One fascinating story from the American Psychiatric Association's annual meeting this month in Los Angeles is the mere fact that such a stalwart psychopharmacology authority as Stephan M. Stahl may be jumping on a bandwagon, which until very recently was widely derided as "antipsychiatry." Stahl must be one of the top ten promoters of psychiatric drugs in the world! Why would he help "deprescribe"-?
Maybe it's an opportunistic business move for Stahl. His new book is due out in exactly six months, and it's expensive ($60 for a paperback of just over 500 pages). I may buy a couple dozen copies and give them out to clients and nuthouse psychiatrists. Any legitimacy attributed to getting people off psychiatric drugs is deliciously seditious in the context of the state plantation system. But I can't help thinking my friend Rodney Yoder will be absolutely sure that the real intention here is to own the deprescribing craze, i.e., own it to exploit it, or to make it disappear.
If we take everybody off the drugs, we will inevitably saddle the forensic psychiatric system with the impossible requirement that clinicians must talk to patients. They hate that. They want to be doctors who are obeyed, not counselors who must listen or empathize. And anyway, it's too expensive (not to mention useless) to do anything with dangerous crazy people other than just drug them into sufficient disability so that they conveniently, without ugliness, disappear. That is clearly the modus operandi of Illinois' Department of Human Services.
In the meantime, I saw headlines this morning about North Carolina's psychiatric slave system, which sounds to me very similar to Illinois' plantations. It can be expected that horrible abuses will be found in every state if competent investigations are conducted. They might be. We are inches away from a widespread realization by the American public that the kind of "mental health" we have been sold since 1945 has been a harmful scam. Psychiatry as we have known it will cease to exist without forced "hospitalization" and "treatment." Tom Szasz predicted that long ago.
Involuntary psychiatry has long been lamented, at least on and off, as necessary. But it doesn't protect the public or serve justice. The drugs have long been lamented, at least occasionally, as imperfect. But they don't help anyone or cure anything.
These facts are being acknowledged, implicitly, even in the media and amazingly, at APAAM2025! There will be efforts to distract attention from the facts, but psychiatry may lose its status and power.
That would be a happy development indeed. Psychiatria delenda est!
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