By Kieron McFadden

Of what exactly are mental"disorders" a symptom?

Clearly people do have difficultly from time to time. They do becomeunhappy, get depressed, lose hope, suffer anguish. This is not in question.

What is in question is whether a psychiatric drug is a remedy for it. Canthe person's difficulty be better and MORE SAFELY resolved than by giving theperson a drug.

Modern advances in medicine and nutrition tell us very emphatically thatyes, there is. We must first ask this question, a question incidentally thatpsychiatry does NOT ask when diagnosing a pateint as suffering from some mentaldisorder......

What Causes Mental Symptoms?

The psychiatric answer is that the person has a disorder or imbalance in thebrain or nervous system. It does not really explain how this disorder cameabout and does not PROVE the existence of the alleged disorder; it merelyasserts it. If a doctor tells you you have pancreatitis or a broken arm, hedoes so after taking tests, looking at X rays, analyzing blood and so forth. Hearrives at his diagnosis on the basis of the body's tangible physical evidence.He can point to the X RAY for example and say "There, see? Hairlinefracture of the Ulna. Caused when you fell off your bike most likely."

In the case of a psychiatric diagnosis of, say, "depression, caused bya chemical imbalance in the brain," the psychiatrist makes the diagnosiswithout tests or X rays. He cannot point to anything tangible that proves theexistence of "Depression: there, see that?" In other words, thediagnosis is an assumption or opinion and similarly he cannot explain how thealleged disorder came about.

Of course, a person may be sad or depressed for very tangible reasons: hisbeloved grandmother just died for instance. However, his emotions are ENTIRELYNATURAL AND SANE. He has just had a loss, he feels sad. This is a sanereaction, it is NOT the symptom of a diseased brain or diseased anything.

If however, the person feels depressed for no apparent reason, then yes,something is wrong. The psychiatric reaction is "Ah! Diseased brain!Mentally ill! Here's a prescription...." And off the person goes on a lifesentence of psychiatric drugs that usually cause complications and worseningmental difficulties and these things DO damage the brain and nervous system.

This is all very profitable for psychiatry and the pill manufacturers and itdoes save the psychiatrist from having to do any work: a proper examination andtests the way a real doctor would do or some real but time consuming counselingfor instance. However, it does not cure anything.

By long experience psychiatry found that its pills did not actually make aperson well and often made him WORSE, just as earlier barbarities such as ECTor lobotomy merely killed or maimed but did not cure. Of course psychiatry wastrying to cure something that did not exist (a diseased brain) with a remedythat did not work except to embark the patient on a lifelong career of pilltaking. This lack of ability to actually make anyone well became embarrassing.Therefore. it decided that a cure for "mental illness" was notpossible and abandoned all pretense at trying. It progandized the incurabilityof mental disorders while at the same time expanding the definition of mentaldisorder to embrace almost every nuance of human behaviour. It touted the ideathat mental illness was, alas, in the genes and embarked upon containment ormanagement of the alleged "disease."

What psychotropic medications do at best and usually imperfectly, is mask ordeaden the symptoms.

But symptoms of what?

Psychiatry has alleged the symptoms are of a diseased or deranged brain andsought to "re-arrange" it with chemicals (and without by the way everestablishing what an "arranged" brain is supposed to look like foreach individual patient or how you would even detect an "arranged"condition).

It had gotten nowhere. Human unhappiness, crime, broken relationships anderraticness of behavior are on the rise. The complications (often manifest insuicide and homicidal rages) caused by psychiatric medication are notorious.

Put flatly, in terms of making the mentally or emotionally unwell, wellagain, we have been barking up the wrong tree and the whole approach had been acatastrophic failure.