Psychiatry’s history is strewn with false “discoveries” that were passed off at the time as the latest breakthroughs in mental treatment, but which were discovered in retrospect to be little more than brutal, debilitating punishments.

Science writer Robert Whitaker says: “Rarely has psychiatry been totally without a remedy advertised as effective. Whether it be whipping the mentally ill, bleeding them, making them vomit, feeding them sheep thyroids, putting them in continuous baths, stunning them with shock therapies, or severing their frontal lobes—all such therapies ‘worked’ at one time, and then, when a new therapy came along, they were suddenly seen in a new light, and their shortcomings revealed.”

In Blaming the Brain , Elliot Valenstein, Ph.D., wrote, “Prefrontal lobotomy, insulin coma, and other treatments that are now totally rejected were claimed, in their time, to be just as effective in treating mental illnesses as it is now claimed that drug treatment is.”

With ECT and psychosurgery under intense critical public scrutiny, psychiatry is now feverishly searching for a new “breakthrough miracle”— “deep brain stimulation,” “transcranial magnetic stimulation” (TMS) and “vagus nerve stimulation” (VNS) (vagus nerve: the cranial nerve that connects the brain to the internal organs in the body) are the new catch phrases.

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) involves threading wires through the skull and into the brain. They connect to a battery pack implanted in the chest, similar to the heart pacemaker and emanate high-frequency electrical impulses directly into the head. The FDA has approved this procedure for patients suffering from Parkinson’s disease, which is an actual brain-based pathology, but psychiatrists are using it experimentally on the “mentally” ill, charging around $50,000 per patient.

In TMS, a magnetic coil is placed near the patient’s scalp and a powerful and rapidly changing magnetic field passes through skin and bone and penetrates a few centimeters into the outer cortex (outer gray matter) of the brain and induces an electrical current. Repetitive TMS can cause seizures or epileptic convulsions in healthy subjects, depending upon the intensity, frequency, duration and interval of the magnetic stimuli.

VNS is a nerve-brain stimulator. An electrode is wrapped around the vagus nerve in the neck and then connected to a pacemaker implanted in the patient’s chest wall. The apparatus is programmed to produce electrical stimuli in the brain.

Over the past few decades, many a critic has drawn comparisons between psychiatric experiments and the unconscionable “science” perpetrated by Nazi practitioners in concentration camps. Psychiatrists will not be able to dispel these notions, unless and until they stop claiming scientific value for their techniques. If history is anything to go by, they will once again plead to be given “another chance” and new treatments will be used to create an appearance of scientific progress. But in the end, they will be no closer to effecting any cures; all they will have accomplished is assault and mayhem in the name of therapy.

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