Psychiatry is the Only Big Business People Implicitly Trust (and they shouldn’t)

This is a 5 Star rave review of Crazy Like Us by Ethan Watters

This is such an important book. The focus is on the Westernization of mental health practices around the world, but it also touches on some of the biggest issues and conflicts of interest in the psych industry as a whole. This book gets to the heart of the issue: Psychiatry is a business and diseases themselves are marketed.

We create symptom pools and the unconscious mind latches onto these as a way to perform emotional distress. And who has the biggest hand in creating symptom pools? the pharmaceutical companies. Pharmaceutical companies fund research which is then misrepresented and cherry-picked, so the efficacy of psych drugs can not be proven. Psych drugs may help some patients but they greatly harm others: which is itself a reason not to treat them as a blanket solution for all psych patients.

Many of the doctors involved in the creation of the DSM-the single most important tool in psychiatry for diagnosing and treating patients-have received incredible amounts of money from pharmaceutical companies. These conflicts of interest need to end, because they greatly compromise patient care.

There is also a stark condemnation of the biomedical model in this book. This book talks about how otherizing the biomedical model truly is. From my own experience, as a kid living in a very violent home, I was diagnosed with bipolar at age 14, two days after having the absolute fuck beat out of me by my grandfather and I landed in the ER in a hysterical state. Even if I AM mentally ill, there is no way my home environment didn’t exacerbate my symptoms. Yet, all doctors ever talked to me about was my chemical imbalance. When I talked about my abuse I was ignored. I was drugged. The drugs made me much more emotional. With these new symptoms caused by the drugs, the doctors gave me more labels, more diagnoses. I was drugged into symptoms that I did not have and then otherized further.

Psychiatry in its current state, is harmful. Stop telling people to go to therapy or get “professional help.” Like any big business, psychiatry is rife with oppression. The most vulnerable groups are further victimized.