Dear the mental health establishment:

[substitute]

We are not fooled at all. You may drop the pretense that mental health care is scientific.

We understand that most of you are in good faith trying to be helpful. But we’re still in the medieval stage with this stuff and it’s time to admit it.

The drugs you prescribe are sometimes helpful but have outrageous side effects, and often cause the opposite primary effect from the intended one. While we applaud your research efforts, the current products are often ineffective or dangerous. And let’s not even get into the surgical ideas here.

Psychotherapy in its myriad forms is mainly religious and not practical. Great theories of the human mind and soul are invented out of thin air and applied to patients with an assumption of authority that is entirely undeserved. We know what’s going on. You’re kicking the TV and congratulating yourselves when the picture looks better. The sheer number of psychotherapeutic methods and their incredible variation suggests that any egotist with a Ph.D. and a charismatic argumentative style can invent a new school of therapy and get away with it. There are no standards.

This isn’t science. It isn’t medicine. In fact, the intellectual standards of this field would not be accepted at a good hair salon.

Please, please get real with us and just admit you’re making shit up out of desperation. It’s not like we can’t tell already.

Hugs,

The “patients”

Comments

Re: TREAD SOFTLY FOR YOU TREAD ON MY DREAMS

[so-gracefully.livejournal.com]

i am sorry. and what i said about effort didn't come out the way i meant it. what you say indicates to me that you place a lot of blame on the doctors; there are seven major schools of thought in psychology, and compounded with the ignorance of all of them that you find in psychiatry, it can be overwhelming. i understand. all i was meaning to say was that there is really no psychological disorder in existence that can be simply cured by a doctor. schizophrenia may be the closest to a medical psychiatric disorder that exists, but even that is not simply "here, pop this pill and that'll be the end of that". because the brain, both as an organ and as the mind, is so expansive, it will never be so simple. i don't want you to be so discouraged, and i'm sorry that you are.

so many people have worked so hard just to make psychology what it is today, and i believe that most negative attitudes about psychology come from negative experiences with people who do not represent what our science is at its heart (scientology, primal screaming, electroshock, you name it). modern psychology is still a young discipline, and there are still problems. but psychology revolves around the idea that the answers are all here, all available, and that it is absolutely compulsory that we seek and find them. so it isn't like no one's trying to make it any better. i guess that's all i want to say.

Appaise ta rage

[torgo-x.livejournal.com]

You know, at some level, it can be actually okay for a discipline to be non-scientific. For example: cooking is the cornerstone of civilization, and it's scientific only in parts.

That said, I hope one day to achieve the feat of perspective where a life of delerium and panic seems commensurable with an overbaked turkey.