by Dave Randle
In November 2015, Thomas R Insel stood down as Director of the American National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH).
Insel’s defining moment came in 2013 when he publically accepted that psychiatry’s bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), with its ever-increasing disorders and conditions, lacks any science, objectivity or basis in fact.
Those millions already ‘diagnosed’ with reference to it unsurprisingly found this information harder to swallow than the medications the manual was designed to promote. The thought that one has been used as a patsy for pharmaceutical corporations is not easily borne when you have gone to someone who looks like a doctor for help.
A psychiatrist might look like a doctor, but is more likely to quack like a duck.
He and his colleagues have known for decades, so they claim, that mental conditions are not the result of a chemical imbalance in the brain, but kept the public fiction going because they have no real idea what they might be caused by – and, besides, they were shifting a lot of drugs.
The unmasking of a completely bogus set up that has rooked governments, health service providers and insurance companies for years might have been expected to cause ructions across the medicated world. But to most people on the outside it was hardly news. The Citizens’ Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) has been tirelessly repeating the message and rescuing people from psychiatry’s clutches for more than forty years.
The one sound idea that the founders of psychiatry had was that ‘mental health’ was a racket no one else wanted to get into. Not so now, of course, with charities jumping on the bandwagon in exchange for Pharma ‘contributions’.
Now, at the eleventh hour, when the activity might be advised to try and redeem something from the shambles, clear and demonstrated links between ‘mental difficulties’ and diet, allergies and suppressed pain are ignored in the pursuit of sexier, though equally unavailing, ‘brain science’, in whose convincingly high-tech environment ‘patients’ can be fed through a scanner to find out how badly damaged they have already been by prescription drugs.
While the distressed public often prefers to have something rather than nothing, the exponential abandonment of the ‘profession’ by students is withering it from within.
Will Insel’s successors pursue real solutions to mental travail or keep their wagon hitched to a commercially driven ‘industry of death’, whose days are inevitably and inexorably numbered?
DAVE RANDLE is an author and journalist. Please find him at The Randle Report for more great articles
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