Psychiatry

The Final Nail In Psychiatry’s Antidepressant Coffin

January 18, 2024 Bruce E. Levine, Counter Punch. Educate! Antidepressants, Big Pharma, Health Care, Medications, mental health, Psychiatry

Historically, there have always been some patients who report that any treatment for depression—including bloodletting—has worked for them, but science demands that for a treatment to be deemed truly effective, it must work better than a placebo or the passage of time without any treatment. This is especially important for antidepressant drugs—including Prozac, Zoloft, and other selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), as well as Effexor, Cymbalta, and other serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRIs)—because all of these drugs have uncontroversial troubling side effects.

Unionized Psychiatrists Say Maryland Provider Violated Labor Law

July 10, 2023 Colleen Grablick, DCist. Resist! Health Care, Maryland, Psychiatry, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

Unionized psychiatrists and nurse practitioners at Cornerstone Montgomery, an independent behavioral health care provider with dozens of locations across the D.C. region, are accusing management of unfair labor practices, arguing that recent policy proposals would sacrifice their ability to care for patients. Represented by the healthcare worker union 1199SEIU, psychiatrists and nurse practitioners say that Cornerstone Montgomery has tried to “drastically” increase the number of appointments on the providers’ calendars, which would decrease the amount of time each practitioner can spend with their patients, and how frequently they meet.

The Political Implications Of Contemporary Psychiatry

July 10, 2022 Bruce E. Levine, Counter Punch. Educate! History, Karl Marx, Psychiatry, Spinoza

Simple logic tells us that those atop a societal hierarchy will provide rewards for professionals—be they clergy or psychiatrists—who promote an ideology that maintains the status quo, and that the ruling class will do everything possible to manipulate the public to believe that the social-economic-political status quo is natural. If a population believes that its financial and emotional suffering are caused not by social-economic-political variables but instead by individual defects—be it noncompliance with religious dogma or faulty biochemistry—this “individual-defect” belief system can be a more powerful and less expensive way of maintaining the status quo than a heavily armed police force. That organized religion has a great deal in common with organized psychiatry would be apparent to both Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), two of history’s most famous critics of the political implications of organized religion.

World Psychiatric Association Statement Bans Psychiatrists From Participating In Torture

April 6, 2018 By Shannon Peters, Madinamerica.com Educate! Psychiatry, Torture

This statement comes two years after the Hoffman Report was released, which outlined how the American Psychological Association colluded with the US government to conduct torture (for more reactions to the Hoffman Report see here and here). The WPA cited the Madrid Declaration, first approved in 1996, which explicitly states psychiatrists should not participate in any mental or physical torture. They also review that psychiatrists are physicians bound by the Hippocratic Oath “never to do harm.” The WPA defines interrogation as “the attempt to elicit from a person deprived of liberty information that is not intended for the therapeutic benefit of the person.” The WPA makes very clear that even indirect or covert participation in torture is unethical. This includes “the creation of environments that might undermine the self or the identity of the detainee.”

Psychiatry’s Manufacture Of Consent: The Antidepressant Explosion

June 20, 2014 Bruce Levine, www.brucelevine.net Educate! Corporatism, Depression, Mental Illness, Profit, Psychiatry

Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s book title Manufacturing Consent derives from presidential advisor and journalist Walter Lippmann’s phrase “the manufacture of consent”—a necessity for Lippmann, who believed that the general public is incompetent in discerning what’s truly best for them, and so their opinion must be molded by a benevolent elite who does know what’s best for them. Starting in the 1990s—despite research findings that levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin were unrelated to depression—Americans began to be exposed to highly effective television commercials for antidepressants that portrayed depression as caused by a “chemical imbalance” of low levels of serotonin and which could be treated with “chemically balancing” antidepressants such as Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, and other selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). Why has the American public not heard psychiatrists in positions of influence on the mass media debunking the chemical imbalance theory?

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