“Psychiatry is a science…and it has the tools and knowledge at its disposal to help us when our lives break down. This is the official story we hear, the one gaining airtime in the media, the ear of government policymakers, and widespread dissemination through celebrity chat shows and popular magazines. But what if the actual truth about psychiatry were not so sanguine or clear cut as we have all been led to believe? What if there is another more insidious story to be told, one that threatens all of our preconceptions? An alternative story certainly does exist—a deeper and far more maddening story.”
James Davies, Cracked: Why Psychiatry is Doing More Harm Than Good
The public has been led to believe that the diagnosis of mental illness by psychiatrists, and the prescribing of psychiatric drugs, is a practice grounded in science. In this video, we explain why this is not the case. We look at the problems with the diagnostic methods of mainstream psychiatry and we explore how Big Pharma has infiltrated and corrupted the psychiatric industry.
In 1973, a groundbreaking experiment was organized by David Rosenhan of Stanford University. Seven academics checked themselves into different psychiatric hospitals across the United States. Each told the psychiatrist on duty that they were hearing a voice in their head that said the word “thud”. Other than this, they acted normally. All the academics were diagnosed with schizophrenia, admitted to mental hospitals, and given antipsychotic drugs. Most of the academics were held for weeks against their will, and a few for over two months. Confessing that they were subjects in a scientific experiment only solidified the psychiatrists’ conviction that they were insane. The only way the academics managed to be released was to agree they were mentally ill and pretend they were getting better.
Another study conducted in the 1970s presented the same patients to different American psychiatrists in different locations. It was discovered that two psychiatrists gave different diagnoses to the same patient almost half the time. Yet another experiment showed that psychiatrists in the United States and Russia were twice as likely to diagnose a patient as schizophrenic than psychiatrists in England and Europe. Regarding these three studies, James Davies writes that:
“…in the history of psychiatry, [these experiments] were considered game-changers. They plunged psychiatry into severe crisis in the 1970s by exposing that there was something terribly wrong with the diagnostic system. Psychiatrists were not only defining sane people as insane, but when two psychiatrists at any given time were faced with the same patient, they would assign different diagnoses nearly half the time…Psychiatry was making these errors because it possessed no objective way of testing whether a given person was mentally disordered, and if so, precisely what disorder he or she was suffering from. Without such objective tests, the diagnosis a psychiatrist would assign could be influenced by his subjective preferences, and as different psychiatrists were swayed by different subjective factors, it was understandable that they regularly disagreed about what diagnosis to give.”
James Davies, Cracked: Why Psychiatry is Doing More Harm Than Good
Leaders in the psychiatric industry recognized that these experiments exposed a deep problem at the heart of psychiatry, which required a solution. The solution devised was to completely revamp the manual used to diagnose mental disorders. This manual is called the DSM, or the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and as Herbert Pardes explains:
“If you don’t understand the history of the DSM, you cannot hope to understand modern psychiatry…the DSM contains every mental disorder with which you or I could be potentially diagnosed, and that’s its significance.”
Herbert Pardes, Quoted in James Davies, Cracked: Why Psychiatry is Doing More Harm Than Good
The second edition of the DSM, published in 1968, consisted of vague definitions of mental illness which left too much room for subjective interpretation. In the 1970s, psychiatrists put together a Taskforce to essentially tear up DSM-II and re-write a new manual – DSM-III. Allen Frances, Chairman Emeritus of the Department of Psychiatry at Duke University, explains how the release of DSM-III enormously impacted not just the psychiatric community but the public at large.
“DSM stands for Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. Until 1980, DSMs were deservedly obscure little books that no one much cared about or read. Then DSM-III burst on the scene—a very fat book that quickly became a cultural icon, a perennial best seller, and the object of undue worship as the “bible” of psychiatry. Because it sets the crucial boundary between normality and mental illness, DSM has gained a huge societal significance and determines all sorts of important things that have an enormous impact on people’s lives—like who is considered well and who is sick [and] what treatment is offered…”
Allen Frances, Saving Normal
DSM-III was an overnight sensation. It quickly sold out and the American Psychiatric Association took 6 months to print enough copies to catch up with the demand. This so-called bible of psychiatry became the default manual which psychiatrists across the world used to diagnose mental disorders. With its release and remarkable success, it appeared as if the field of psychiatry had overcome its diagnostic problems. However, as James Davies writes:
“…even as the influence of the manual spread, the truth about its construction remained obscure. Most professionals using the manual simply did not know (and still do not know today) the extent to which biological evidence or solid research failed to guide the choices the taskforce made.”
James Davies, Cracked: Why Psychiatry is Doing More Harm Than Good
