IMPORTANT FACTS

1. “Schizophrenia” has no physical abnormality and, therefore, is not a disease.

2. The first patients to be diagnosed with schizophrenia were later found to have been suffering from a virus that caused inflammation of the brain resulting in bizarre behavior.

3. Neuroleptic (nerve seizing) drugs, used to treat schizophrenia, cause damage to the body’s nervous system and result in permanent impairment and even death.

4. Treatment studies show much higher success rates in poorer countries (where neuroleptics were used on fewer patients) than in prosperous countries.

5. Studies show that extreme violence is a documented side effect of both taking psychiatric drugs and withdrawal from them.

CHAPTER ONE Harming the Vulnerable

Most people consider that psychiatry’s main function is to treat patients with severe, even life-threatening mental conditions.
The most pronounced is that condition first called dementia praecox by German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin in the late 1800s, and labeled “schizophrenia” by Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler in 1908.

Psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey reported that Kraepelin “put the final medical seal on irrational behavior by naming it and categorizing it. Irrational behavior could now hold its head up in medical company for it had names. … His classificatory system continues to dominate psychiatry up to the present, not because it has proven of value … [but] because it has been the ticket of admission for irrational behavior into medicine.”

However, Robert Whitaker, author of Mad in America, says the patients that Kraepelin diagnosed with dementia praecox were actually suffering from a virus, encephalitis lethargica (brain inflammation causing lethargy) which was unknown to doctors at the time: “These patients walked oddly and suffered from facial tics, muscle spasms, and sudden bouts of sleepiness. Their pupils reacted sluggishly to light. They also drooled, had difficulty swallowing, were chronically constipated, and were unable to complete willed physical acts.”

Psychiatry never revisited Kraepelin’s material to see that schizophrenia was simply an undiagnosed and untreated physical problem. “Schizophrenia was a concept too vital to the profession’s claim of medical legitimacy. … The physical symptoms of the disease were quietly dropped. … What remained, as the foremost distinguishing features, were the mental symptoms: hallucinations, delusions, and bizarre thoughts,” says Whitaker. Psychiatrists remain committed to calling “schizophrenia” a mental disease despite, after a century of research, the complete absence of objective proof that it exists as a physical brain abnormality.

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