Latest News

A reading group would do more to help individuals find relief than squeezing their unhappiness into a package labelled ‘disorder’

The Guardian – September 6, 2011 by Lisa Appignanesi

Click image to find out more

In 2000 the World Health Organisation named depression as the fourth leading contributor to the global burden of disease and predicted that by 2020 it would rise to second place. I suppose WHO didn’t mean it to sound like a target to be aimed for, but we seem to be rising to the challenge in any case.

A new survey from the European College of Psychopharmacology, a meta-analysis of a gathered mass of earlier research, reports that a staggering 164.8 million Europeans – 38.2% of the population – suffer from a mental disorder in any year. As well as depression, this includes neural disorders such as dementia and Parkinson’s; childhood problems from ADHD to “conduct disorder”; and the leading anxiety disorders – everything from panic attacks to obsessive-compulsive disorder to shyness. Depression and anxiety, they tell us, are disproportionately women’s ailments. Men, it seems, become alcoholics (another illness category) rather than depressives, particularly in eastern Europe.

Such reports are worrying. They may draw attention to a rising toll of human suffering, but they pinpoint the imperialising tendency of the mental health sector. Our ills and unhappiness are squeezed into a package labelled “disorder” and an ever-proliferating assortment of supposedly objective diagnostic categories. A cure is somehow promised, though it rarely seems to come, certainly not for everyone or for ever.

In talking to the press or drafting press releases, researchers often extrapolate from their material in order to create good copy. The notion that women are somehow more prone to mental illness often emerges – as it did in the Daily Telegraph’s headline on this survey.

According to Hans-Ulrich Wittchen, one of the report’s authors, the reason women suffer nearly twice as much depression and anxiety disorders as men lies in the changing social pattern in which women take on work on top of marriage and children. So stay home, ladies, and you’ll be as happy as apple pie; though in the 50s when we stayed home to bake it, the doctors gave us Miltown and Valium to help us take pain-free care of hubby and the young ones

On the subject of women’s greater susceptibility, it’s just as well to remember that women go to doctors far more than men, for all kinds of ills: indeed the way the stats add up, women’s greater incidence of mental ills just about equals their greater number of visits to the doctors. If men went to doctors as often as they go to the pub, it’s a fair guess that their unhappiness would be represented as depression or anxiety as well.

One of the many things that became clear to me as I was working on Mad, Bad and Sad, my book on the rise and rise of the mind-doctoring professions over the last 200 years, is that classifications of mental disorder are hardly absolutes. They are far more often constructs that mirror their time’s aspirations and ways of understanding. They may reflect subjective experience, but only insofar as we can prod and organise our inchoate inner lives to fit pre-existing psychiatric tick lists.

Useful tools for statisticians, the classifications are also useful to public health administrators, insurance companies, lobbying bodies, or pharmaceutical companies who need “homogeneous populations” on whom to carry out drug trials. But I remain to be convinced that these proliferating classifications help individuals find relief – except, of course, that momentary relief from giving an expert name to what may feel like an intractable set of problems.

Over the last 40 years The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – the bible of the psychiatric professions – has spawned more and more diagnostic categories, “inventing” disorders along the way and radically reducing the range of what can be construed as normal or sane. Meanwhile Big Pharma, feeding its appetite for profits and ours for drugs, has gained an ever greater hold over our mental and emotional lives, medicalising normality.

The more studies that come along to tell us about the rise in mental illness, the more we fit our problems and unhappiness into a category of mental disorder, developing symptoms to take to the doctor in search of a cure. Humans are suggestible creatures. And doctors like to help: they provide the pills Big Pharma recommends, though many must now know that research has shown placebos can work just as well and with fewer side effects.

If doctors – rather than politicians or teachers or priests or friends and family – are to be the guardians of our wellbeing, then doctors really should be provided with new kinds of “treatments” for their patients. Psycho and group therapy could, of course, be rolled out, and not just of the 10-week variety: anything that builds up the individual’s inner resources and allows emotions to be reflected on can’t be bad.

But doctors could recommend group running for depression, proved to have far better effects than SSRIs. Reading groups, too, offer a definite lift. Mentors for those on street drugs rather than the legit kind could be provided. As for women, more free childcare, after-school clubs and husbands who take days off to go to the doctor with the kids (or sort out that drinking problem) would lift a depressed mood wonderfully. Then there’s poverty, terrible schools … could the NHS take those on as well?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/sep/06/mental-illness-medicalising-normality

The Irish Times – September 5, 2011

Huge numbers of people ended up in psychiatric institutions in Ireland, often due to social causes, writes MARY RAFTERY

LINES OF naked people, faeces covering the floors, food served up with pitchforks, people deliberately kept in a state of animal-like existence – not exactly the kind of descriptions one expects to come across in Department of Health files.

Nonetheless, all appear in one of the most damning reports on an Irish institution in this country, revealed this evening in Behind the Walls , RTÉ’s documentary series on the history of psychiatric hospitals in Ireland.

The report concerned the Clonmel District Mental Hospital, as it was then, still open today and known as St Luke’s psychiatric hospital. It was written in 1958 by the assistant inspector of mental hospitals, Dr Ramsey, and delivered to the Department of Health in September of that year.

It was a revealing year in the context of Irish mental institutions. The patient population was close to an all-time high of more than 21,000. For many years, Ireland had led the world in locking up its people in psychiatric hospitals – on a per capita basis, it was even ahead of the old Soviet Union.

While for many years there had been anecdotal references to the enormous numbers in psychiatric hospitals, the definitive research establishing the State as a world leader was carried out recently by Dr Damien Brennan of the School of Nursing and Midwifery in Trinity College Dublin.

Read more: http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2011/0905/1224303499645.html

A NURSE who was jailed for ‘torturing’ an 85-year-old dementia sufferer in a care home has been struck off.

The case of David Hill, 49, went before a Nursing and Midwifery Council hearing. He was jailed for six months last year for the sickening abuse.

At the time the Star reported how Hill, formerly of Cowley Hill Lane, tormented Dorothy Tunstall while working at Victoria Nursing Home, in Rainford.

Hill, clinical manager of the 30-bed unit, squirted the resident with water from a syringe, force fed her and flicked food at her.

He had also fitted her into an electronic hoist and raised her up and down for his own amusement.

A NMC Conduct and Competence Committee panel who examined Hill’s case at a hearing in London took “particular regard to the sentencing remarks of the judge who heard the facts of the case”, a statement setting out their conclusions revealed.

In a statement the panel said: “The judge’s view that the registrant (Hill) abused his trust and engaged in degrading and humiliating behaviour with regard to a vulnerable patient is shared by the panel.

“This behaviour would inevitably bring the nursing profession into disrepute.

“There is no evidence before the panel of either insight or remorse, notwithstanding the sentence to which the registrant has been subject.

“The panel is clear that the registrant’s fitness to practise is impaired.”

The NMC panel imposed a striking off order, with an 18-month interim suspension to cover the period of a potential appeal.

His former colleague Kathleen Roberts, 57, was also charged with the ill treatment or neglect of a person that lacks capacity under the Mental Health Act.

She was said to have played a lesser role, laughing and encouraging him. Roberts was sentenced to four months in jail, suspended for 18 months.

Mrs Tunstall, who was married for 58 years to husband Albert, 88, and lived in Nutgrove all her married life, died in April last year.

Mrs Tunstall’s only daughter, Wendy, 49 told the Star of her outrage at the abuse last year. She has welcomed the decision.

http://www.sthelensstar.co.uk/news/9227766.___Torture____nurse_is_struck_off/

‘You must not use your professional position to establish or pursue a sexual or improper emotional relationship with a patient or someone close to them.’ – Paragraph 32 – Good Medical Practice published by the General Medical Council

Psychiatrist Steven Lomax, although retired and living in France, was the subject of a recent hearing at the General Medical Council (GMC). Reason: he had sex with a married patient and started an emotional relationship with her, contrary to paragraph 32 of Good Medical Practice.

On Monday 22 August, it was stated his name would be erased from the medical register. This action prevents him from practising, but it is essentially closing the door after the horse has bolted.

What is the answer? It has been written before but it is worth repeating. Patients should be provided written information on professional counselling standards and informed that any behaviour outside those standards is inappropriate; that sexual abuse is criminal, not “boundary crossing,” “improper” or “inappropriate.”

Psychiatrists often claim sex with patients is “consensual,” even though they are aware of the strong emotional hold they have over their patients. Steven Lomax is no exception. But if someone has sex with a child, society recognises the imbalance of power, knowledge and authority used by the adult and condemns the act as criminal. So it must be with a psychiatrist and patient.

CCHR International’s latest video featuring Chill EB

Click the image to watch the video

While compassion, common sense and decency declare that sexual abuse of patients is a serious and criminal act, psychiatrists are hard at work to sanitise it.

Psychiatric sexual assault has reared its ugly head again after psychiatrist Steven Lomax was reported in the Telegraph as having had sex with a married patient on his consulting room floor while a delegation from the Women’s Institute was right outside.

Such despicable treachery could only burden the victim with further emotional scars and instability. It is a damning critisicm of these “professionals” who have been entrusted with the task of helping people who are emotionally fragile.

Psychiatrists rarely refer to rape as rape. Instead, they downplay it as “sexual contact,” an “inappropriate relationship,” “crossing the boundaries” or that it was to “enhance the patient’s self-esteem.”

The following examples confirm this:

Normal
0


• Psychiatrist Graham Craig was struck off by the General Medical Council (GMC) for having an “inappropriate relationship” with a patient almost forty years younger than him.

Normal
0


• Psychiatrist Andrew Clayton was struck off by the GMC for having behaved in a “sexually motivated” way towards patients and staff. He had previously been placed on the sex offenders’ register for five years after pleading guilty to possessing indecent images of children.

Normal
0


• Psychiatrist Salim Nayani was struck off by the GMC after being found guilty of gross misconduct, breaching his duty of care after conducting an “inappropriate relationship” with a patient.

Normal
0


• Psychiatrist Theodore Soutzos was struck off by the GMC for having “improper sexual relationships” with three patients.

Psychiatrists often claim sex with patients is “consensual,” even though they are aware of the strong emotional hold they have over their patients. But if someone has sex with a child, society recognises the imbalance of power, knowledge and authority used by the adult and condemns the act as criminal. So it must be with a psychiatrist and patient.

No progress can be made in the matter of patient sexual abuse until all such assaults by psychiatrists and psychologists are legally defined by statute as rape: the only required proof is that sex was involved.

Patients should be provided written information on professional counselling standards and informed that any behaviour outside those standards is inappropriate; that sexual abuse is criminal, not “boundary crossing,” “improper” or “inappropriate.”

Normal
0


٠

TV presenter Gail Porter: “…we were just locked in the unit and basically forgotten about. It seemed to me that the nurses didn’t really know what to do with us so it was easier to give us lots of drugs so we were calm and quiet.”

Gail Porter’s account in the Daily Mail of being locked up in a psychiatric unit has highlighted what is being passed off as mental health care and ‘treatment’ in psychiatric facilities around the country.

Mind-altering drugs and electroshock treatment (ECT) are the main treatments being used by psychiatrists today, ‘treatments’ that rely on overwhelming the individual for their ‘effectiveness’.

These methods however never address the causes of ‘mental illness.’ They do not ‘cure’ the person’s troubles, a subject that was addressed in 1994, when Norman Sartorius, psychiatrist and former president of the World Psychiatric Association said, “The time when psychiatrists considered they could cure the mentally ill is gone. In the future the mentally ill have to learn to live with their illness.”

Ms Porter’s account confirmed this: “There was no treatment programme and nothing to do. It meant patients just focused on their problems instead of getting better.”

Far from curing the problem, contemporary psychiatric methods interfere, in a hit-and-miss way, with the person’s current physical, emotional and thought processes. When the treatment ‘works,’ it commonly means the person’s problem or its manifestations have been chemically or mechanically suppressed. The trouble with this is that, to varying degrees, so is the patient and their awareness of life. Meanwhile the underlying problem remains, and in due course, the individual finds himself less than able to cope with life than before.

The frst action to take with someone mentally disturbed is to “do no harm.” That means ensuring they are not subjected to psychiatric treatments that use force and harm in an attempt to control behaviour. The true resolution of many mental difficulties begins with a thorough physical examination by a competent medical, not psychiatric, doctor. It is a matter of sound medical fact that undiagnosed physical illness or injury can trigger emotional difficulties.

If human rights include freedom from brutality and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, then there is no doubt that contemporary psychiatric treatments are no more than human rights abuses.

For further reading: http://www.cchr.co.uk/downloads/Real%20Crisis.pdf

Despite the general belief that ECT ceased to be administered with the death of Jack Nicholson’s character McMurphy in ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,’ hundreds of thousands around the world are still subjected to it each year.

In Scotland, a lady under the care of NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde was given the ‘wrong kind’ of ECT (electroconvulsive therapy). The Scotsman newspaper reported she “…had electricity shot through both sides of her brain three times after doctors in different hospitals failed to liaise over her treatment.”

The question is, how can you have the ‘wrong kind’ of ECT? The statement implies there may be a ‘right kind’. Whatever way it’s dressed up, there isn’t a ‘right kind’. Just as whipping, leeching and flogging are unlawful, ECT should be prohibited or prosecuted for the criminal assault that it is.

For anyone who has seen and been sickened by shock treatment, they will know it has all the marks of physical torture methods that might instead belong in the armoury of a KGB interrogator, rather than the inventory of a ‘medical practitioner.’

It has been cleverly cloaked in medical legitimacy: the hospital setting, white-coated assistants, anaesthetics, muscle-paralysing drugs and sophisticated looking equipment. All very medical, but in spite of these trappings, the brutality of shock treatment verifies that psychiatry has not advanced beyond the cruelty and barbarism of its earliest treatments.

Few are aware that a Rome slaughterhouse inspired this so-called scientific procedure. In 1938, psychiatrist Ugo Cerletti observed butchers incapacitating pigs with electric shocks to render them more docile prior to slitting their throats.  Inspired, Cerletti conducted further experiments on the pigs, finally concluding that “these clear proofs caused all my doubts to vanish, and without more ado I gave instructions in the clinic to undertake, next day, the experiment upon man.”

Dr John Friedberg, a neurologist who has researched the effects of ECT for over 30 years, stated, “It is very hard to put into words just what shock treatment does to people generally…it destroys people’s ambition, and…their vitality. It makes people rather passive and apathetic… Besides the amnesia, the apathy and the lack of energy is, in my view, the reason that… [psychiatrists] still get away with giving it.”

The theory behind the practice hasn’t advanced beyond that of the ancient Greeks who tried to cure mental problems using convulsive shock created by a drug called hellebore. It may sound crude but it is a fact: the shock treatment procedure itself is no more scientific or therapeutic than being hit over the head with a cricket bat.

Further reading: http://www.cchr.co.uk/downloads/Brutal%20Reality.pdf

Psychiatrists have long desired to be viewed on a par with medical professionals but the practice of redefining life’s problems and idiosyncracies as so-called ‘mental disorders’ has resulted in psychiatrists and their profession being held up to ridicule.

The proposed revised edition of the mental health ‘bible’, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), has been pilloried for the fact any one of us would be hard pushed to avoid a psychiatric diagnosis once it is published.

Mental health ‘experts’ scrutinise, debate and pontificate on human behaviours, and thereafter vote in respect of their deliberations as to whether they should be listed in psychiatric textbooks as a ‘mental illness.’ ‘Binge eating disorder’ is lined up for inclusion, along with temper tantrums, which, if proposals were accepted, would be redefined as ‘Temper Dysregulation Disorder’.

Excessive use of the Internet is also being lined up as an addition to the list. People who spend too long on-line, those who ignore household chores to be on-line, those whose productivity suffers because of the Internet; they are on the psychiatric radar for having an Internet addiction.

Whereas regular doctors have tests to prove or disprove illness, psychiatrists do not. In a significant departure from medical diagnosis, psychiatric diagnoses are devoted to the categorisation of symptoms only rather than the observation of actual physical disease. Without any scientific laboratory tests showing the presence or absence of mental problems, it is extremely difficult to see how psychiatry’s diagnostic system works.

John Read, senior lecturer in psychology at Auckland University, New Zealand, said, “Making lists of behaviours, applying medical-sounding labels to people who engage in them, then using the presence of those behaviours to prove they have the illness in question is scientifically meaningless. It tells us nothing about causes or solutions. It does, however, create the reassuring feeling that something medical is going on.”

This is how madness is being marketed by psychiatrists and the pharmaceutical industry, and in the process, creating a multi-million pound industry that is feeding at the public trough.

Dr Norman Sartorius, a former president of the World Psychiatric Association, confirmed this when he said, “The time when psychiatrists considered they could cure the mentally ill is gone. In the future, the mentally ill have to learn to live with their illness.”

With no science and no cures, and while getting the lion’s share of the NHS budget in England, psychiatry is probably one of the best rackets in the country.

Further reading: http://www.cchr.co.uk/downloads/Pseudoscience.pdf

ADHD – Labelling normal kids as “mentally ill”

Click image to watch video

NHS figures revealed £43.8 million was spent on 867,000 prescription items for ‘ADHD’ drugs in England in 2010. As no scientific evidence exists to support the existence of ‘ADHD’, these figures are representative of slick marketing and good business, but bad medicine.

Commonly used to label children, the psychiatric explanation for ‘ADHD’ centres on the unscientific notion that children have a ‘chemical imbalance’ in their brain. Well-meaning parents have accepted the unscientific explanation without inspection. If parents were to ask for the laboratory results that confirm their child has a ‘chemical imbalance’ in his or her brain, they would be waiting for a very long time.

When all of the rhetoric is stripped away, what psychiatrists are actually doing is drugging bad behaviour, having redefined it as an illness. They have manufactured a condition, labelled it, shrouded it in medical legitimacy, concocted an expensive chemical, and produced nullifying effects on its recipients that are then hailed as ‘demonstrably effective.’ All that has happened is the person has been drugged, and is exhibiting the effects of a dangerous mind-altering foreign substance in his or her body.

Dr Thomas Szasz, professor of psychiatry emeritus is uncompromising in respect of psychiatry and children. He should have the last word on this subject. He says, “I have long maintained that the child psychiatrist is one of the most dangerous enemies, not only of children, but also of adults who care for the most precious and most vulnerable things in life, children and liberty.”

Despite a list of adverse drug reactions that continues to expand, antidepressants are still on the market

Science Daily recently covered the conclusions of a researcher from Canada regarding antidepressants.

Evolutionary psychologist Paul Andrews from McMaster University in Ontario concluded that patients who use antidepressants are much more likely to suffer relapses of major depression than those who use no psychiatric drugs at all. Whichever way you look at it, that’s a damning statement.

Andrews said, “There’s a lot of debate about whether or not depression is truly a disorder, as most clinicians and the majority of the psychiatric establishment believe, or whether it’s an evolved adaptation that does something useful”.

There was also a study regarding antidepressants conducted by a UK team that was recently published in the Lancet. That research indicated dementia sufferers don’t feel any benefit from taking certain types of antidepressant and could in fact be at greater risk from a range of possible side-effects.

While antidepressant prescribing continues, the latest research simply adds to an ever expanding catalogue of effects associated with antidepressant use.

Their use has also been linked to higher heart disease and stroke risk, research from the University of Southampton listed internal bleeding, strokes and birth defects as some of the long-term effects of antidepressants, go back to 2008 and a study by Irving Kirsch from the University of Hull concluded antidepressants were ‘no better than placebo’, while the most alarming and paradoxical effects of the drugs are the fact they can increase suicidal thoughts, suicidal behaviour, violence and aggression.

Aside from the catalogue of dangerous, even fatal effects, the antidepressant empire has been built on the idea that the drugs do something to resolve a so-called ‘chemical imbalance’ in the brain. While psychiatrists and pharmaceutical companies would welcome a test to support the idea, it remains as an opinion about the state of a person’s brain that has never been scientifically proven. Suggesting that a ‘chemical imbalance’ is the cause of a person’s problems is simply a marketing tool. It helps to sell the drugs.

Realise also there is no concept of a correct chemical ‘balance’ in a person’s brain. Thus, claiming the existence of an ‘imbalance’ in the brain is testimony to the worldwide psychiatric propaganda on the subject.

The resolution of many mental difficulties begins, not with a checklist of symptoms, but with ensuring that a competent, non-psychiatric doctor completes a thorough physical examination to find undiagnosed physical conditions manifesting as so-called mental illness.

Psychiatrist received research funding from a tranquilliser manufucturer while advising the Government on tranquilliser addiction

The headline in the Independent says Professor who wrote Coalition health policy was paid by drugs firm. Professor John Strang, head of the National Addiction Centre at King’s College London, and author of a government report on the prescription of potent psychiatric sedatives, did not declare he received money from a pharmaceutical firm which manufactures two commonly prescribed tranquilisers, fuelling allegations of a serious conflict of interest.

Earlier this month, a psychiatrist in the United States was also found to have conflicts of interest, this time in the area of child psychiatry. Dr Joseph Biederman, Chief of the Programme in Paediatric Psychopharmacology, Massachusetts General Hospital, received research funds from 15 pharmaceutical companies. The New York Times exposed how Biederman earned $1.6 million in consulting fees from drug makers between 2000 and 2007 but did not report all of this income to Harvard University officials.

For more on psychiatric conflicts of interest:http://www.cchrint.org/cchr-issues/the-corrupt-alliance-of-the-psychiatric-pharmaceutical-industry/

Trainee lawyer blames antipsychotic drug Seroquel after developing diabetes

Sarah Audu from New Southgate in London, took 450mg of Seroquel a day from 2005 until April 2010. While on the drug her weight rose from 8st to 17st and she was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes in 2007.

The full article, which can be read in the Evening Standard, said Ms Audu hopes to sue the drug manufacturer AstraZeneca.

Ms Audu is looking for other patients who may have suffered side effects after taking Seroquel to join her in a legal action in the UK.

Earlier this month, the New York Times reported that, “AstraZeneca would be adding a new heart warning to the labels of Seroquel at the request of the Food and Drug Administration.”

While in August 2010, AstraZeneca paid out $198 million in settlements to resolve lawsuits that had been filed involving allegations that Seroquel had caused diabetes.

This was followed in in February 2011, when AstraZeneca reportedly agreed to pay another $150 million to settle Seroquel diabetes lawsuits, bringing the total amount of reported Seroquel settlements to $348 million.

NHS figures reveal mental health has received the lion’s share of taxpayer’s funds for the last 7 years

A psychiatrist and a GP wrote on the Joe Public Blog hosted by the Guardian newspaper claiming ‘mental health remains the poor relation’. The authors said that just £11 bn of the annual NHS budget was spent on mental health, implying that this wasn’t enough taxpayer’s funds to deal with the problem.

Just £11 bn. In order to understand the significance of the figure, it’s important  to know the amount of the overall NHS budget and how the figure of £11 bn compares. It was noted the overall figure for the annual budget was conspicuously absent.

Department of Health figures (National Expenditure Data – click on link) show the overall NHS budget in England in 2009-10 was £103.9 bn, which means the funds spent on mental health, which were £11.26 bn to be precise, represented 10.8% of the overall budget.

Now consider the amount of funds assigned to ‘problems of circulation’, the category which includes heart problems, one of the main physical ailments experienced by people in modern times. The amount was £8 bn, 7.7% of the annual budget. Third in line behind ‘problems of circulation’ was ‘cancers and tumours’ which received £5.86 bn, which represents 5.6% of the annual budget.

The upshot of it all is that mental health was top of the list, receiving the largest amount of NHS funds in England in 2009-10 making it the very wealthy relation, by £3.26 bn to be exact.

Further, it’s been the wealthiest relation for the last 7 years, since the NHS started categorising the different areas that received funding.

Recommendation: it’s worth looking at the bigger picture before believing what’s said about mental health funding in England.

The story surrounding honeymoon murder suspect Shrien Dewani rumbles on.  According to the Daily Express, psychiatrist Michael Kopelman thinks Dewani may be faking ill-health or, to be psychiatrically correct, exercising ‘conscious manipulation’ to avoid going to trial.

Dewani was excused attendance at a recent hearing in London after it was claimed he was ‘unfit to plead’.

Although incapable of either predicting future dangerousness or of rehabilitating criminals, psychiatrists continue to testify in court, assert that offenders are not responsible for what they have done, say they are too ill to make an appearance, and are ‘victims’ of fictitious mental disorders.

If criminals are able to evade the consequences of their actions through this type of perversion of the principles of justice, then the very tool that society has to protect itself has been obliterated.

Professor of psychiatry Thomas Szasz in his book The Myth of Mental Illness, is uncompromising on this point: “The introduction of psychiatric considerations into the administration of the criminal law-for example, the insanity plea and verdict, diagnoses of mental incompetence to stand trial, and so forth-corrupt the law and victimise the subject on whose behalf they are ostensibly employed.”

Psychiatry’s attempt to eradicate the concept of right and wrong and thereby destroy personal responsibility by inventing excuses for the most flagrant misconduct undermines the justice system and deserves the contemptuous label: junk science.

It is up to the many conscientious, hardworking and increasingly disheartened people within the system to realise this and rid it of these destructive intruders.