The MH industry fails to recognize abuse & inequality as the primary causes of suffering. They label, disbelieve, and blame survivors on a mass scale. They act like drugs are the only option. Some people claim to feel better by taking mind-affecting drugs but drugs aren’t the only option.
The dramatic push after the war to insert social psychiatry into the West, and the many theories and forms of dynamic psychiatry and psychotherapy that traveled with it (to treat both those said to be mentally ill as well as those who were 'normal') made gains for a short time.
By the late 1960's, however, psychiatry was under attack from within and without.
Many within psychiatry disliked what was occurring and were demanding a return to biological psychiatry (although that subject had never gotten beyond speculation at best).
Psychiatry's monopoly on mental health had been broken and serious questions were being asked regarding the value of the profession. Psychiatry had entered what has been called a "crisis of legitimacy."
"In the American Journal of Psychiatry in 1977, Thomas Hackett, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, pointed out that the number of medical students going into psychiatry had shown a marked and substantial drop throughout the country and that it reflected, in his opinion, a growing skepticism about psychiatry’s useful future as it is seen from the outside. “Apart from their training in medicine,” he claimed, “psychiatrists have nothing unique to offer that cannot be provided by psychologists, the clergy, or lay psychotherapists” Mayes and Horwitz, 2005. DSM-III and the revolution in the classification of mental illness.
By 1976, the President of the American Psychiatric Association, Alan Stone said of social and dynamic psychiatry: "...carrying psychiatrists on a mission to change the world, had brought the profession to the edge of extinction." Mitchell Wilson MD. 1990. DSM III and the Transformation of American Psychiatry: A History.
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Interesting. These days I think psychiatry is used because it's a cheap and quick fix. If someone is distressed then society believes that drugging that person is safe.
But I question how safe psych drugs really are. Just as one example of many, antipsychotic drugs cause the brain to shrink in size. That article says that they don't think this shrinkage has major effects, based on a study they did. But it also says that "we need more research... to evaluate the significance of these brain changes". So I think the real answer about psych drugs is that we don't know what they're actually doing. They could be doing things that we don't yet fully understand.
Also we need to study the relationship between psych meds and mass shooters. Also we should question why the suicide rate is higher now than at any point in recorded history despite so many people receiving psychiatric and psychotherapy services. If I didn’t know better I’d suspect the current standard of care often makes things worse
Agreed we have no idea what these drugs are doing. It is an enormous social experiment with potentially catastrophic consequences merely for drug profits and to hide the fact that psychiatry simply has nothing else. Now, psychedelics..... drugs that were tested long ago for uses in chemical warfare and may even now exist in arsenals across the planet. Utter madness.
On an individual level these drugs have a shotgun effect i.e. they effect broad areas of the brain (nothing to do with disease) and so have many side effects. You may be interested in Joanna Moncrieff. Story of antipsychotics is one of myth and misrepresentation. The Conversation. 2013.
Not saying that this is good or bad, but it’s likely antipsychotics prune certain parts of the brain that cause the dopaminergic overactivity that leads to psychotic symptoms.