INTRODUCTION In Desperate Need of Help

Life can sometimes be a real challenge. It can get very rough indeed. A family faced with a seriously disturbed and irrational member can become desperate in their attempts to resolve the crisis.

To whom can they turn when this happens?

According to psychiatrists, one should consult them as the mental health experts. But that is a deception, as many have discovered.

Dr. Megan Shields, a practicing family physician for more than 25 years, and an Advisory Board member of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, warns: “Psychiatrists know nothing about the mind, treat the individual as no more than an organ in the head (the brain) and have about as much interest in spirituality, standard medicine and curing, as an executioner has in saving lives.”

In the film, A Beautiful Mind, Nobel Prize winner John Nash is depicted as relying on psychiatry’s latest breakthrough drugs to prevent a relapse of his “schizophrenia.” This is Hollywood fiction, however, as Nash himself disputes the film’s portrayal of him taking “newer medications.” At the time of his Nobel Prize award, Nash had not taken any psychiatric drugs for 24 years and had recovered naturally from his disturbed state.

This is not to suggest that anyone taking prescribed, psychotropic drugs should immediately dispense with them. Due to their dangerous side effects, no one should stop taking any psychiatric drug without the advice and assistance of a competent non-psychiatric, medical doctor.

We wish to highlight however, that there are solutions to serious mental disturbances that avoid the serious risks and flaws inherent in psychiatry.

Any psychiatrist or psychologist who claims that “serious mental illnesses” are no different than a heart condition, gangrene of the leg or the common cold, is dealing in deception.

As Dr. Thomas Szasz, professor of psychiatry emeritus of the State University of New York, Syracuse, states, “If we are to consider mental disease to be like physical disease, we ought to have biochemical or pathological evidence.” And if an “illness” is to be “scientifically meaningful, it must somehow be capable of being approached, measured or tested in a scientific fashion, as through a blood test or an electroencephalograph [recording of brain electrical activity]. If it cannot be so measured—as is the case [with] … ‘mental illness’—then the phrase ‘illness’ is at best a metaphor and at worst a myth, and that therefore ‘treating’ these ‘illnesses’ is an equally … unscientific enterprise.”

In practice, there is abundant evidence that real physical illness, with real pathology, can seriously affect an individual’s mental state and behavior. Psychiatry completely ignores this weight of scientific evidence, preferring to assign all blame to illnesses and supposed “chemical imbalances” in the brain that have never been proven to exist, and limits all practice to brutal treatments that have done nothing but permanently damage the brain and the individual.

Knowing nothing about the mind, the brain, or about the underlying causes of serious mental disturbance, psychiatry still sears the brain with electroshock, tears it with psychosurgery and deadens it with dangerous drugs. Completely ignorant of what they are dealing with, they simply prefer the expedient approach of “throwing a hand grenade into a switchboard to fix it.” It sounds and looks impressive, but in the process destroys a whole lot that’s good, cures nothing but costs billions of taxpayers’ dollars each year.

By destroying parts of the brain, the person is more tractable, but less alive. The original mental disturbance remains in place, just suppressed. This is psychiatry in action in the treatment of disturbed individuals.

The information in this publication is a warning for anyone who may be experiencing serious difficulties in life, or knows of someone who is, and who is looking for answers. There are alternatives to psychiatric treatment. Seek out and support them for they can repair and build. They also work. Avoid psychiatry because it only tears apart and destroys. And it never works.

Sincerely,

Jan Eastgate, President,
Citizens Commission on Human Rights International

Next

Back to Contents