The medicalization of all aspects of life fostered by psychiatry and psychiatrists constitutes the real problem. Iatrogenic–physician caused–disease is epidemic in the mental health field because the prevailing school of psychiatric theory–biological psychiatry–serves the rapacious interests of the drug industry to the detriment of the physical health of our citizens.

Outcomes are not only “no better” than they were 20 years ago, they are actually much worse. We’ve had 50 + years of putting people on drugs that do damage to people in the name of benefiting them. The panacea of psychiatry, the psychiatric drug, is going beyond maiming, it is literally killing.

The contemporary paradigm that relies so heavily upon these potentially deadly chemical compounds needs changing. All that a human being is should not be dismissed with the bestowing of an entirely dubious disease label. Toxic drugs and damning labels do people serious injury. A different approach to treatment, that doesn’t depend upon any chemical quick fix, but that deals with the social contexts in which troubles arise is required.

When this basic approach to treatment changes, with or without psychiatry, then the numbers of people in treatment can contract rather than expand the way it has done so much of late. This is to say that when the approach to treatment changes to something more fundamentally sound than a chemical fix, more people will completely recover from their mental distress than do at present. Should this not occur, there will come a time when the problem, even more than it has today, will lead to disastrous consequences for more and more people.

The problems that complicate and obstruct psychiatry are similar to those that do the same apropos of other medical specialties. Outcomes are “little better” now because once treatments are considered effective by consensus, the character of samples in subsequent studies changes. One of the changes that keeps outcomes stable is inclusion of more “treatment-resistant” patients, patients with atypical features and more (and more severe comorbidities). This has itself been well-documented and is relatively recently introduced evidence (past 15 years or so).

I cannot address everything you assert, but suffice it to say(with no offense intended) that you really don’t seem to know very much about the problems that you broach. In fact, I am tempted to say that you are so far out that you’re not even wrong. Learn more. Learn, for example, that the number of “individuals on disability” may increase because some disabilities have become easier to get (and for reasons that have little to do with psychiatry).

Blaming psychiatry for its problems is facile and just plain dumb. And then assuming that “therapy” is a unitary entity (underused) is just (well, it’s one of those things that is so far out it’s not even wrong). Variability in samples and practitioners makes each study about psychotherapy a unique psychotherapy. Standardization is poor; artifacts many; cognitive biases rampant. The only “positive” is relative absence of greedy Pharmsters and academic competition as a perhaps more benign corruptor of content.

Learn more; don’t expect solutions to be one liners; stop reckless blaming; we aren’t doing too badly; after all, the eminence-based propagation of what was represented as evidence that could generate generally effective solutions is almost gone. (Freud is almost gone.) But, you know (and I don’t think you do know) psychiatric pharmacotherapy is almost always dispensed with a referral for psychotherapy. (Evidence-based information indicates better outcome than either as monotherapy.)

Pharma is an important obstruction to optimization. Its desiderata are different in almost every respect from those to which the values of doctors give rise. Unfortunately, those values are highly soluble in cash, and psychiatrists who have “solld out” know enough to keep solvable problems festering. They are the most serious obstruction to generation of valid and reliable information and clear exposition of that information. Pharma and doctor-collaborators are about persuasion and about creating representations of evidence. The companies control their crucial preapproval trials every step of the way. There is deep rot in the foundation of evidence generation that very little can be done about when Pharma lobbyists outnumber members of Congress. It’s hard (cognitively and emotionally) to be a psychiatrist these days. I counseled my own daughter to stay away from psychiatry when she was considering specialization. Other medical specialties face similar problems, but find more effective and more perspicuous solutions in their methods of validating diagnoses and effectiveness of treatment (laboratory markers and imaging studies, for example, which psychiatry lacks).

The solutions for psychiatry’s most difficult problems are known (more or less); it’s the implementation that bedevils the efforts.

A psychiatrist not sorry to have chosen psychiatry thirty-plus years ago (but one who would not choose it again were the years that remain to me enough to allow another choice)

One is that they do not resemble “sciecnes” at all. No “scientific” discipline would have as many inherently different “theories” as psychlogy do, from Freud’s manic obsessions to Jung’s pre programmed archetypes to Skinner’s machine like regimentation. No “theory” has ever dropped out! They just keep piling them on! And that relates to the greatest ugly secret of all of psychology. The “theories” that are supposed to describe normal, healthy people all, every last one of them, are derived from case studies of mental patients! They look at how an ax murderer thought and use that to “define” how normal people think! It’s like looking at jaundice patients and saying everybody must have bright yellow skin!

All the “theories” derive from the delusions of some on or another lunatic! Then they are “fit” to every other case history!

Psychology works by being, basically, a salve, a kind of placebo, for people whose mental weakness and incipient malleability is already proved by the fact they have to see a psychologist!

Sadly in the mental health system glib representations (puffery) far exceed reality. This is reflected in the fact the outcomes are little better then they were 20 years ago. The burgeoning population of individuals on disability by virtue of mental illnesses is the testament.

Would any physician wish to commit his future to a mental health system which can deliver so little?