Psychiatrists Admit No Science And No Cures: In A 5 Minute One-Sided Video

A video from CCHR (co-founded by the Church of Scientology) is doing the rounds: Psychiatrists Admit No Science and No Cures. The video is 5 minutes long (an automatic defence against being nuanced), one-sided, it features Thomas Szasz, it semi-ambushes a number of American Psychiatric Association conference delegates/psychiatrists on the street who can have had little idea that the material would be used in this way.

I'm taken aback by the video. No, there is no blood test for it, but if a troubled teen self-harms many times a day, I think there is a mental-health problem. However, the video seems to be anti-psychiatry (perhaps this is not surprising, given its origins). I don't understand what is being offered as a solution. It's all well and good to advise us to say, "Gee, Doc. Where's the test for that?" upon hearing a psychiatric diagnosis for a loved one, but what is that supposed to do? Leave us refusing interventions (pharmacological or not) that might help the putative loved one? Depression does have a well-established mortality rate, doesn't it? Or is there some serious and well-researched disagreement on this point?

As for the sneering cui bono question which Szasz answers with, "The people who make the diagnosis", what? Seriously, it's the psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers etc. who benefit? Nice to see that Big Pharma is implicitly left out of the rogue's gallery for once, although I am sure that they would be in the list of secondary beneficiaries or rogues. I know very little about what the Church of Scientology recommends for diagnoses in which they don't believe, but media reports tend to contain the words vitamins and saunas. I have no idea whether they charge for these interventions, I equally have no idea whether or not they are effective although I have my doubts.

Mental health is a serious issue. Psychiatry deserves more than ambushing delegates on the street and taking their responses out of context. I would like to see a discussion in which psychiatrists tell us what they do achieve: I'd even like to see input from some patients.

Anecdote warning. When I was 9 years old my mother sent me to take something to a neighbour. When I arrived, my neighbour's children were crying in the kitchen: their mother was in bed and refusing to move because she was a nuclear bomb, and if she moved, she would destroy the world. I fetched my mother. Sometime later our neighbour was admitted to hospital. Some weeks later, our neighbour returned home. She no longer believed that she was a nuclear bomb and she was functional again. Cure? Maybe not, because she did need to keep taking some medication. Remarkably improved and functional to the point of being a success story? Absolutely.

I wouldn't feel so strongly about this video if it were not being so heavily promoted among desperate parents who receive nothing but conflicting advice about what best to do for their troubled children. This is the harm of what happens when government destroys its own credibility and betrays the trust of the electorate.

I'm reproducing this post by permission from Shinga of Breath Spa for Kids.

I find this video is a classic example of mis-information. Michael Crichton recently gave a lecture on Fear, Complexity, Environmental Management in the 21st Century. He gives a remarkable account of the mis-information surrounding the impact of Chernobyl. He summarises some of the statistics of estimated deaths and health-related problems and goes on to discuss how wrong they have proved to be. Crichton quotes a UN report from 2005 that says the largest public health problem created by the incident at Chernobyl is the:

damaging psychological impact [due] to a lack of accurate information…[manifesting] as negative self-assessments of health, belief in a shortened life expectancy, lack of initiative, and dependency on assistance from the state.

In Crichton’s opinion:

the greatest damage to the people of Chernobyl was caused by bad information. These people weren’t blighted by radiation so much as by terrifying but false information. We ought to ponder, for a minute, exactly what that implies. We demand strict controls on radiation because it is such a health hazard. But Chernobyl suggests that false information can be a health hazard as damaging as radiation. I am not saying radiation is not a threat. I am not saying Chernobyl was not a genuinely serious event.

But thousands of Ukrainians who didn’t die were made invalids out of fear. They were told to be afraid. They were told they were going to die when they weren’t. They were told their children would be deformed when they weren’t. They were told they couldn’t have children when they could. They were authoritatively promised a future of cancer, deformities, pain and decay. It’s no wonder they responded as they did.

It is easy to assign a demon role to the demands of television and the public’s desire for information. It’s incompatible with our social and intellectual values that there should be a draconian censorship policy that would restrict publication, broadcast and dissemination of speculation. We need public discussions of important issues and so we need access to views from interested parties. But there are times when I would like some of the assumptions and data underlying the speculation (which is sometimes presented as if it is fact) to be made more explicit.

Most of all, I would like some smart economist to write a book on The Moral Consequences of FEAR or The Economic Costs of Blighting Lives Through Mis-information.

Copyright 2006, Tony Plant Happystance Project