Saturday, December 01, 2012

Defining psychiatry

Recent article in The Lancet makes reference to an article that I commented on in a previous post. It suggests that in some ways psychiatry is a "speciality only beginning to define itself". 

Wonder why it's taken so long to do that! Perhaps the article is trying to dissociate itself from psychiatry's history (see my chapter in Mental health ethics). If it's following the previous article, this means believing that psychiatry needs to "realign itself as a key biomedical specialty at the heart of mental health".  That's always been the hope of psychiatry that it will find the biological basis of mental illness. And, what's that got to do with being a "branch of medicine that seeks to support some of the most marginalised members of society", which is what the article says psychiatry is? 

The latter characterisation of psychiatry may even raise questions. The article favourably references The Lancet's Global Mental Health Series, which I have commented on in a previous post. However, social factors, such as poverty and injustice, are not necessarily at the centre of the understanding of mental health problems in modern psychiatric practice. 

The article also mentions the  Schizophrenia Commission's recent report, but doesn't mention the Inquiry into the schizophrenia label (ISL) (see previous post).  Suman Fernando, one of the ISL co-ordinating group, has commented on the report. Psychiatry should be about treating people with mental health problems as persons, but this isn't always the case. A helpful feature of the Schizophrenia Commission's report is its recognition that too many people with a diagnosis of schizophrenia are in secure psychiatric provision.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

"secure psychiatric provision"?!

I know that is probably some British doublespeak.

But I'm sick of doublespeak.

What you mean is, innocent people imprisoned without charges or a trial. Disappeared.

And the "schizophrenia" hate speech smear is not a "diagnosis" for you are not real doctors and have no moral right to even use the word diagnosis, which is a word that should be reserved exclusively for those who are in the business of practicing real medicine.

You know, those quaint doctors who actually respect human rights, and treat real diseases.

Down with psychiatry.

If your fraudulent profession is still defining itself after hundreds of years, that means it is still weak enough to be destroyed.

Hopefully it will be destroyed.

Just as it has destroyed millions of lives.


Anonymous said...

Well said. Psychiatry is the disgrace of modern medicine. It is pseudo science. It is falsified science. It destroys thousands of lives, silently, behind closed doors. One day we will look back on psychiatry in the same way we look back on the Nazis

Anonymous said...

I just read the paper that Double put his name to, by Bracken mainly, in one of the "top" quack journals.

The more I read of the Brit critical psychiatrists, the more suspect they become.

Almost all of them support forcing their profession on people using laws.

And the disrespectful blanket painting of the survivor movement as being part of some "service user" movement makes my blood boil into a revictimized rage.

It is like having someone spit in your face.

Psychiatric survivors are NOT "service users" any more than a victim of a vicious pack rape is a "penis user".

How dare anyone lump everybody together as a "service user" movement!

These are "services" that people are being COERCED into, therefore it becomes a completely offensive and immoral thing to refer to the coerced as "users".

The term "user" implies consent, decisive consumption choices, evaluation and weighing among options, and a DESIRE for such a service.

This contrasts with the blood on all psychiatrists hands, when they actively trained on, or actively work with to this day, captive human beings, whose bodies they fill with drugs against these persons' wills.

SLIGHTLY critical psychiatrists can chatter among themselves in their little journals, but what is happening on the ground is survivors are recovering in spite of your profession's quackery and learning the truth of the past, present and pathetically unpromising future of your profession, listening to the way your profession denies and minimizes the horrific human rights abuses you carry out (see "service user" label). And we don't need you.

IN FACT ALL WE NEED IS TO BE PROTECTED FROM YOUR EVIL LEGAL POWER.

Psychiatry is a waste of space, and a life practicing psychiatry is a wasted life. Just think of all the useful, non harmful GPs we could have had, had not thousands of duped quacks thrown their medical degree down the shitter.


Anonymous said...

its nice to see fiendly objective debate! with a point of view based on stucture, facts and undepinned by rasional thinking!

Unknown said...

~Anyone with any firearms misconduct at all. Period. If you're not able to be responsible with a weapon, you shouldn't own one. Which brings me to psychiatry above. It was made by Representative Leslie Combs, a state legislator in Kentucky after she accidentally discharged her legal gun in her office in the state's capital annex building today. Apparently there are no charges being filed because it was an accident and no one was hurt, but really....if you fire a gun in a state capital even once, isn't that grounds to say someone might not be safe with a firearm? If it were not a lawmaker, would this be tolerated?