Why you should never trust a psychiatrist
Dr Vernon Coleman
The following short essay is taken from the book `Betrayal of Trust’ by Vernon Coleman
If Medicine Was a Science…
If medicine was a science then when a patient visited a doctor complaining of a symptom he would be given the best, proven treatment, a treatment that was quite specific for the disease. Treatments for specific symptoms would be predictable and diagnostic skills would, because they would be based on scientific techniques, be reliable within certain acknowledged limits.
But that is not what happens at all. In some areas of medicine specialists operate in a way that would be considered a variety of pseudoscience if the practitioners did not happen to have qualifications recognised by the medical establishment.
Consider, for example, the practices of psychiatry, psychosurgery and psychoanalysis, widely accepted medical specialities where doctors clearly still make decisions about treatments according to their personal beliefs, instincts and hunches rather than according to any scientific principles.
Psychiatrists cannot even agree on which collections of symptoms constitute mental disorders. It was only in 1980 in the third edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders that the American Psychiatric Association deleted homosexuality from its list of mental disorders. In 1985 at a meeting of 7,000 psychiatrists in Phoenix, USA three out of four main speakers said that schizophrenia did not exist.
Where is the logic in any of this? Psychiatrists can offer no scientific evidence to support their decisions to accept some categories of mental illness while rejecting others.
We are led to believe that psychiatry is a modern day science but in reality it is still a black art, based on rumour, suspicion and gossip rather than anything remotely resembling science.
Two thirds of the people who commit suicide will have visited their GP within a month of killing themselves and half of these will have consulted their GP within a week of their death.
Surely there must be something wrong with mental care when most of the people who kill themselves do so shortly after seeking professional help?
The cruellest irony is undoubtedly the fact that many of those who kill themselves do so with pills their doctors have prescribed.
Both general practitioners and psychiatrists have wildly and irresponsibly prescribed tranquillisers and sleeping tablets for millions of patients and have produced an army of addicts around the world. The way in which untold millions of people around the world became hooked on the benzodiazepine tranquillisers is an excellent example of the way that the medical profession and the regulatory authorities allow themselves to be dictated to by the powerful international drug companies. Time and time again warnings were ignored or suppressed as the drug companies, which were making vast profits from these drugs, managed to persuade doctors that the hazards associated with the products had been exaggerated.
NOTE
This short essay was taken from `Betrayal of Trust’ by Vernon Coleman. There is an analysis of psychiatry in Vernon Coleman’s short book `Psychiatry: Black art and confidence trick: A short monograph explaining the enduring and expanding myth of mental illness; and why you should never trust a psychiatrist.’ Both books are available from the bookshop on www.vernoncoleman.com
Copyright Vernon Coleman May 2024
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