Those psychiatrists are crazy

I will start by saying I am a bystander in all of this, that I have not been diagnosed or accused by any of these guys, but I am beginning more and more to see through the sham that is psychiatry and psychology. I am not a scientologist or anything like that, those guys are just as crazy, but the psychiatric profession is scaring me more and more. I know that mental illness is real, and that it is a huge burden for indiviuals and for society. But it is part of the greater problem of over-treatment in health care today. I know there are raving lunatics who think god or the C.I.A. or whoever is talking to them from the fillings in their teeth, or that the orbiting mind control lasers are responsible or something. When I was in medical school I met a guy who claimed to be Ross Perot's son (this was a black guy) and when the cops came for him he was sitting on the front porch with a shotgun waiting for them.

But the real crazies who have real organic problems, can be treated by internists and neurologists. The rest is just a slowly creeping expansion of unscientific, even magical, thinking into medicine. When up to 26% of people get diagnosed at some point in their lives, then you have to start wondering. First people noticed that antidepressants might lead some people to kill themselves, then they noticed that perhaps they don't do anything at all.

I can't do as thorough a job of writing it as the March 1 Economist, which discusses this in detail, but suffice it to say the evidence supporting anti-depressants is pretty thin. Yet 10 billion doses of anti depressants were taken in 2004. Ka-ching $$$.

Is this any different than televangelists selling hope? For modern man looking for the answer to life, the universe, and everything in science, they turn to this. And medicine obliges, and big pharma obliges.

Selling hope, happiness, and solutions to existential crises in pill form. And the methods of science are applied to happiness, and the illusion of objective truth is created.
"The statistics say the pills make people happy, therefore it must be true." This is the same fallacy that puts a dollar value on human lives. Human lives can't be measured in any meaningful way with dollars, and happiness can't be measured with statistics and surveys of subjective symptoms. It's like trying to catch moonlight in a pail.

The illusion of objectivity is disturbing. We say these problems are a result of too much or too little dopamine, too much or too little serotonin, or norepinephrine, or GABA. Which is exactly what people thought about black bile, green bile, phlegm, and blood. I predict in twenty years, instead of calling people "sanguine" or "melancholic" or "phlegmatic", they will be dopaminish. Perhaps we could sell snake oil labeled "Sero-tonic", and people can be seroterrific when they feel good.

And even the blood/black bile/green bile/phlegm theory was simply the theory of demons and evil spirits updated for the times.

Anyway, I feel GABAish, so I am going to sign off now.