Psychiatry: Black Magic Masquerading as Science
Dr Vernon Coleman
Modern psychiatry is the greatest con on earth.
Psychiatrists and general practitioners have become increasingly enthusiastic about drug therapy in recent decades. They claim that they can treat a wide range of disorders with psychotropic drugs, and so a goodly portion of the nation now regularly gulps down happy tablets. The startling result is that the incidence of mental health problems is increasing. Officially, one in two people in Britain is incurably mentally ill. Yes, you read that correctly. One in two people in Britain is incurably mentally ill. In other countries, including the United States, the figure is similar or worse. Some of those people are classified as mentally ill because they cannot cope with the modern world. Some are classified as mentally ill because they fit new criteria for mental illness (they have symptoms which are now regarded as indicative of mental illness). And some of those who are classified as mentally ill have been made ill by the reckless prescribing of powerful and dangerous drugs.
(Despite this, the number of hospital beds available for mental health patients is constantly shrinking. This is, of course, because the mentally ill make an ineffective lobby and have almost no political clout. Politicians quickly bow to drug industry pressures because providing hospital beds costs more money than providing mind numbing drugs which turn patients into zombies.)
But the bare truth is that psychiatry isn't a science at all and it isn't even an art. It’s more of a confidence trick; a collegiate confidence trick with pretensions of grandeur. Psychiatrists often claim that the drugs they prescribe are designed to correct chemical imbalances in the brain. But the simple fact is that there is no evidence that there is any such thing as `chemical imbalance'. Ask any psychiatrist about this and he will agree that `chemical imbalance' is a still unproven theory. It's never even been properly tested so how could it ever be proven? So how can psychiatrists and drug companies possibly treat the problems which they claim are caused by `chemical imbalance'?
The bald truth is that psychiatry is no more a science than witchcraft. It is a perfect example of pseudoscience running riot. Cinema legend Samuel Goldwyn was right when he said that anybody who goes to see a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined. A big part of the problem lies in the fact that modern medical thinking is based upon the Cartesian principle that the mind and the body can be treated separately. The modern clinician still does not see the mind and the body as a single unit (that is why orthodox practitioners don't believe in holistic medicine) and this leaves the way open for psychiatrists to play around with the human mind as though it were a completely separate entity.
Psychiatrists won’t tell you this (because it is, to say the least, rather embarrassing) but a large study of randomly selected psychiatric patients showed that approximately three quarters (75%) of the patients had been wrongly diagnosed. And no one could be sure that the remaining 25% had been properly diagnosed, or were receiving appropriate treatment. The medication prescribed is often no more effective than a placebo.
In many cases patients are diagnosed as having - and are then treated for - serious psychiatric problems when their symptoms are caused by drugs they have been given for physical problems or for other mental problems.
Whole wards full of patients have been diagnosed, treated and classified as suffering from schizophrenia when they were actually suffering from side effects produced by the drugs they had been given by prescription happy doctors.
The idea that anyone would describe psychiatry as a science is utterly absurd. Nothing that psychiatrists claim as `fact' can be proved by any means recognised by scientists; there are no proper controls and if an experiment is repeated, it rarely produces the same result. Let me be clear: there are no facts in psychiatry, only convenient commercial assumptions.
The ultimate absurdity is the fact that psychiatrists claim that only they are fit to judge the effectiveness of their recommendations. Psychiatry is black magic masquerading as science.
Taken from Vernon Coleman’s monograph entitled `Psychiatry’ which is available as an eBook.
Copyright Vernon Coleman August 2022
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