Expanding Shrinks

While doing online research this last week I ran across a series of websites that are dedicated to ridding the world of psychiatry. This is apparently a quite old effort, dating back at least fifty years. Their claims are that psychiatry causes more harm than it does help, that it creates the problems that it purports to treat, and that it medicalizes or pathologizes what is normal human behavior.

The harm that is caused is side effects of medications, all the way from daily negative effects like dry mouth and dizziness to long-term effects like tardive dyskenisia, an involuntary motor movement condition that is permanent; labeling of people that sticks to them and makes it hard to find decent jobs, housing, education, and is the cause for legal wariness; and ultimately gives control over people's lives to that well-educated band, psychiatrists.

As far as creating problems, it is often cited that in earlier editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, or DSM, that homosexuality was earlier classified as a mental disorder, and then when times and public perception changed the diagnosis was reduced to sexual identity disorder or sexual disorder not otherwise specified (NOS). This is evidence, they say, that mental illness isn't so much a biological disorder as it is a matter of public acceptance, which medications really can't be designed to treat. There are disorders which hadn't been identified earlier and are now called diseases, like restless leg syndrome or ADHD. Depression is a normal occurance in life, and before psychiatry we dealt with it without medications.

Along this line, pharmaceutical companies are implicated in the 'badness' of psychiatry. It's no secret that they are among the most profitable and powerful industries in the U.S. They continually lobby psychiatrists to use their medications, and in effect write legislation that regulates themselves.

Having been in the field of psychology for a couple of decades I see the things that are being criticized on these websites. I have grave misgivings about the prevalence of ADHD and oppose the medication of such a large percentage of children in what appears to be behavior control. I oppose the rise of overdiagnosing autism as the next poster affliction to follow ADHD. I believe that situational depression is, indeed, a normal occurance in life and think that we would be better served to work through it (which cultivates strength of character) rather than medicating it. I dislike the amount of power that the medical and pharmaceutical industries have garnered over us, and even believe that the unnecessary altering of human pereption and development with medications is a criminal act.

But I disagree with these websites on a fundamental point: their presentation is black and white, that all psychiatry is bad and wrong, maybe even evil. Several sites are unmistakably motivated by a good deal of barely-concealed anger. There are personal axes being ground. But not all psychiatry is bad and wrong. The sites mention schizophrenia but don't say outright that this disorder is, like the others, a myth. I would challenge anybody who believes all mental illness to be a myth to spend a day with somebody who really is schizophrenic. It's not BS, a manipulation, or anything with a conscious motivation and payoff for these people to have fixed delusions. It's not imagination that these people hear voices (that comment on them negatively, tell them bad things about themselves, tell them that their medications are poison, tell them to kill themselves, and so forth) that results in loss of sleep, withdrawal from family and society, misery, and suicide. On the bell curve of how people are put together physically, chemically, and psychologically, there is bound to be a percentage whose minds don't work just right (just as there are those on the other end of the curve who have superabilities). There are also those who , due to parenting or experiences, don't develop healthy methods of coping. Clinical depression differs from situational depression, and it's not a matter of will, morals. or thinking yourself out of it. These are the truly mentally ill, and they should receive treatment.