I was always uneasy with stories of American doctors feeding their children ritalin to control behaviour... I didn't realise it was THAT bad. I have doubts over the whole field. I only did psychology to A-level but that alone was an exercise in bullshit and opinions and nothing I'd ever deem science. kmt

To be honest, its not psychiatry that is the problem, it is capitalisim infused into medical territory, you would be surprised the comditions such asblood pressue which can be controlled by diet, artherities , IBS etc are over prescribed when really it should be last result. Psychiatry is a much neeeded profession. In sudan where mental illness is a taboo to the point where their was a case of a doctor who ironically his wife is a psychiatorist, his condition was not seen to, eventually he ended up killing the nanny, and all because the shame mental illness brings to communitites in Sudan.........and i bet you more are not diagonised, eventually he got the medicine that he needed, however it was too late.

If capitalism is insane shouldn't psychiatrists figure that out?

Freud didn't study human psychology, he studied European psychology. Since he was European you have to wonder how objective he was about it.

Of course the Europeans are mostly going to say Freud was brilliant.

Eric Berne's Transactional Analysis parent adult child model, theory and history article

Don't expect good ideas to get spread because it interferes with people making money.

umbra

Not any more Umbrarchist. Read a science journal that recently refferred to Freud in passing as the "soundly debunked psychoanalyst"

Not sure how you debunk an untestable model like psychosexual development but hey... it's like scientifically proving pixies don't exist. Logically you can't do it which is why belief in pixies and psychoanalysis (and by extension all psychiatry) is largely bunk.

SF I accept what you're saying about medicince and rush diagnosis for chemical sales as a whole but I think that Psychiatry has a particular problem in that most of it is made up and unscientific nonsense with no physical basis in anything.

The ritalin and ADD thing is my concern. I read that the American practice of labelling children with a "disorder" and proscribing behavioural modifying drugs to developing brains is catching on and growing among britains medical community. That scares me. You only have to watch super nanny in passing to see that kids labelled ADD usually have some problem stemming from bad parenting and neglect. Covering that up with pacifying sedative drugs is worrisome.

Got to go with GM here....Can't agree with the Watcher's analysis even though I like his scientific reasoning and deduction. Psychiatry is based on models and theories of personality and behaviour. Some models are clearly suspect with the passage of time and others not. Some aspect of Freud has always been over cooked for me..Oedipus complex in particular. But Fanon who actually was a physciatrist's model of internalisation and reproduction of violence and pathology stands to this day and supported by other work eg. Allthrops work on Nazism and Anti-Semitism's and the internalisation of self hate by Jews..

There is good science and shit in the whole scientific world/community...Cognitive Disonance as theory is proven to to be robuts and empirically supported behavioural response..So not going to write of a whole discipline in that way.

GM and Fred

Look at the case of black people being labelled insane in hugely disproportionate numbers when living in the west. We think of this as "misdiagnosis". As if the science is fine but naughty docs are practising it poorly. I contend that the reasoning and science itself is at fault. These aren't merely naughty racist doctors, they're people practising a psuedoscience which has it's roots and history in racism, eugenics and nazism.

Of course mental illness exists. Obviously insanity and various dementias are real.

But imo nobody has a REAL clue about a) what they really are and b) how to really cure them. Psychiatry is very crude and slapdash. Psychologists themselves can't agree on what schizophrenia is, personally I have a family member who has been diagnosed with such and yes I know full well he's mentally ill but recognise that nobody really knows what that means.

ADD, depression, OCD, schizophrenia, bi-polar etc etc look at the models of these things and other popular oft given diagnosis. Not the lists of supposed symptoms which seem to be interchangeable, but the models themselves.

People create theories like theoretical physicists (another joke ting) arguing about wether there are 12 dimensions or 11... when we've only evidence of 4. Fighting over string theory and m theory like they're actual factual concepts when it only exists in certain peoples imaginings and papers. Psychologists do this constantly.

All the models of personality I've seen are pretty and descriptive but seem to have been pulled from a hat. Have you ever seen an "ego"? Can you describe a test which would differentiate a superego from an ego? Or are such terms merely one persons description we ran with and called a fact?

Behavioural psychology is a reductionist joke. Developmental psychology is full of contradictory and logically poorly constructed "models" which serve as templates of normality... I could go on and on for all branches of psychology. Not to mention the constantly changing theories and fluidity of these models. When do psychiatrists, psychologists actually study normal people, non mentally ill people to even have a barometer and know what normal looks like? I'm sure some are of the opinion we all have SOME disease and they can't wait to find it and diagnose us. This is the science, that as the video points out, labelled runaway slaves insane for trying to seek freedom. I'm saying doh....

GM and Fred you guys seem to put credence in biopsychology and chemical imbalances. Sure I agree with you to a point here but argue that the experts have very little real idea of what is going on, on a fundamental level simply because they don't know how the brain actual works and processes information. In science it's not good enough merely to say that this drug affects this mood or "disease" and so that's it's treatment. They don't understand on a basic level WHY the drug does this. I'm not talking about blocking synapses and inhibiting or replaces neurotransmiters now but actually deeper than that. This sort of sloppiness wouldn't be acceptable anywhere else. As a result we have chemical lobotomies which (if you watched the vid) do remind me of the primitive icepick through the eye manuvers.

Okay so this part of the brain does this and we know this through brain scans and more likely lobotomies (cutting out bits of somebodys head to see what won't work anymore). So if you have this or that "disease" wrong we can use chemicals to target that part of the brain. Nobody asks why the brain was doing that in the first place. The brain has become seperate from the person and their experiences. This is a total 180 from psychoanalysis which I think had scared away and annoyed modern psychiatry so much (cos it was that dumb) that the medical chemical model is all the rage. Yeah you can treat a condition with a chemical and it seems to work but if you don't get why then what else is that chemical doing and could you use something else and more to the point, how did the person get there and become "chemically unbalanced". These aren't pertinent questions.

ADD just "is" and magically comes out of nowhere. So we target it with drugs. Imagine having a broken arm and being given painkillers as if the pain is a seperate entity from the arm and the sole focus of the problem. Ask yourselves if you ever heard of bi-polarism, or ADD back in the Carribean or Africa. I ain't.

Perhaps ADD is the result of those problems you mentioned, its symptoms ''visible'' enough to be defined and classified as an illness of some sort.

Was doing some research once and was surprised to find that the symptoms of schizophrenia actually varies according to country, there is the American definition of the illness, an English one and not doubt others although those were the two that I kept bumping into. Seems that a person can be sane in one country but deemed insane by another's standards.

I haven't and wouldn't deny crazy people exist GM.

You seriously think 1 in 6 of us needs a diagnosis of mental illness and medication though? The industry of psychiatry exists for it's own purposes and has little to nothing to do with understanding or treating real afflictions. Too much made up shit engulfs the field so that even something that may be true is up for ridicule.

The Watcher,

I agree with you ,just different wording........as i said when you bring profit to the equation, it all goes cocks up. Over zealous medical sales representatives target the over stressed medical profession, blended with a *suing culture*,how many times you read the case of a nutcase killing someone only for people to finger point the psychiatrist and tell them * why was he allowed out*......blame the human rights. So if their is overprescritption or over diagnosis it is because it is *profit* baring , NOT becuase it is has no scientific bases, sorry the brain is another organ just like the heart and it is suseptiable to deviate from its noraml working function. Their is a valid scientific teaching of psychiatry, it is the red tape and americanised man managment that ruin the profession. As a scientist graduate with scientist of parents, we don't even have paracetamol in the house, for the side effects of it out weighs advantages of it ie it frugs up your liver.

Also the overprescription of drugs and over diagnoises of patients is a concern to me in not just psychiatry, but also in cardiovascular, gastrointestinal, osterposis, inflammation conditions such as artheritis........Sometimes all you need is a good diet, moderate excerise and symptoms disappear.....literally! The human body is very good at self diagnosing and repairing, the medical profession should be an aid to it, not to take over the body.

I guess just like politcans, you will get psychiatrist who will distort information for their own agenda. I guess the line is blurred, hence i can not say if psychiatory is a load of cods wollap, all i can say is that when it is needed.......TRUST ME IT IS NEEDED .

i love the adverts at the bottom..............pure promotion of pyschiatry.......lol