Movement against overpsychiatrisation

The Mental Health and Overmedicalization Summit organised by the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Institute was livestreamed (see youtube video) and led to the launch of the MAHA Action Plan to Curb Psychiatric Overprescribing (see press release). The Summit was supported by Inner Compass, founded by Laura Delano, author of the book Unshrunk: How the mental health industry took over my life - and my fight to get it back. Look at least at the first part of the livestream for the personal testimonies of several young people, like Laura, who feel they were 'psychiatrised' as children. 

As I've said several times (see eg. previous post), when I first started in psychiatry, medication was rarely used in children and adolescents (see also my Lancet Neurology book review). Historically, child and family studies tended to take a more holistic approach to personal and social problems (see eg. my article), but have become increasingly biologised over recent years (see eg. another previous post). Calls to review the use of medication for behavioural problems in children have gone unheeded (see eg. yet another previous post). This has meant that there are now young people who have grown up feeling that their identities have been taken over by being prescribed psychiatric medication from a young age.

Daniel Bergner, author of The mind and the moon: My brother's story, the science of our brains, and the search for our psyches, has an article about the Summit in The New York Times Magazine entitled 'The strange alliance trying to remake American psychiatry'. By this he means that although Inner Compass may not seem like natural Trump allies, it is supportive of Robert F Kennedy Jnr, as Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, in his attempt to curb psychiatric prescribing (see podcast interview of Laura Delano by Kennedy). As I said in a previous post, "Maybe only the politicians can effectively counter ... [the] institutional bias [of psychiatry]".

Psychiatry needs to stop misleading people. including children, about the nature of mental illness. The vast majority of presentations to psychiatric services, certainly child and adolescent services, are not due to a brain disorder. This is not what people always hear because psychiatry wants to fudge the issue, even remains hopeful that an underlying physical cause may be found. It's merely tautologous to say that the brain mediates our thoughts, feelings and behaviour. That doesn't mean they are caused by the brain and psychiatry needs to be explicit about this for a new generation.