooling); seizures, sexual dysfuntions; obesity; diabetes; cardiac arrhythmia (potentially fatal); and cognitive decline associated with measureable shrinkage of the brain mass”.

Who would choose to take such drugs knowing that these risks are not only possible, but that they are likely?

The first drug intentionally given for its psychoactive effects was chlorpromazine. It was found to place experimental patients into a twilight state. Early on, it was noted to cause a “veritable medicine lobotomy”. One volunteer psychiatrist took it and described a feeling of “detachment” with perceptions muted, experienced as if through a filter. Chlorpormazine was labeled a neuroleptic, which literally refers to substances that seize the nerves, for these effects.

Chlorpromazine’s pacifying effects were used on people defined as having schizophrenia. As the authors point out, it “was a means of subduing the person, not a method for treating a discrete pathological process. They further state:

The primary effects of the neuroleptics developed over the past 60 years, including so-called ‘new generation’ drugs, is to disable, aggressively, particular brain functions. The suggestion that such disabling effects are ‘secondary’—or ‘side effects’—involves a highly cosmetic manipulation of the facts.

The authors further document how the drugs trap people into a lifetime of psychiatric drugging:

If people stop taking psychotropic drugs suddenly they risk developing a ‘psychotic rebound effect’ by exaggerating the ongoing ‘chemical chaos’, and appear to become even more ‘disturbed’.

When it comes to so-called psychiatric drugs, the truth is that they are not given for the stated reasons. They do not treat any mental problems—unless having the ability to feel is a mental illness. They act only to subdue people who have the misfortune to fall into the trap of a psychiatric diagnosis.

Read Part 2 here.

Sources:

• First, do no harm: Confronting the myths of psychiatric drugs. Nursing Ethics, Phil Barker and Poppy Buchanan-Barker, July 2012 vol. 19 no. 4451-463, doi:10.1177/0969733011429017

Tagged big pharma, conventional medicine, pharmaceutical drugs, pharmaceuticals, politics, pseudo-science, pseudoscience, psychiatric drugs, psychiatric drugs used for torture, psychiatric torture, psychiatry, psychotic break, schizophrenia, torture