| I absolutely agree with this. For anyone curious about how psychiatry is bought and paid for by pharmaceutical companies, read the book "Mad in America" by Robert Whitaker. He looks at studies of the long-term outcomes for schizophrenia patients who are treated with drugs versus those who aren't given drugs. What he finds is that schizophrenics who never take psychiatric drugs have overwhelmingly better long-term outcomes than those that do. This isn't a mere selection effect either; the studies track cohorts of people who were given the same prognosis (bad, medium, or good) at the beginning of their course of treatment. In each cohort except for the most severe, individuals who were treated with drugs experienced some short-term relief but fared far worse than the non-drug subgroup over the long run. The psychiatry establishment has a long and ugly history of suppressing alternative treatments which emphasize little/no drug use. There is a massive vested financial interest in the status quo treatment of keeping schizophrenics on drugs for as long as possible. In my opinion it's the most criminal act being perpetrated today on a systemic basis by a supposedly respectable profession. Forget about Wall Street blowing up the economy with collateralized debt obligations or politicians underfunding pension obligations to the tune of billions of dollars; psychiatrists are literally preying on the brains of the mentally ill in direct contradiction to the evidence of which treatments work best, all so they can line their pockets with money. One concrete example: a study by the World Health Organization found that schizophrenics in the US and other developed countries fared much worse than schizophrenics throughout the developing world. What's the common thread among treatment of schizophrenics in the developed world vs those in the developing world? Drug use. This issue strikes near to me since I had a run-in with a psychiatrist when I was much younger due to anxiety issues/mild psychotic symptoms which have since been resolved with age and quitting a job which I hated. He kept pressuring me to take drugs, but when I showed him the aforementioned study his response to me was astounding: "Well, I haven't personally seen that in people I've treated." His entire basis of selecting a course of action was anecdotal data! http://arachnoid.com/trouble_with_psychology/index.html - That's another great resource on the sham science underlying psychology/psychiatry. Paul has written a number of them, and they're quite informative. |
He also was really quick to take correlation and imply causation. Like you do when you talk about the common thread of schizophrenics in the developed world vs the developing world. You could just as well argue that the difference is clean drinking water, or any other number of things.