Criticism of Psychiatry reprint

Here's an interesting article I'm reprinting from Keith Scott-Mumby's newsletter:

[Keith Scott-Mumby wrote:]

Issue 202 | Date: February 17, 2017

Psychiatrists Are The Real Screwballs I’m not so sure about the patients but I am sure about the doctors: psychiatrists are just nuts! They have a fantasy diagnosis system that is not based on any real-world objective test. Not one. Not any! It’s shocking to grasp this but you need to know… it’s true. The so-called “bible” of psychiatry, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual or DSM (currently number 5 or V), lists over 300 conditions, not one of which exists in reality. OK, I’m kidding slightly. But not one of those diagnoses can be proved, therefore in a sense they are not real. It’s all opinion. There is no definitive blood test, x-ray, scan result, urine change or microscope visual that can establish any of the 300 conditions. That’s why you can visit one psychiatrist, who says you’re depressed; another says you have anxiety neurosis; and a third (if you are unlucky) will try to tell you that you have signs of schizophrenia. But none of these experts will look at some     lab work and say, “This shows you have XYZ condition.” I repeat: there are no such tests. Yet these people are dishing out some of the heaviest, most destructive “therapies” known: toxic chemicals, including SSRIs, electroshock convulsion treatment and, yes, they are still doing lobotomies in some barbaric places (ie. Great Britain and The United States of America!) British psychiatrist Maurice Partridge, who conducted a follow-up study of 300 lobotomy patients, said that the treatment achieved its effects by "reducing the complexity of psychic life". Following the operation, spontaneity, responsiveness,     self-awareness and self-control were reduced. Activity was replaced by inertia, and people were left emotionally blunted and restricted in their intellectual range.  In other words the patients is wrecked but complains less. For “reducing the complexity of psychic life” read: cabbage state. Based on the fact that they have no workable diagnostic system, they have no right to treat anything. Yet they subsume the right to destroy brain tissue permanently and blunt the whole purpose of living. Holistic Psychiatry? I complain that they do not have any lab work. But in fact they do! It is my assertion that over 95% of so-called “mental illness” is caused by undiagnosed and untreated physical disorders, namely food allergies, heavy metal inflammation, nutritional deficiencies, hormonal imbalances and hidden stealth pathogens. So the real treatment becomes obvious: fix the physical problem. Do not label the person as a mental case and treat him or her with frightful chemicals under the guise of medicines. I’m shortly finishing up a book on Holistic Psychiatry (that’s its working title), which goes into these many treatable disorders which can underpin mental symptoms. I mean, just take hormones…. Any woman of menstruating age can report that a change in hormones can signal severe, even extreme, mental changes. Ask a man! It’s been a joke of mine for decades that “a lot of men suffer from pre-menstrual tension!” Does it mean a woman becomes a lunatic every month? I don’t think so. The point is that we do not need a Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of supposed disorders. We really need a book of causes. An effective manual of psychiatry would list food allergies as probably the main condition; there would be a chapter on hormones; another chapter on nutritional deficiencies (very common, even if the overfed West); and a chapter on parasites and stealth pathogens. There would also be a chapter on cool procedures to pull people out of psychic trauma—trauma and abuse does exist, of course. But: 1.    Is not a mental illness, even when incapacitating (see 2.) 2.    Need not be permanent, if dealt with properly 3.    Should not be treated with addictive chemicals that create ongoing dysfunctionality Let’s do what the math teacher calls factorization. The treatment of depression due to food allergies (I’ve cured over a thousand such) is change the diet; the treatment of depression due to low thyroid function is supplement (replace) the thyroid hormones; the treatment of depression due to B vitamin deficiency is to supplement the vitamins; the treatment of depression due to Lyme’s is antibiotics to kill the spirochete (I’m talking real Lyme’s: an infection with Borrelia burgdorferi). Take out the common factor, which is “depression”, and you are left with a series of proper diagnoses and we do not need the word depression at all! Can’t Diagnose Sanity, Never Mind Mental Illness OK, let’s lighten up and have some fun. A couple weeks ago, sitting reading in Waikiki, I came across an interesting experiment. The book calls itself The Untold Story of Psychiatry and is by Jeffrey A. Lieberman, MD. He’s obviously a shrink and takes the orthodox point of view. Not a vitamin or whole food in the entire book! The article that caught my eye, referred to by Lieberman, took place in 1973 (long before I came to the States). It was published in the prestigious journal Science and was titled “On Being Sane In Insane Places.” The author was David Rosenhan, a lawyer, not an MD (he had a degree in psychology though). The opening sentence of Rosenhan’s article was “If sanity and insanity exist, how shall we know them?” Good question! He proposed to investigate psychiatry’s take on this important issue by sending sane, well-balanced and otherwise “normal” individuals into mental hospitals, to see if they were spotted as sane and sent home. Unbeknownst to the hospital staffs, Rosenhan engineered the secret admission of eight totally normal individuals. They used fake identities and varied their profession from the real ones. At each hospital, they telephoned ahead for an appointment and when they arrived they complained of hearing voices and had been primed to say three words: “empty”, “hollow” and “thud”. Each of the fake patients was a voluntary admission, by the way. Each was instructed to say they no longer heard voices and to start behaving totally normally, once they reached the psychiatric ward. The result? All but one of the planted cases were diagnosed as schizophrenic! They were locked up from 7 – 52 days (brave fellows!) Rosenhan’s conclusion: We cannot distinguish the sane from the insane in mental hospitals. Predictably there was widespread outrage and derision from the public at large. Some of my older subscribers may even remember this outcry (1973). But Rosenhan wasn’t done yet! The furor that he evoked suggested a further chance to humiliate the psychiatrists! He issued a new challenge to one of the hospitals, which unwisely accepted: “Over the coming year, I will send in another round of impostors into your hospital. You try to detect them, knowing full well that they will be coming, and at the end of the year, we will see how many you catch.” From a total intake of 193 patients over the subsequent year, the staff identified 41 possible fake patients. To which Rosenhan gleefully announced that he had not sent in a single imposter! So he declared that, given psychiatry’s inability to tell sane from insane individuals, they were clearly incompetent. It resulted in the medical insurance companies, like Aetna and Blue Cross, slashing the mental health benefits in their policies. Their complaint, apart from the absurdity of being unable to identify true mental illness, was that in this one specialty, only the patient and psychiatrist could ever know what medical services were provided and why. I laughed so much, I nearly spilled my Mai Tai! To your continuing mental health! Dr. Keith Scott-Mumby The Official Alternative Doctor www.alternative-doctor.com What? Not a subscriber? To get your weekly copy of my fabulous "Medicine Outside the Box" sign up here...