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Name: Cracked
Rating: 4.4 (25 reviews)
Author: James Davies

James Davies

Why Psychiatry Is Doing More Harm than Good

4.4 (25 ratings)

18 mins

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Cracked
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What’s in it for me? Gain a glimpse into the corrupt world of psychiatric medicine.

Despite its expensive research facilities and highly qualified doctors, psychiatric medicine is more like a religion than a science. With the help of huge pharmaceutical companies and their advertising dollars, psychiatry has become an unquestionable dogma.

In fact, psychiatry is rife with strange approaches and assumptions. Of these, few are based on the most current, objective scientific data, while many are directly harmful to our perception of mental health patients – not to mention the patients themselves.

In these blinks, you’ll learn how mental health services got where they are today by examining the preferences of psychiatrists and mental health institutions – and by simply following the money.

Luckily, there are also things that we as a society can do to turn psychiatry back into something that benefits everyone, not just pharmaceutical companies.

After reading these blinks, you’ll know

why blue pills will cause you to act differently than red pills;
why homosexuality was removed from the most famous psychiatry handbook; and
why you’re more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD if you’re the youngest kid in your class.

Discrepancies in diagnosis are a major problem for psychiatrists, even with a new manual.

Let’s start with a simple question: If you have a mental health issue, how can you be sure a psychiatrist will diagnose it correctly?

Basically, you can’t. The process of diagnosing psychiatric conditions is more subjective than we might think, depending heavily on the whims and even location of the psychiatrist. One study conducted by Dr. David Rosenhan demonstrates the consequences of these highly individual diagnoses.

He sent a group of eight academics to different hospitals, each of them with the complaint that they heard a voice in their heads saying the word “thud,” but were otherwise behaving normally. All of them were diagnosed with various mental disorders and prescribed strong antipsychotic pills. Most were held in hospitals for weeks, even after explaining that they were part of a study!

Furthermore, statistics show that psychiatrists across the world only share a consensus on patient diagnoses for the same patient 32 to 42 percent of the time. However, there are regional similarities in diagnoses. For example, when we compare trends in psychiatric diagnoses across countries, we find that psychiatrists from the US and Russia are twice as likely to diagnose their patients as schizophrenic than their colleagues in Europe.

These discrepancies arise despite the fact that psychologists have already standardized the diagnosis of mental disorders in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or the DSM.

The DSM contains all psychiatric disorders known in modern medicine and has been continually edited and refined since its first publication under the title DSM-I in 1952.

However, the standards found in the DSM are based on the consensus of psychiatrists, not on scientific research. For example, homosexuality used to be categorized as a mental disease in DSM-II. This all changed during the gay rights movement in the 1970s, during which psychiatrists voted to remove homosexuality from the manual’s third edition, DSM-III.

Unlike other medical sciences, where doctors can agree if a patient’s leg is broken based on the available evidence, e.g., an X-ray, psychiatrists cannot diagnose patients in a way that enjoys a unanimous consensus.

The development of the DSM involves the violation of basic scientific rules.

Knowing that psychiatrists use a standard manual for their diagnoses, you can’t help but wonder how such a manual is created. When compiling the DSM, a small group of psychiatrists known as the Taskforce is responsible for determining what makes it into the manual and what doesn’t.

It’s bad enough that the manual’s content is voted upon – voting in and of itself is not part of objective science – but it makes it even worse that this democratic consensus includes so few people.

Integration of new mental disorders and misuse of the DSM is leading to medicalization of people.

One result of the subjective way the DSM is compiled has been a huge change in psychiatric diagnoses. The inclusion of new mental disorders into the DSM has led to a rapid increase in the number of diagnosed mental illnesses – a phenomenon called medicalization.

Just look at the statistics: about 26.2 percent of all Americans suffer from at least one disorder outlined in the DSM in a given year. Contrast this with the rates from the 1950s, which were around 1 percent and even as low as 0.1 percent in the early twentieth century.

Big Pharma uses the “chemical imbalance” theory to justify medicalization.

In addition to the problems with the DSM and inconsistent psychiatric diagnoses, psychiatric medicine is also influenced by the pharmaceutical industry, sometimes called Big Pharma.

In the 1990s, pharmaceutical companies were forced to reinvent the image of mental health drugs. Previously, people saw them as mind-altering drugs, not legitimate medical products. To combat this, they promoted something called the chemical imbalance theory in order to boost their drug sales.

The chemical imbalance theory isn’t very conclusive.

The chemical imbalance theory does everything it can to reduce psychiatric disorders to neatly identifiable causes and effects. That’s what the pharma companies want you to think.

And despite all the heavy marketing in the pharma industry, the chemical imbalance theory has some serious flaws.

Psychiatry’s approach to drugs, especially antidepressants, is fatally flawed.

Antidepressants don’t work as smoothly as the chemical imbalance theory suggests. They don’t reset your brain – they change it.

Consider a recent study undertaken at Oxford University, which showed that most SSRI antidepressants don’t just correct negative emotions: people taking SSRI antidepressants reported a general reduction of emotions, especially positive emotions like happiness, love or excitement.

The pharmaceutical industry’s coffers are as deep as its manipulative powers are wide.

Here’s a serious question: How can you explain the high rates of psychiatric drug prescriptions when there’s no conclusive evidence that they actually work? The answer is pretty grim.

For starters, pharmaceutical companies suppress certain research results in order to let the positive ones shine. For example, drug producer GlaxoSmithKline was fined $2.5 million in 2004 for defrauding customers through their dishonest research. How? They actively didn’t publish studies that had mixed or negative results: some of the studies had shown that its antidepressant Paxil/Seroxat was less effective than placebos.

Psychiatry uses dangerous social myths to answer our health-related questions.

Throughout human history, philosophers have pondered questions on the meaning of life and existence after death. In the process of posing and answering these questions, they contributed to social myths, or the prevailing ideas of their time.

We create our own social myths regarding our health when we ask: “Why do we have health issues?” and “How can we be cured?”

Western psychiatry is exporting its harmful mental health practices into new markets worldwide.

As we can reasonably expect from any money-hungry cartel, Big Pharma is expanding its reach across the globe by intervening in the way other countries conduct psychiatric treatments.

Every country has an individual culture and a symptom pool that generates certain culture-specific disorders. For example, some people in southwest Asia experience koro, the feeling that their genitals are retracting into their body, while people in Canada don’t.

Psychiatry has to prove its scientific legitimacy by changing its paradigm.

After reading these blinks, it might be difficult to imagine making an appointment with a psychiatrist ever again. But don’t write off psychiatry just yet! Some psychiatrists are working towards a paradigm shift that would benefit us all.

One part of that shift includes more appropriate means of treatment based on a patient-centered attitude and in which psychiatrists put together individualized treatments.

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What is Cracked about?

Cracked gives a clear and detailed overview of the current crisis in psychiatric science: malfunctioning scientific standards and the powerful influence of pharmaceutical companies have caused the overdiagnosis and overmedication of people all over the world.

Best quote from Cracked

By lowering the diagnostic thresholds for warranting a diagnosis more people may be unnecessarily branded mentally unwell.

—James Davies

Who should read Cracked?

Anyone involved in psychiatry
Anyone receiving psychiatric treatment or considering it
Anyone interested in the history of prescription drugs

About the Author

James Davies is a qualified psychotherapist with a Ph.D. in medical and social anthropology. In addition to writing for numerous publications, such as The Times, Daily Mail and The Guardian, he has also published three academic texts with Stanford University Press, Karnac and Routledge.

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