Helpful Medicine v. Harmful Psychiatry

Yesterday I had a long conversation with a woman who wants to sue her psychiatrist of 25 years ago for disabilities she continues to suffer, caused by shock treatment, multiple psychiatric drugs, and a psychiatric label of “bipolar”. She once had an excellent sense of direction, but can no longer find her way to places where she has driven many times. She can’t practice her previous work as a surgical assistant. She can’t maintain stable relationships.

There were other complaints that I may be forgetting at the moment... but this person clearly believes psychiatry ruined her life. I also believe her. She was rational and open, not obsessive, and in good two-way communication.

One very interesting point occurred to me during this conversation. So many of this woman’s descriptions of side effects from shock treatment and drugs sounded startlingly similar to symptoms I experienced myself, in the weeks before I was diagnosed with a meningioma on my right frontal lobe, and before the surgery to remove that tumor. Clearly, physical assaults on the brain create predictable problems, whether they are organic (as in my own case) or iatrogenic (as with so many victims of psychiatric “medicine”).

The biggest difference between my case and that of the woman I spoke with yesterday is that my diagnosis (right frontal lobe meningioma) was useful and scientific, whereas her “diagnosis” (“bipolar disorder”) was bullshit: my medical/surgical treatment (craniotomy and tumor excision) was successful, whereas hers (electric shocks to the brain and terrible psychiatric drugs as pretended “medicine”) had no benefit, but only hurt.

The other significant difference was that I consented to surgery after being fully informed of risks and benefits, whereas the woman was coerced, lied to and defrauded.

As Thomas Szasz said long ago (by the way, Dan Hardy once told me that Szasz spent a couple years as an intern or resident of some sort at EMHC, back before before it became DSH)... psychiatry, especially state psychiatry, is the single most destructive social/cultural influence in the modern world.

Psychiatria delenda est!