“By embracing the technology-worship “religion,” psychiatry is permitted to ignore the reality of its repeated failures.“
This article by Dr. Bruce Levine has been published by Mad in America. It begins:
“How can psychiatry maintain its authority and influence despite its repeated scientific failures and lack of progress—now even acknowledged by key members of the psychiatric establishment and the mainstream media?
As I documented in CounterPunch earlier this year, it is now mainstream to acknowledge that: (1) psychiatry’s treatment outcomes are ‘abysmal’ and ‘not getting any better’; (2) the serotonin imbalance theory of depression is untrue; and (3) psychiatry’s diagnostic manual, the DSM, is scientifically invalid.
Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) from 2002-2015, acknowledged in 2011, ‘Whatever we’ve been doing for five decades, it ain’t working. When I look at the numbers—the number of suicides, the number of disabilities, the mortality data—it’s abysmal, and it’s not getting any better.’
In 2021, New York Times reporter Benedict Carey, after covering psychiatry for twenty years, concluded that psychiatry had done ‘little to improve the lives of the millions of people living with persistent mental distress. Almost every measure of our collective mental health—rates of suicide, anxiety, depression, addiction deaths, psychiatric prescription use—went the wrong direction, even as access to services expanded greatly.’
In 2023, Time reported, ‘About one in eight U.S. adults now takes an antidepressant’; however, Time continued, ‘Mental health is getting worse by multiple metrics. Suicide rates have risen by about 30% since 2000. . . . As of late 2022, just 31% of U.S. adults considered their mental health ‘excellent,’ down from 43% two decades earlier.’ …”
You can read more from here.
