What is Psychiatry?: A Common Sense Guide, Part One

Psychiatry is a nineteenth century school of the mind, which believed that:

Man is an animal.
All Man’s thought, emotion, inspiration, hopes and dreams result from chemical and electrical activity in the brain.
Man has no soul.

The causes of Man’s woes cannot be rectified but they can be suppressed and their symptoms anesthetized by a direct attack on the body, brain and nervous system, through electric shocks and other methods of altering structure, removing or disabling sections of the brain or chemical poisons known as drugs.

When the lack of results achieved by such brutal interventions became a liabilty, psychiatry later added genetics, which asserted that nothing could be done about the mind because human difficulties were inherited: that is, pre-programmed into the person’s genes.

Psychiatry was able to establish itself as an authority on the mind because in the nineteenth century very little was known about the mind. The physical sciences were ascendant and psychiatry was able to make itself sound scientific.

Close examination of psychiatry reveals that its claims to science are bogus. I invite you to verify this for yourself by examining its methodology against the criteria for a true science. However, dressed up in pseudo-scientific trappings, and funded through the decades by governments and corporate/banking interests who have failed to make any such examination, psychiatry clung to its status as an authority on the mind until recent times. This was despite the fact that it was never able to produce workable methods with desirable results, a betterment of Man’s conditions or the resolution of his problems.

Through generous funding by governments and their money masters, the banking elite, and through a huge outpouring of literature and friendly media, psychiatry became woven into the fabric of society. It insinuated itself in various guises and with false claims of expertise into many areas, such as criminal reform, education, the justice system and mental health.

As it did so insanity, violence and crime increased. After nearly two centuries of psychiatric intervention, Man is more troubled and uncertain about himself than he has ever been and violence, crime, insanity and drug addiction are at epidemic levels. The world has become, in other words, catastrophically worse.

If psychiatry had truly provided answers, the opposite would have happened.

Yet despite all this, despite the swathe of carnage it has engineered, it continues to survive thanks to the continued willingness of governments to waste tax payers’ money on it.

Do We Really Need Psychiatric Drugs

The blunt answer to the question asked in the title of this article is: "No, we don’t need psychiatric drugs."

Hope Re-Born
This is actually very good news and heralds an era of re-born hope in the field of mental health, yet the pharmaceutical industry spends more on advertising than it does on research in a concerted campaign to convince us of the opposite answer, to sell us on the idea of using drugs to resolve mental problems.

In so doing they are in the position of a car salesman pulling out all the stops so as to sell us a model of car already several years out of date and which was, even in its heyday, a hideous liability of a contraption in any case.

The concept of using chemical concoctions to alter "brain chemistry" so as to resolve mental difficulties – as technologies go about as subtle and precise as using bashing someone in the head with a baseball bat so as to cure his toothache – has in fact been rendered as redundant as the Stone Age by modern advances in nutrition and psychotherapy.

Massive marketing and promotional efforts have managed to keep this from the view of the general public for a while but the truth has a way of penetrating even the amour plate of the pharmaceutical dinosaurs.

Superior Methods
Methods far superior to and safer than drugs now exist and are available. You do not need to take the drugs proffered by psychiatry in lieu of actually being made well, nor suffer their appalling debilitative effects and complications, nor endure the life sentence of such suffering that embarkation upon the psychiatric-pharmaceutical road so frequently entails.

You just don’t need it. Period.

So why bother? Why go through hell for no good reason? Of course the drug route will be immensely profitable for the psychiatric-pharmaceutical axis if they can entice you and many million others onto it. But do you owe the drug companies that much that you will permit yourself to be damaged in order that they and their shareholders can continue to be rich?

It is true that the reason so many people are lured onto the drug route is that they are unaware that better alternatives exist and there has no doubt been a considerable expenditure of effort by vested interests to ensure the continuation of that ignorance.

But let us for now, for the purposes of this short essay, take just two simple examples.

Feeling Depressed?
If you are, psychiatry will persuade you to take an antidepressant. And you only have to read the drug’s warning label to know what a minefield of potential harm you are walking into if you let yourself be so persuaded.

But did you know that in no less than twenty three random clinical trials, the natural herb St John’s Wort, was found to be as effective, if not actually more effective, than routine antidepressant drugs. St John’s Wort comes however without the dangerous side effects of the pharmaceutical concoctions. (see Leslie Kenton’s book "Healing Herbs," published by Random House in 2002)

Blue-green Algae too – of which you will be hearing a lot more in the near future - are a useful mood elevator, with a host of other wonderful benefits besides (see Miracle Superfood: Blue-Green Algae by Gillian McKeith Ph.D., published by Keats Publishing, Los Angeles).

The motto is: nutrition is better medicine than drugs.

Better Than Psychiatric Drugs, Part Three

The Right Tree

A person who is "mentally disturbed" will be found to have hidden underlying physical problems that prevent their recovery.

Broken bones, pinched nerves, and suppressed pain - all can affect the person’s mental outlook. Modern advances in medicine and nutrition have revealed just how big an adverse effect on the mind can be exerted by nutritional and vitamin deficiencies, poor diet, allergies, food additives and chemical toxins in the fatty tissues of the body.

Physical discomforts, deficiencies and exhaustion have a detrimental effect on mood. The person is medically ill or injured, not "insane." He may have a disease but he does not, short of a tumor, have a diseased or malfunctioning brain, nor is he locked into a mental condition by the fickle pre-programming of his genes.

Fix the medical problem, allergy or nutritional deficiency and the person will experience resurgence.

The correct first action on a seriously mentally disturbed person therefore is a full searching clinical examination by a competent medical doctor.The correct second action is find and fix the cause. There follows below a by no men's exhaustive list of things that can affect quite seriously a person’s mental state and behavior. Just to give you an idea, let me start with the example of Lyme Disease.

Lyme Disease is the most common tick-borne disease in the Northern Hemisphere. It is transmitted to humans by the bite of infected ticks. Early manifestations of infection may include fever, headache, fatigue, depression, and a characteristic skin rash called erythema migraines. Left untreated, late manifestations involving the joints, heart, and nervous system can occur. In most cases, the infection and its symptoms are eliminated with antibiotics, especially if diagnosis and treatment occur early. You will notice that two of the symptoms noted here are depression and fatigue. I

Imagine someone with the early stages of Lyme disease but does not know he has the disease. He feels worn out and depressed. He goes to his doctor or psychiatrist, describes his depression, is not given a thorough physical examination so the presence of the Lymes infection is missed,

The psychiatrist,without checking for any one of a long list of ailments that can cause a person to feel depressed, diagnosed "depression" and wrote out a prescription for anti depressants. The physical cause is neglected so the illness gets worse. The psychotropic medication, supposed to treat a mental disorder that does not exist, causes physical and mental complications and the person gets worse.

In fact, Dr. Paul Fink, past president of the American Psychiatric Association, has admitted that every disorder in Psychiatry’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM IV) can be caused by Lyme Disease. Yet Psychiatrists when diagnosing, steadfastly ignore the spectrum of possible causes of an emotional condition and will limit practice to pharmaceutical and other treatments that have done nothing but damage the brain and the individual.

Here then is a by no means exhaustive lisy of physical illnesses that can cause problems of the mind and mood:

Antidepressant Drugs
Antipsychotic Drugs
Adrenal Over– or Under–activity
Alcohol or Alcohol Withdrawal
Altzheimer’s Disease
Amphetamines

Brain Tumors
Broken Bones
Caffeine or Caffeine Withdrawal
Calcium Imbalance
Cancer
Candida
Chlamydia
Cocaine
Copper Poisoning
Diabetes
Diphtheria
Drug Withdrawal
Ecstasy
Encephalitis
Epilepsy
Heart Disease
Heroin
Herpes
HIV
Hypoglycemia
Insecticide Poisoning
Kidney Disease
Lead Poisoning
Legionnaires Disease
Liver Disease
LSD
Lupus
Lyme Disease
Malaria
Marijuana
Meningitis
Menopausal Symptoms
Mercury Poisoning
Metabolic Abnormalities
Methamphetamines
Monosodium Glutamate (MSG)
Multiple Sclerosis
Nicotine or Nicotine Withdrawal
Nutritional Imbalances
Overdose of Over–the–counter drugs
Parasites
Pellagra (Vitamin B3–Niacin Deficiency)
Pinched Nerves
Pneumonia
Porphyria
Rheumatic Fever
Scarlet fever
Sepsis
Sleep Apnea
Sodium Imbalance
Steroids
Streptococcal Infections
Strokes
Synthetic Food Coloring
Syphilis
Thyroid Over– or Under–activity
Tranquilizers
Typhoid Fever

Urinary Tract Infections
Vitamin B1 Deficiency
Vitamin B12 Deficiency
Vitamin B9–Folic Acid Deficiency
Wheat–gluten Sensitivity
Zinc Deficiency

Drugs, whether illicit street drugs such as cocaine or prescribed psychotropic medication, will at best provide a person with temporary relief by disrupting the routine activities of the nervous system. Given a tranquilizer, for example, the nerves and other body systems are forced to do things they normally would not do.

The human body, however, will fight back against the foreign invader, trying to process the chemical, and working hard to counterbalance its effect on the body. But the body was not designed for the continuous manufacture of euphoric, tranquilizing, or antidepressant sensations via the agency of disruptive chemicals and, quickly or slowly, its systems break down. Tissue damage may occur, nerves stop functioning normally, organs and hormonal systems go awry. Bizarre things start to happen: addiction, exhaustion, diminished sexual desire, trembling, nightmares, hallucinations, and psychosis. Side effects are, in fact, the body’s natural response to having a chemical disrupt its normal functioning.

In other words, the person deteriorates while, unaddressed or even undetected, the original physical illness remains and often worsens.

As a solution or cure to life’s problems, psychotropic drugs do not work. But proper medical treatment, detoxification of the body, antibiotics, setting broken bones, vitamins, nutrition, temperance and sufficient sleep and so forth all do.

The very LAST thing one should do when suffering some unwanted mental condition is take a psychiatric drug!

[Important warning: if you are already on some psychiatric medications do NOT just stop taking them without first seeking and following the guidance of a medical doctor.

Better Than Psychiatric Drugs, Part Two

The Wrong Tree

Clearly people do have difficultly from time to time. They do become unhappy, get depressed, lose hope, suffer anguish. This is not in question.

What is in question is whether a psychiatric drug is a remedy for it. Can the person’s difficulty be better and MORE SAFELY resolved than by giving the person a dug.

Modern advances in medicine and nutrition tell us very emphatically that yes, there is. We must first ask this question, a question incidentally that psychiatry does NOT ask when diagnosing a pateint as suffering from some mental disorder……

What Causes Mental Symptoms?

The psychiatric answer is that the person has a disorder or imbalance in the brain or nervous system. It does not really explain how this disorder came about and does not PROVE the existence of the alleged disorder; it merely asserts it. If a doctor tells you you have pancreatitis or a broken arm, he does so after taking tests, looking at X rays, analyzing blood and so forth. He arrives at his diagnosis on the basis of the body’s tangible physical evidence. He can point to the X RAY for example and say "There, see? Hairline fracture of the Ulna. Caused when you fell off your bike most likely."

In the case of a psychiatric diagnosis of, say, "depression, caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain," the psychiatrist makes the diagnosis without tests or X rays. He cannot point to anything tangible that proves the existence of "Depression: there, see that?" In other words, the diagnosis is an assumption or opinion and similarly he cannot explain how the alleged disorder came about.

Of course, a person may be sad or depressed for very tangible reasons: his beloved grandmother just died for instance. However, his emotions are ENTIRELY NATURAL AND SANE. He has just had a loss, he feels sad. This is a sane reaction, it is NOT the symptom of a diseased brain or diseased anything.

If however, the person feels depressed for no apparent reason, then yes, something is wrong. The psychiatric reaction is "Ah! Diseased brain! Mentally ill! Here’s a prescription…." And off the person goes on a life sentence of psychiatric drugs that usually cause complications and worsening mental difficulties and these things DO damage the brain and nervous system.

This is all very profitable for psychiatry and the pill manufacturers and it does save the psychiatrist from having to do any work: a proper examination and tests the way a real doctor would do or some real but time consuming counseling for instance. However, it does not cure anything.

By long experience psychiatry found that its pills did not actually make a person well and often made him WORSE, just as earlier barbarities such as ECT or lobotomy merely killed or maimed but did not cure. Of course psychiatry was trying to cure something that did not exist (a diseased brain) with a remedy that did not work except to embark the patient on a lifelong career of pill taking. This lack of ability to actually make anyone well became embarrassing. Therefore. it decided that a cure for "mental illness" was not possible and abandoned all pretense at trying. It progandized the incurability of mental disorders while at the same time expanding the definition of mental disorder to embrace almost every nuance of human behaviour. It touted the idea that mental illness was, alas, in the genes and embarked upon containment or management of the alleged "disease."

What psychotropic medications do at best and usually imperfectly, is mask or deaden the symptoms.

But symptoms of what?

Psychiatry has alleged the symptoms are of a diseased or deranged brain and sought to "re-arrange" it with chemicals (and without by the way ever establishing what an "arranged" brain is supposed to look like for each individual patient or how you would even detect an "arranged" condition).

It had gotten nowhere. Human unhappiness, crime, broken relationships and erraticness of behavior are on the rise. The complications (often manifest in suicide and homicidal rages) caused by psychiatric medication are notorious.

Put flatly, in terms of making the mentally or emotionally unwell, well again, we have been barking up the wrong tree and the whole approach had been a catastrophic failure.

So what is the right tree?

Better Than Psychiatric Drugs, Part One

 Do We Actually Need Mind-altering Drugs At All?

Somewhere back in the middle ages. the use of leeches to cure physical ailments must have begun its demise with a similar question to the one posed by the title of this essay. One day, someone looked at the state of medicine, took on board new advances and discoveries and asked the question: do we actually NEED leeches at all?

Until that time "everybody knew" that leeches cured illness despite the fact that there was no evidence they did anything at all except leave an already sick person closer to death by virtue of blood loss.

One can imagine that the owners of the leech farms would have been only too happy not to have the palliative effects of leeches called into question. Indeed, one can visualize the leech farming corporations investing heavily in marketing campaigns to convince everyone of the indispensability of leeches in preserving human life and rubbishing new "crackpot" branches of medicine such as penicillin and hygiene, just as they rubbished as superstition the herbal cures and remedies that had served man workably for thousands of years.

If it ever got out that leeches were not only not needed but actually made people even more ill, the leech farming corporations stood to lose a packet and as they were far more concerned with preserving a profitable monopoly than advancing the cause of human longevity they were, in my fictitious scenario, mighty determined to prevent real healers muscling in on their racket.

Well, the real healers won that particular battle, much to Man’s advantage. Advances were made in medicine and nutrition that were to the benefit of all, while the leech lingered in the ancestral memory merely as a symbol of past ignorance vanquished.

The battle may have been won but the war still progresses and human knowledge continues to carve out its arduous advance, sometimes against entrenched resistance. One area that is making heroic strides is the field of nutrition, both as it affects physical health and as it affects one’s state of mind and emotional condition.

And in its way, lo and behold, stand the modern equivalent of leech farming corporations, the wealthy vested interest groups known as pharmaceutical manufacturers and psychiatrists. They are very happy for one particular "everybody knows" to continue: that psychiatric medications are necessary to cure mental disorders.

Actually, they don’t say "cure" because they don’t believe cure is possible , they say "alleviate" or "manage," which is another way of saying that the patient needs to take their medications for life and this is immensely profitable.

However, the whole "I’ve got a mental disorder but a psychiatric pill will fix me up" routine is a complete myth. The myth is very profitable for the pill manufacturers and pushers and so they spend more on marketing than they do on research in order to get as many people people as possible popping their pills from as young an age as possible and on every pretext imaginable.

Unfortunately the pills often debilitate, harm and kill human beings and if the psychiatric drugging pandemic continues, with the evident acquiescence of our governments, to cut broad swathes through the citizenry there will be no-one left sufficiently clear of mind and endowed with vigor to run things and the whole civilization will stagger drunkenly into its own fog and, with a stultified whimper, perish.

So let’s begin the process of dispelling our very own Twenty First Century leech myth and examine whether we actually need the psychiatrist’s pills at all.

Better than Drugs

How to Get Safer, More Effective Help For Your Child

The growth of the dreadful practice of giving dangerous psychiatric drugs to children in the U.S. is slowing as state agencies increase their vigilance over usage and medical doctors and perhaps even the more benign psychiatrists grow more wary of such powerful medications.

This softening in sales for children is the first sign that litigation, reaction to improper marketing tactics on the part of manufacturers who actually spend more on marketing than they do on research, and concern about the dreadful side effects of these drugs is affecting what had been a fast-growing children's drug segment.

The ongoing psychiatric horror story in Florida, in which one little boy committed suicide and another died while on psychiatric medication, may also be playing a role in this appearance at last of a little light at the end of a very long dark, corpse-strewn tunnel.

How anyone can tout medications for kids that are known to be dangerous and harmful even for adults, just to make a buck, is beyond this writer but evidently some people do. Thankfully some of the heroic work put in by human rights and consumer groups to warn people they are being sold a tainted bill of goods is beginning to pay off. It may be too late to save many thousands of children currently on psychiatric medication but many thousands more in the future will have cause to be thankful for it.

Another factor now entering the scene is a growing awareness on the part of the public that what is being pitched as "medicine" for their kids is not only immensely harmful, it is more often than not, not necessary. It comes as part of a vast money spinning machine motivated by profit and rapacious in its quest for sales and God help anyone who lets conscience, the welfare of children, or the concept of actually healing people get in the way. I guess the old adage is true: you can’t fool all of the people all of the time – even when you drug many of them first.

As with adults, any of the bogus "disorders" from which, according to the unproven opinion of some psychiatrist, a child is suffering is NOT some vague congenital disorder or "chemical imbalance" or any other catch-phrase of the brain but is the symptom of some undetected, undiagnosed, untreated physical ailment.

The ailment could be an undetected broken bone, a glandular disorder, an allergy, a food intolerance or plain and simple bad diet leading to vitamin and mineral deficiencies.

The truth of the matter is that advances in understanding of nutrition and diet and the use of food as medicine have left the whole field of psychiatric medication back in the Stone Age. We no longer need psychiatry to invent bogus mental illnesses, a practice spotlighted recently by the scandal over that archetypal bogus mental illness and excuse to drug the kids, ADHD. We no longer need a psychiatrist to then clobber the living organism with factory-spawned chemical poisons and then listen to him tell us, "The illness was worse than we thought. He needs more medication…" as we watch our child deteriorate instead of get well before our eyes.

Psychiatry has had its day. So has the pharmacopia, as witnessed by the billions it must spend in marketing and influencing governments just to keep its psychotropic sales happening. It was not a very bright or successful day and no-one mourns its passing.

Let us move on and provide for our kids the benefits of modern knowledge about the mind, the living organism and what it needs for optimum function.

If you are having a problem with your child, here’s what to do:

1. Get him a thorough medical examination and persist with this until his physical illness or illnesses are identified.

2. If an outright illness (such as a broken bone, mild poisoning or whatever it is) is found, get the illness treated. Follow the medical doctor’s advice. Use a doctor who has expertise in the field of diet and nutrition if you can. Avoid the use of drugs if you can but this will depend on how life-threatening the illness is or how much pain is involved. For instance if a tooth abscess is discovered and a tooth must be extracted, no-one is suggesting the child should not be given dental anesthetic,

3. Get him to a nutritionist and have his allergies, dietary deficiencies and so forth identified. Follow the nutritionist’s advice to the letter as regards supplements, vitamins, dietary changes and do forth.

4. Watch your child get more and more well. Once the underlying physical illnesses are handled, you will see your child experience a resurgence.

5. Never, never, never let anyone tell you your child has a mental illness. Never, never, never let your child be given any psychiatric, mind altering medication. There are plenty of dietary, vitamin and herbal remedies for whatever trouble the psychiatric drug purports to handle but without the ghastly side effects.