By Kieron McFadden

n this series of articles, Iwill be examining whether psychiatric drugs serve any purpose other thanenriching their manufacturers and the psychiatrists who administer them. I willbe showing how someone seeking relief from some mental or emotional misery canfind safe and EFFECTIVE solutions outside the psychiatrist's pharmocopia andindeed he had better if he wants to get well. The Stone Age of psychiatry is comingto an end.

Somewhere back in the middle ages. the use of leeches to cure physicalailments must have begun its demise with a similar question to the one posed bythe title of this essay. One day, someone looked at the state of medicine, tookon board new advances and discoveries and asked the question: do we actuallyNEED leeches at all?

Until that time "everybody knew" that leeches cured illnessdespite the fact that there was no evidence they did anything at all exceptleave an already sick person closer to death by virtue of blood loss.

One can imagine that the owners of the leech farms would have been only toohappy not to have the palliative effects of leeches called into question.Indeed, one can visualize the leech farming corporations investing heavily inmarketing campaigns to convince everyone of the indispensability of leeches inpreserving human life and rubbishing new "crackpot" branches ofmedicine such as penicillin and hygiene, just as they rubbished as superstitionthe herbal cures and remedies that had served man workably for thousands ofyears.

If it ever got out that leeches were not only not needed but actually madepeople even more ill, the leech farming corporations stood to lose a packet andas they were far more concerned with preserving a profitable monopoly thanadvancing the cause of human longevity they were, in my fictitious scenario,mighty determined to prevent real healers muscling in on their racket.

Well, the real healers won that particular battle, much to Man's advantage.Advances were made in medicine and nutrition that were to the benefit of all,while the leech lingered in the ancestral memory merely as a symbol of pastignorance vanquished.

The battle may have been won but the war still progresses and human knowledgecontinues to carve out its arduous advance, sometimes against entrenchedresistance. One area that is making heroic strides is the field of nutrition,both as it affects physical health and as it affects one's state of mind andemotional condition.

And in its way, lo and behold, stand the modern equivalent of leech farmingcorporations, the wealthy vested interest groups known as pharmaceuticalmanufacturers and psychiatrists. They are very happy for one particular"everybody knows" to continue: that psychiatric medications arenecessary to cure mental disorders.

Actually, they don't say "cure" because they don't believe cure ispossible , they say "alleviate" or "manage," which isanother way of saying that the patient needs to take their medications for lifeand this is immensely profitable.

However, the whole "I've got a mental disorder but a psychiatric pillwill fix me up" routine is a complete myth. The myth is very profitablefor the pill manufacturers and pushers and so they spend more on marketing thanthey do on research in order to get as many people people as possible poppingtheir pills from as young an age as possible and on every pretext imaginable.

Unfortunately the pills often debilitate, harm and kill human beings and ifthe psychiatric drugging pandemic continues, with the evident acquiescence ofour governments, to cut broad swathes through the citizenry there will beno-one left sufficiently clear of mind and endowed with vigor to run things andthe whole civilization will stagger drunkenly into its own fog and, with astultified whimper, perish.

So let's begin the process of dispelling our very own Twenty First Centuryleech myth and examine whether we actually need the psychiatrist's pills atall.