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No emotions or name calling here, I'd like to hear honest answers. I just notice how so many people are quick to blindly defend the so-called "mental health" system, yet they almost always seem to want "treatment" for others rather than themselves. Then when skeptics like me decry the system for its abuses and excesses, advocates resort to throwing around hollow pejoratives like 'crazy' (which reinforces stigma & belies their whole support of people getting diagnosed/treated) and 'scientologist'.
Scientology has nothing to do with it though, and all the petty bickering that goes on around this topic across internet forums fails to address the underlying fraud inherent in psychiatry:
-Diagnoses are subjective/arbitrary (no objective clinical tests for any of the 300+ labels psychiatrists call 'mental disorders'. Why?)
-Diagnoses are unfalsifiable (impossible to disprove, i.e. the doctor simply makes up an unscientific decree by fiat...no way to argue against it)
-Diagnoses are circular/self-referencing, i.e. psychiatrists say people hear voices because they have schizophrenia, but the only way they know anyone has schizophrenia is because they hear voices. Perceived symptoms alone validate illnesses, and illnesses are solely validated by symptoms.
-Diagnostic criteria is written in sand; the DSM field guide has been revised seven times with multiple contradictory changes in order to fit the cultural zeitgeist of the moment, i.e. homosexuality and women disobeying their husbands ("hysteria") were disorders just decades ago.
-Diagnostic categories are catch-alls in that they lack discrete boundaries and have unexplained heterogeneous symptomatology, i.e. DSM criteria for bipolar, major depression, schiz etc. is so broad that two different people can share the same "diagnosis" with no shared symptoms.
-Descriptive clinical features ('manic', 'psychotic' etc.) are reified as disease manifestations but more aptly amount to social value judgements, because they're purely behavioral and have no verifiable physiological cause. This explains where the (inherent) social stigma comes from.
-Medication efficacy is completely testimonial and akin to religious conviction, as subjects in hundreds of double-blind trials across drug classes consistently respond to both medications and placebos alike, i.e. psych drugs are clinically indistinguishable from innocuous dummy pills, and can't be proven to do anything medically beneficial.
-Psychotropic drugs have been proven to *cause* and *enhance* psychiatric symptoms and regulators know about it, i.e. FDA blackbox warnings about "antidepressant" SSRIs causing suicidal ideation, whilst suicidal ideation is simultaneously considered an organic symptom.
-The psychiatric profession has yet to elucidate what a normal baseline 'chemical balance' looks like, nor has it supplied a compelling definition of what 'the mind' is and how it can be medically quantified (hint: it can't) or what the difference between 'mental disorders' and brain diseases are. The whole field is logically groundless without such explanations.
-Global epidemiologic studies have consistently proven that longterm exposure to psychotropic drugs and the "mental health" system leads to permanent disability and premature mortality, whereas poor developing world patients tend to fully recover from even the most debilitating "mental disorders" due to strong family support systems in traditional societies, and limited access to psychiatric drugs/bureaucracy.
So is bigotry against the "mentally ill" so entrenched that people are willing to ignore and even support this destructive pseudoscience no matter what? Or is this just a secularized generation that seeks convenient materialist explanations for all human phenomona, even when such explanations don't make sense or hold up to logical scrunity? Either way, as a "diagnosed" so-called schizophrenic, I'll say it loud no matter what doctors, the government or "society" thinks, from the kids doped up on Ritalin to the eldery having their brains zapped with electroshock to the homeless coerced into outpatient offices - psychiatry is a straight up scam.
Mental illness is all in someone's head but it's really hard to train your brain back to reality. I have such a desire to die but my friends make distractions for me and plus I attend programs and therapy to realize it's all in my head. It's a constant struggle. I stress over the dumbest stuff.
Here we describe it as meeting the criteria in the DSM -5 or DSM - IV.
MANY people have mental illnesses. It is probably close to the number who have physical illness (but my stats aren't readily available.)
The problem is that mental illnesses ARE actually physical illness as well but the ignorant do not see it that way.
If 'mental illnesses' are physical illnesses, then why aren't there any objective diagnostic exams to prove it?
And why is a fiat decree from a psychiatrist the only way to "diagnose" them?
And what then, is the difference between such 'mental illnesses' and physical illnesses?
And why do 'mental illnesses' have such broad definitions? i.e. schizophrenia has 5 separate subtypes that consist of disparate behaviors that have nothing to do with each other. Why?
Why have you been diagnosed? Can you live your life without help? Support yourself etc?
I got in a fight and the quack doctors assumed I was delusional when the cops brought me to the hospital. Yes I'm living without help and self-supportive.
I got in a fight and the quack doctors assumed I was delusional when the cops brought me to the hospital. Yes I'm living without help and self-supportive.
I think mental illnesses are real but quack doctors are real too. Thing is as long as you're not hurting anyone and you can provide for yourself and you are happy with yourself, who cares if it's defined as an illness or not?
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