World Mental Health Day should be embraced as an opportunity to focus on mental health, a time to present optimism for those who are struggling. Psychiatry however has a tendency to focus on mental difficulties, the negative aspects of life, how bad things are while categorising these issues as “mental illness” and using them to make repeated calls for increased public funding.
The psychiatric industry is unique in that it continually advertises failures to get more investment. It’s a pattern that’s been occurring for decades. Increased investment, poor results and catastrophic failings, more investment, more failures, more investment and so on. And it’s happening in the community and in mental units, witness the Lampard Inquiry.
Pharmaceutical companies also invest in psychiatry, continuing a symbiotic relationship where psychiatrists manufacture new “disorders” or psychiatric labels, while Big Pharma develops new expensive psychotropic drugs to generate higher revenue.
If there were beneficial treatment outcomes and patients were cured of their mental troubles, psychiatry would be struggling to maintain the business model. It would probably go bankrupt. The habitual psychiatric prescribing patterns are good for maintaining the business model, but they are bad medicine.
Significantly, agencies such as the World Psychiatric Association admit that psychiatrists don’t know the causes or cures for any mental disorder or what their treatments specifically do to the patient. Norman Sartorius, former President of the World Psychiatric Association summed it up in these words, “The time when psychiatrists considered that they could cure the mentally ill is gone. In the future, the mentally ill have to learn to live with their illness.” The age-old mantra of “prevention is better than cure” doesn’t apply. There’s no prevention and there’s no cure.
The Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) continues to fight for the rights of patients, especially the right to full informed consent. It’s a key point that’s included in CCHR’s Mental Health Declaration of Human Rights.
Based on some of the reports received, people who are detained and coercively treated are expected to accept the lack of scientific evidence to support psychiatric diagnoses. As a consequence, vulnerable people are being labelled and forcibly treated while informed consent is blatantly absent.
Based on the number of suicides and premature deaths associated with psychiatric prescribing habits, fully informed consent is not a reality. Some patients who have done their due diligence know the truth about psychiatric drugs and refuse treatment. Their decisions however are often overridden by psychiatrists who use detention laws to coercively treat them.
It’s easy to see that those caught in the mental health matrix need a helping hand. Making informed choices has the potential of bringing much-needed reform to the mental health sector and preventing unnecessary treatment-related deaths.
Psychiatric narratives can be blinding unless steps are taken to help people become informed of the possible risks and benefits associated with psychiatric treatment. If this happened, World Mental Health Day could be full of optimism rather than the pessimistic, negative narrative promoted by the psychiatric industry.
Information booklets about psychiatric drugs: Find out what psychiatrists don’t want you to know
Documentary about electroconvulsive therapy: Therapy or Torture – The Truth About Electroshock
