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Schizophrenia Psychiatry's for Profit 'disease'
Added: (Tue Aug 30 2005)
I am writing with reference to the article in a local paper about a family learning to come to terms with and coping with Schizophrenia. Life can sometimes be a real challenge; it can get very rough indeed. A family faced with a seriously disturbed and irrational member can become desperate in their attempts to resolve the crisis. To whom can they turn when this happens? According to psychiatrists, one should consult them as the mental health experts.
I wish to highlight however, that there are solutions to serious mental disturbances that avoid the serious risks and flaws inherent in psychiatry. Any psychiatrist or psychologist who claims that “serious mental illnesses” are no different than a heart condition, gangrene of the leg or the common cold, is dealing in deception.
As Dr Thomas Szasz, professor of psychiatry emeritus of the State University of New York, Syracuse, states, “If we are to consider mental disease to be like physical disease, we ought to have biochemical or pathological evidence.” And if an “illness” is to be “scientifically meaningful”, it must somehow be capable of being approached, measured or tested in a scientific fashion, as through a blood test or an electroencephalograph (recording of brain electrical activity). If it can not be so measured as is the case with…”mental illness” – then the phrase ‘illness’ is at best a metaphor and at worst a myth and that therefore ‘treating’ these ‘illnesses’ is an equally unscientific enterprise”
Psychiatrists not only admit that they have no idea of what causes these supposed “diseases” they have no scientifically validated proof whatsoever that they even exist as discrete physical illnesses. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-IV (DSM) a text that lists 374 supposed mental disorders contains in it diagnostic criteria so vague, subjective and expansive that there is possibly not one person alive today who, using this as the standard, would escape being labelled mentally ill. Of course that makes for a whole lot more mental ill-health business for psychiatrists.
Some important facts to consider are:
1. Schizophrenia has no physical abnormality and, therefore, is not a disease.
2. The first patients to be diagnosed with schizophrenia were later found to have been suffering from a virus that caused inflammation of the brain resulting in bizarre behaviour
3. Psychiatrists have been unable to establish agreement on what schizophrenia is, only on what to call it.
4. “Schizophrenia”, “bipolar” and all psychiatric labels have only one purpose, to make psychiatry millions on insurance reimbursements government funds and profits from drug sales
5. The cornerstone of psychiatry’s disease model today is the concept that a brain based chemical imbalance underlies mental disease. As with all psychiatry’s disease models this theory has been thoroughly discredited by researchers.
Psychiatrists literally vote on what constitutes a mental illness or disorder by raising their hands at a conference. This explains why they cannot scientifically define what they treat. Professor Thomas Szasz further states: “schizophrenia is defined so vaguely that, in actuality, it is a term often applied to almost any kind of behaviour of which the speaker disapproves”
Anyone who has been diagnosed or wants to get more information about psychiatry’s for profit disease should contact CCHR’s abuse line on 0121 523 8185, all confidence will be protected.
Chris Wrapson (Volunteer)
Media Relations Officer
Citizens Commission on Human Rights Birmingham
chris@cchr.org.uk or info@cchr.org.uk
07793 285 784 or 0121 523 8185