Psychiatry: An Agency of Torture and Death (part 2)

This is Part 2. Part 1 can be seen here.

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.

As the authors point out, the fact that people fare far better if they’ve never taken psychiatric drugs or stop taking them is the elephant in the room.  They state that it’s “more of an open secret than a radical view”, though few acknowledge it. They wrote:

Ironically, if there is a single psychiatric ‘truth’ it is that people had a better chance of recovery from a psychiatric ‘breakdown’ before the advent of psychiatric drugs 60 years ago, than they do today.

As they point out, the professionals of the psychiatric field are entirely willing to collude with the view that drugs are necessary to treat “mental illness”. They referred to a recent Irish study that showed nurses, who often prescribe these drugs themselves and who routinely administer them, avoid “telling people of the likely effects of certain psychiatric drugs for fear that they would stop taking them”. They call it “caring concern”, though as the authors point out, it is nothing less than “paternalism writ large”.

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.

The article was written for Nursing Ethics, so is therefore focused on nursing. However, the fact is that the entire psychiatric system is condemned by the forcible treatment of people with drugs—not to mention electroshock therapy and updated forms of lobotomy, such as cingulotomy. In spite of nightmarish effects of those drugs and the lack of legitimate research to demonstrate that the conditions they claim to treat exist, the psychiatric profession continues to make the bogus claim that they treat brain diseases.

The authors refer to the “inconvenient truth” that mental outcomes have become far worse since the advent of psychiatric treatment. Their focus is on drugs, but the same has also been true of other so-called therapies. They point out that initiation of the first psychiatric drug, chlorpromazine, resulted in quadrupling the population of psychiatric hospitals!

The World Health Organization (WHO) has reported that  people with schizophrenia diagnoses in developing nations will usually have a single episode and recover. However, in western nations—especially the US, which does the most psychiatric drugging—most given such diagnoses become chronic.

Treatment programs—such as those documented by Loren Mosher’s Soteria House, Open Dialogue by Yrjö O. Alanen and Jaakko Seikkula, or Diabasis, a San Francisco-based Jungian non-drug treatment program—have proven successful over and over. When people who’ve been labeled with psychiatric diagnoses take matters into their own hands, such as the Hearing Voices Network, the results are also far superior to those administered by psychiatrists and their lackeys.

The Colluders

In spite of this evidence, psychiatrists—and more and more frequently their cohorts in crime, social service workers—are forcing more and more people to take drugs. As Barker and Buchanan-Barker state, these drugs “… may cause permanent and disabling physical damage”. Nonetheless, the fact is that the law now often requires people to submit to this forcible downing of disabling drugs. Clearly, the network of psychiatry with Big Pharma is willing to destroy people’s lives for the benefit of their own power and wealth. As the authors state:

Despite its claim to offer healing, the traditional role of psychiatry is to control its troubled or troublesome ‘patients’, providing some benefits to families and/or society.

Society’s and families’ collusion has been necessary to facilitate this destruction of people’s lives. Certainly, the troubled person is often a nuisance to his or her family—or may be selected as the fall guy for the family’s or society’s problems. That person is the glaring evidence of failure. Failure to nurture. Failure to support. Failure to provide space for differences. Failure to be supportive.

What better way to deal with such uncomfortable people than to marginalize and medicalize them? There is now even an industry in pseudo charity. The National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) in the US, which draws the bulk of its funding from Big Pharma and acts primarily to press for the use of their drugs and the labeling of people with diagnoses from the DSM. They actively provide the ammunition that families can, and do, use to press relatives into a lifetime of psychiatric drugs and sideline them to stunted lives.

Psychiatry: An Agency of Torture and Death

The psychiatric profession, which could have opted to be one of comfort and support, has chosen instead to be the arbiter of what constitutes normal in society. Woe be to those who step outside that narrow definition—and woe be to those who can’t figure out just what’s expected.

Supported by family, community, police, courts, and laws, this utterly destructive profession has been allowed to take control of the lives of countless people—now even children!—both pressing and forcing their toxic treatments onto them. These treatments are often described by their victims as torture. Their uses in repressive regimes for just that purpose belies any suggestion that they serve any purpose beyond that of control.

The ultimate result of these treatments is death an average of 25 years earlier than who those who avoid taking psychiatry’s poisons. There can be little question about this fact, as people who had psychotic breaks before the advent of these drugs lived as long as anyone else.

But even worse is the fact that people whose only problems have been to work too hard or just not fit in or, as has been true throughout psychiatric history, were simply inconvenient to their families, are often grabbed by the psychiatric system and forcibly drugged, their health destroyed, and they’re even pushed into psychosis as a direct result, resulting in yet more drugging.

Psychiatry, which could have been an agent looked to for help when facing trauma, has become, instead, little more than an agency of torture and death.

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