Against Biological Psychiatry

for many years, and specifically on the back of my own personal experiences around the investigation that http://www.jbhfile.com/ makes public, i've written quite publicly about my own abhorrence of the popular notion that psychiatry is a field which should be bounded by the notion that mental illnesses, whatever the type, should necessarily have biological explanations.

i mean, specifically biological explanations as opposed to the more likely cultural, circumstancial sorts of social explanations.

in my own instance, the so called 'mental illnesses' are in fact totally non existent and merely generated by an investigative group (and it's accompanying community/social cohorts) which desire an investigation to proceed upon a specific course and ending. but yet, in the early days of my circumstances, i did, if ever so carefully, entertain the notions and advices of certain professionals in the field of psychiatry.

across the board, i found that at the slightest mention of distress in my life (much less the truth, that i was being surveilled to the point of oppressive harassment) would result in these so called 'health care providers' whipping out a prescription pad to scribble down some panacea in the form of the latest SSRI or anti-psychotic medication.

this consistent willingness to medicate even the slightest of emotional distress, was horribly suspect to me and my participation in their suggestions terminated rather shortly after it had begun.

the greater motivation in my own case of course, was that i knew my claims were totally true, totally well founded and that no amount of therapy or medications would or could make it otherwise; truth cannot be medicated into unreality or the realm of delusion.

anyway, ...

following those early experiences, perhaps around the early 2002 time frame, i began a serious process of investigating popular psychiatry and especially those within the field of psychiatry who had come out against their own discipline; these 'whistleblowers' of a sort who had come out publicly based wholly on conscience and their own concern for the terrible and damaging trajectory that they were observing the field of psychiatry taking.

one such person whose writings i feel are important, is David Kaiser, a practicing psychiatrist who has made quite a public rant regarding his views on the notion of biological origins to emotional illnesses.

here's a bit from one of his papers:

"This is a culture increasingly obsessed with medical science and medical health as a sign of virtue. It is not surprising that our psychic ills would be pulled into this dominant medical discourse, essentially medicalizing our specific forms of psychic pain. It seems to me that modern psychiatry, in step with a culture which created it, assumes any suffering to be unequivocally bad, an impediment to the "good life" of progress, productivity and progress. It is now almost heresy in psychiatry to say that perhaps suffering can teach us something, deepen our experience, or point us to different possibilities.

Now, if you are depressed or anxious, it has no real meaning, because as a biologic illness similar to say diabetes, it is separate from the world of meaning and merely is. Now any thoughtful person knows that something as fundamental as depression has meanings such as loss, facing mortality, unlived desires, lack of power or control, etc., and that these meanings will continue to exist even if Prozac makes us feel better. There is much more to life than feeling better or living without pain, and only a superficial and pathologic culture would need to deny this. Yet conclusions such as "depression is a chemical imbalance" are created out of nothing more than semantics and the wishful thinking of scientist/psychiatrists and a public who will believe anything now that has the stamp of approval of medical science."

-- from Against Biologic Psychiatry by David Kaiser, M.D.

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if you care to read the entire article, and i suggest you do ... follow the link at the end of the above quoted text.

also, here's the same text re-printed at the 'Psychiatric Times' website: LINK

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this post is intended to be supplemental to the facts made public in my main website, http://www.jbhfile.com/; it probably will not make much sense to you if you have not already made yourself aware of the legal and personal efforts discussed in that site. please see http://www.jbhfile.com/ for a necessary introduction into why this blog exists. or, if you just like reading weird stuff, then don't. and, enjoy.
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jbh.

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