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For much of human history, people with mental illness were thought to be possessed by gods or devils. Madness, as it was called, was believed to be supernatural, not natural. Some Greeks, including Plato, viewed mental illness as a kind of spiritual gift, a portal into new ways of seeing.
Access Denied: Victims of Prescribed Harm Are Abandoned by Psychiatry 43 The United States spends more money on healthcare than any other developed nation in the world. Yet, we have experienced an observable and exponential rise in poor mental health outcomes, disability rates, and suicide over the past several decades. Robert Whitaker’s Anatomy of An Epidemic provides the world with alarming statistics that cannot be ignored. The rise in the number of disabled mentally ill has been especially pronounced since 1987, the year that Prozac, the first of the “second-generation” psychiatric...
Welcome to Planet Psychiatry 2887 Editor’s Note: This piece is an edited excerpt from the author’s 2020 book, Butchered by Healthcare. Most physicians view psychiatrists as somewhat feral animals. We suspect—with some justification—that many of their ideas are hot air. Unlike any other specialty, psychiatrists take care of people with normal labs and radiologic tests. They keep only patients with purely subjective problems. Psychiatrists pass patients with “organic” issues such as thyroid disease to others. These are the ones with identifiable physical signs, symptoms, and tests. ...