The untruths of psychiatry

I’ve said several times (see eg. previous post) that biomedical psychiatry wishfully thinks that primary mental illness will be shown to be caused by brain abnormality in some way. It even commonly acts as though that has already been proven. People are encouraged to think that there is something wrong with the brains of people who are mentally ill. That there must be something wrong may seem plausible but people are not just their brains. Of course what they think, feel and do is mediated by the brain. However, people are not completely driven by their brains. Their environment and circumstances, for example, have some influence. How people lead their life means that in a way people are also forming themselves. There may well be reasons why people become mentally ill but there is a sense in which we can never prove why they have.

People generally find this conclusion too difficult to accept. If they did there would be too much uncertainty in life and psychiatry in particular (see eg. previous post). They therefore embark on pseudoscientific speculations about the biological nature of mental illness believing them to be true (see eg. last post). These speculations can be repeated in the media misleading the public about the evidence. 

Peter Gøtzsche, who I've mentioned before (see eg. previous post), writes on Mad in America (see blog post) about the claim on Danish national TV that patients with an ADHD diagnosis die 5 years earlier if they are not treated with drugs. Peter managed to obtain a correction from Danish TV that there is no evidence for making such an unequivocal statement. The trouble is that such statements about ADHD (see eg. previous post) and neurodiversity in general (see eg. another previous post) are widely propagated in the media. Peter talks about the “pervasive lies of psychiatry” and there is a legitimate question about how much people are being misled about the role of the brain in mental illness and life in general. Mistakes and wishful thinking can become outright falsehoods in psychiatry that it should make more effort to avoid.