IMPORTANT FACTS

1. While medicine has advanced on a scientific path to major discoveries and cures, psychiatry has never evolved scientifically and is no closer to understanding or curing mental problems.

2. In the 1930s and 1940s psychiatry attempted to emulate medicine with physical �treatments� like insulin shock, psychosurgery and electroshock treatment.

3. In the 1950s and 1960s, psychiatry parodied medicine with psychoactive drugs that only suppressed symptoms, and with its pseudoscientific diagnostic system, the DSM .

4. In 1989, the American Psychiatric Association advised members to increase their �profile among nonpsychiatric physicians,� using the DSM to �yield dividends through increased referrals.�

5. In 1998, the World Psychiatric Association (WPA) produced a �Mental Disorders in Primary Care� kit to induce primary care physicians to diagnose mental illness.

From 1808, when Johann Reil coined the word �psychiatry,� to the 1900s when Emil Kraepelin defined a psychiatrist as �An absolute ruler who � would be able to intervene ruthlessly in the living conditions of people� to modern day, psychiatrists have tried in vain to emulate medical science. After 300 years of suppressing symptoms with pain and force they have yet to define insanity, let alone find its cause or cure.

CHAPTER TWO Psychiatry Versus Medicine

The best way to grasp the psychiatry of today is to understand the psychiatry of yesterday.

Unlike medicine itself, with a history dating at least from ancient Greece, psychiatry is an infant practice. According to Professor Edward Shorter, author of A History of Psychiatry, �Before the end of the 18th century, there was no such thing as psychiatry.�

Doctors Franz G. Alexander and Sheldon T. Selesnick report that in the 1700s and 1800s, the mentally unsound were considered beyond the physical methods of medicine.

It was 1676 when Louis XIII decreed the establishment of hospitaux generaux (general hospitals) throughout France, to contain �the debauched, spendthrift fathers, prodigal sons, blasphemers, men who �seek to undo themselves,� [and] libertines.� That decree marked the beginning of the �great confine ment of the insane.�

From asylums grew the expertise of the institutional custodian, the direct predecessor to the institutional psychiatrist. The phrase snake pit� slang for �mental hospital��stems from these early custodial days, when the insane were thrown into a serpent-filled hole to shock them back to their senses.

Relegated to the position of asylum work, early �psychiatrists� asserted �a legitimate claim to [medical] guild status on the grounds that running an asylum in a therapeutic manner was an art and science as intricate as chemistry or anatomy.� It is a claim to which psychiatry clung steadfastly for 100 years in the face of damning evidence to the contrary.

Although psychiatry was tolerated as �needed,� medicine saw it as suspect, and ensured it was kept in a marginal position.

In 1858, Rudolf Virchow released his Cellular Pathology as Based upon Physiological and Pathological Histology, signaling the birth of modern medicine as a profession based on empirical science. The study of pathology as the phenomenology of disease, combined with the study of bacteriology as the etiology [cause] of infectious disease, placed medicine as the study of bodily disease on the rock solid foundation of modern science.

As medicine advanced on its surefooted, scientifically based path to major discoveries, psychiatrists developed their own ideas independent of the scientific model. In 1803, Johann Reil, who later coined the word �psychiatry� (meaning healing of the soul), wrote of the early custodians as �stepping forward at once to improve the lot of the insane.� He referred to them as a �bold race of men� who dared to take on this �gigantic idea� of �wiping from the face of the earth one of the most devastating of pestilences.� In other words, psychiatry�s pioneers believed they could eradicate insanity.

Reil was the first to label the �psychic method of treatment� as part of medical and surgical methods. However, his �psychic treatments� meant massage, whipping, flogging and opium. John G. Howells, M.D., in World History of Psychiatry, says that Reil�s recommendation of these �methods of cure for mental disease� made a �significant contribution towards the establishing of psychiatry as a medical specialty.� In the 1840s, Dr. Thomas S. Kirkbrade, superintendent of the Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane announced that �recent cases of insanity are commonly very curable.�

Such �cures� included the �socalled Darwin chair� in which �the insane were rotated until blood oozed from their mouths, ears and noses. Castration and starvation cures were also employed.�

In 1918, psychiatric pioneer Emil Kraepelin defined a psychiatrist as �An absolute ruler who, guided by our knowledge of today, would be able to intervene ruthlessly in the living conditions of people and would certainly within a few decades achieve a corresponding decrease of insanity.� World War I was raging when Kraepelin established a psychiatric research center in Germany �for the purpose of determining the nature of mental diseases and of discovering techniques for effecting their prevention, alleviation, and cure.� Ground had been taken already, he said, �that will enable us to win a victory over the direst afflictions that can beset man.�

Nearly a century later, American scientist Shepherd Ivory Franz wrote, �We have no facts which at present enable us to locate the mental processes in the brain any better than they were located 50 years ago.� After 100 years, and in spite of its confident boasts, psychiatry had come no closer to understanding or curing insanity or any mental problem.

The 1930s and 1940s saw a shift towards physical �treatments.� Elliot S. Valen stein, Ph.D. observed, �Physical treatments also helped psychiatrists gain respectability within the field of medicine and enabled them to compete more successfully with neurologists, who often treated patients with so-called �nervous disorders.��

In the decade between 1928 and 1938, psychiatry introduced such horrors as Metrazol shock, insulin shock, electroshock and psychosurgery. Despite these �breakthroughs,� however, most other physicians continued to hold psychiatrists in particularly low esteem.

In the 1950s and 1960s, psychotropic drugs were designed to alleviate some of the sym toms of mental disorders, making patients less of a �problem� for those responsible for their care. Simulta neously, psychiatry introduced a system for mental disorder diagnosis. Professor Shorter called this era the �second biological psychiatry.� It held that �genetics and brain development� were causes of mental illness and that psychoactive drugs and informal psychotherapy were its remedies.

During the next 30 years, psychoactive drugs rapidly became the mainstay of psychiatric therapy, and the psychiatric industry�fully armed with its own drugs and diagnostic system� was ready to expand. In 1989, an American Psychiatric Association (APA) �Campaign Kit� told APA members, �An increase of psychiatry�s profile among nonpsychiatric physicians can do nothing but good. And, for those who are bottom-line oriented, the efforts you spend on building this profile have the potential to yield dividends through increased referrals.�

In 1998, psychiatrists made a concerted effort�primarily through the Collegium Internationale Neuro psychopharmacologicum (CINP), the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), and the World Psychiatric Association (WPA) � to garner support from physicians. The World Health Organization (WHO) produced a �Mental Disorders in Primary Care� kit that was distributed inter nationally, to make it easier for primary care physicians to diagnose mental illness.

Based on the DSM IV and ICD10, the kit was primarily designed to increase business for the mental health system.
What psychiatry lacked in science was being compensated for with marketing.

That marketing includes an unholy alliance with the pharmaceutical industry. Pat Bracken and Phil Thomas, consultant psychiatrists and senior research fellows with the University of Bradford in the United Kingdom, state, �Psychiatry is a major growth area for the pharmaceutical industry. By influencing the way in which psychiatrists frame mental health problems, the industry has developed new (and lucrative) markets for its products.�

Says Carl Elliott, a bioethicist at the University of Minnesota, �The way to sell drugs is to sell psychiatric illness.�

With the selling of mental illness to primary care physicians well in hand, the selling of psychiatric drugs followed. Dr. Glenmullen writes, �As they gain momentum, use of the drugs spread beyond the confines of psychiatry and they are prescribed by general practitioners for everyday maladies.�

Today, through heavy marketing of its diag noses and drugs, psychiatry no longer fights to emulate and gain acceptance from medicine; it has become an integral part of it.

In 1998, psychiatry penetrated the physician�s domain with the release of the World Health Organization�s �Guide to Mental Health in Primary Care� kit, designed to facilitate and promote a medical doctor�s use of psychiatric behavioral checklists for diagnosing mental disorders. Psychiatry�s lack of scientific merit was compensated for by invasive and �hard sell� marketing. The prepackaged list of symptoms enables diagnosis by checklist, with a predetermined treatment plan and referral of patients to psychiatrists.

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