What’s wrong with psychiatry?

1. When you are rich, you get time (and possibly pills), when you’re poor, you get pills only. Either the poor are undertreated by not being listened to, or the rich are fooled with make-believe therapy. No, it’s both. But don’t for a second assume that these psychiatrists are evil. They’re like drug dealers. First, they were made addicted, and then they were put on the street to sell themselves. Many psychiatrists were deeply fooled and trapped by this system long before they were let loose on a patient. They too are victims of this mistreatment.

2. Even if the psychiatrists work with some humanized form of Freudian therapy, it’s still based on Freud and he was a fraud. Granted, he made improvements to the psychological therapy available in his time. Instead of locking people up (and parading them for fun and entertainment), he listened to people. But when the effects and fact of the incest pandemic became clear to him (including from years of dissecting baby corpses with venereal diseases in the time no healing antibiotics were known), he made a system to reason it away and cover it over. Even such an elegant therapy as letting someone tell her dreams, he ruined by ‘interpreting’ dreams, which holds the middle between manipulation and hypnosis. A person who twice burned his personal archives is not suspected of hidden honesty.

3. The DSM, a whole system of ‘psychiatric diagnosis’ does not help to heal. Rather than pinning down the problem, it pins down the client. Their ‘diagnoses’ are so ‘good’ because they are self-fulfilling. They immobilize the patient. It’s like diagnosing that someone has a stiff knee, putting a cast on the knee and checking from time to time if the knee is still stiff. Their system is so good because it makes sure that no healing will take place. It is paraded as a big success. Rather, it’s the best proof of their incompetence.

4. Their silver bullet: the pills. They claim that there now are mild medications to treat ‘psychological disorders.’ Well, either they are so ‘mild’ that they are harmless but then they don’t work and undermine any sense of the patient being OK, or they work and then they harm. All of them, the mild, the middle, and the strong medication, all prevent any psychological improvement. They keep you in a sort of half-drunken state. And as we all know, no use talking to a drunk person–nothing will remain from whatever is said. The whole system of ‘medication’ became big business, a very profitable hoax with a whole pseudo-science underpinning it. From chemical imbalance to declaring something uncaused by trauma.

5. Specialists. They know better. They hold the ultimate knowledge over what goes on in your brain. They learned for it. Your ‘mental sickness’ makes that you can’t see it but no worry, they know. And they will invalidate anything the client says about their own condition and if they feel helped. It is true that an outsider often can help us with problems we are blind to, but they claim client’s blindness whenever s/he objects. Even after years of ‘therapy.’ If you return the toaster to the store where you bought it and say, It doesn’t work, it’s inconceivable if they’d say: In our opinion, it works fine, so you have no valid complaint. But that’s what psychiatry does. Two psychiatrists meet each other in the street. Says one to the other: “You are doing fine! How am I doing?”

6. They have no respect for the person or their brain. Something ‘is off’ and they’re gonna fix it. In truth, every human being often subconsciously, but deliberately, produces ‘symptoms’ to cry out for help about hurts that often happened in their early years. There is nothing wrong with crying out when you need help. When you listen long enough to people with mental problems, you simply hear where it’s all coming from and you see slowly how they overcome, bit-by-bit, what happened to them a lifetime ago. If you had no respect for the human brain or the human, you will get it the longer you listen. But they often don’t listen at all. And even if they listen, they know better. How can someone who doesn’t really listen, really help? They can’t.

7. By and large, psychiatry has been on the wrong side of oppression. Surely, Freud was already of the opinion that gayness is unchangeable, not a dysfunction or disorder, but rather something natural. He rejected homophobia as something done by narrow-minded and ignorant people. But over time, this has not been maintained. Psychiatry created dozens of theories and ‘therapies’ to ‘cure’ non-straights or at least intimidate them (torture into obedience). Not only were Queers overrepresented among psychiatric ‘patients,’ so were Jews. Still, it recognized Transgenders a century ago as impossible to ‘adjust’ and make into Cisgenders but then, they advocated sex change because ‘normal’ is their only way to be OK. Also, classical Freudian thought degraded women as having ‘penis envy’ while male ‘womb envy’ somehow did not exist. Psychiatry has been instrumental in labeling, drugging, and incarcerating political ‘dissidents.’ But worst of all, it created a whole new and wide category of oppressed people by regarding, treating, and patronizing ‘mental patients’ (anyone not ‘normal’ enough) as a lesser species, that can’t be respected or taken seriously. Most Western young adults train themselves to pas as normal.

My proof of the above is simple. I’ve met people on drugs for years and people who went through ‘analysis’ for years and are not on drugs. None of them ever was close to happy. They were anything between zombies and cynical. It’s outright painful to see the results of these pharmaceutical and mind-bending treatments. How stark a contrast with people who found someone with a warm heart who will just listen to them, let them talk, talk, talk, cry, laugh, shiver, sweet, blush, yawn, and stretch, and is just in awe with them. If you can’t afford a professional, you can exchange time with a friend. Taking turns listening to each other, not commenting on what you tell each other. Just be there. As the reverse saying goes: Don’t just do something–sit there. The best things in life are for free.

Full disclosure: ● I was heavily drugged by the medical profession at the time for 6 months before I was born and so I have a hard time to give drugs the benefit of the doubt. ● And I discovered many therapies that really help and that show what deceit psychiatry is. It’s like having been fed white bread all your life and then to discover wholesome breads. ● I wrote the above rant in under an hour. I’m sure it’s not perfectly balanced or nuanced for which I apologize. I hope it’s still by and large true and helpful.