Kindness versus “Hard Science”

In my previous post I cited Peter Breggin’s Toxic Psychiatry as evidence to call modern psychiatric medical science both dictatorial and devastatingly harmful. Robert Whitaker’s very readable 2002 book Mad in America provides a great deal more detail about how the insane have been cared for in US history.

In the eighteenth century, for example, the insane were not considered human; they were wild beasts that had to be tamed. Hence the prison-like atmosphere, restraints and beatings, the blood-letting, the spinning chair, the dunking in water to the point of nearly drowning, and the administration of powerful emetics. These techniques were used repeatedly, day after day, sometimes for months. The aim of the mad-doctors, as psychiatrists were called prior to the late nineteenth century, was to terrorize patients, to break their will and supposedly knock the insanity out of them.

The twentieth century, as I mentioned in last month’s post, had its eugenics episode, and it is chronicled in detail by Whitaker, but the century also gave us shock therapies: insulin-coma, metrazol (camphor), and electro-convulsive. Administered perhaps hundreds of times, the purpose was to induce seizure, to supposedly shock the delusions and hallucinations out of patients. “Brain-damaging therapeutics” (Whitaker, p. 96), as these techniques were called, produced effects similar to brain trauma.

Transorbital lobotomy, performed with ice picks in the 1940s by the flamboyant Walter Freeman,* was called “surgically induced childhood” (p. 122). And because masturbation was still believed to be a cause of insanity, clitoridectomy was performed until 1950 (p. 79). In 1954 the drug era then began with the introduction of Thorazine.

But what happened in the nineteenth century? To be sure, many of the same cruel and inhumane techniques continued to be used. The Quakers, however, had a better idea, one that spawned the “moral treatment” movement in mental health (pp. 30-38). Recognizing that mental illness was not physiological, that it resulted from being overwhelmed by certain life events, they insisted that kindness, attention, listening, and talking were key to helping the mentally ill.

Fed well and allowed to sew, garden, read, write, and play games, the patients in the Pennsylvania Hospital that opened outside of Philadelphia in 1841 enjoyed a “pastoral comfort.” The hospital included a dining room, a greenhouse, a library, and a museum. The patients were encouraged to develop friendships, dress well, and rethink their behavior. They were urged to exercise free will and, not unlike Glasser’s Choice Theory, choose to be sane. Needless to say, they were neither chained nor beaten.

By 1890 all trace of moral treatment of the mentally ill was gone. The explosive growth of state-run, i.e., bureaucratic, hospitals made it impossible to train attendants in the spirit of kindness and empathy. What really killed moral treatment, though, was the ridicule and condescension put forth by medical doctors, especially the neurologists. They all considered themselves to be “men of hard science” and the moral treatment advocates were just old-fashioned, religious “gardeners and farmers” (p. 37). In the name of science straitjackets and cruelty were brought back; kindness and empathy were out.

The short-lived pastoral comfort of moral treatment brings to mind the “one brief shining moment” phrase from the title song in Camelot. Somewhat similar to King Arthur’s humanitarian moment in legendary history, moral treatment was eclipsed. It was stamped out by “hard science.”

Robert Whittaker is an award-winning investigative journalist. Before writing Mad in America, he subscribed to the conventional wisdom that psychiatry, especially the use of modern neuroleptic drugs, was good for the mentally ill. That is, until he stumbled on “symptom-exacerbation” experiments, conducted well into the 1990s, in which psychiatric researchers were giving patients drugs (such as ketamine, chemical cousin of angel dust) in order to worsen their psychotic symptoms. After this discovery, Whitaker in earnest began researching his book.

Psychiatric reviewers of Mad in America, not surprisingly, were unhappy campers. The reviews in fact were so negative that Whitaker’s editor advised him, if he wanted to make a living as a writer, to stay away from the field of psychiatry. He did so for awhile, writing two unrelated books, but psychiatric survivor groups kept contacting him. As a result in 2010 he wrote Anatomy of an Epidemic, the story behind the tripling of mental health disabilities from 1987-2007—this tripling despite increased usage of the alleged miracle drugs.

I have not yet read Whitaker’s latest book, but in a podcast interview about it with Peter Breggin, Whitaker relates three attempts by the psychiatric profession to silence him with ad hominem attacks and character assassinations. Here’s his response to one of the attempts. The profession, he stated in the interview, has succeeded in keeping him out of magazines where he used to write regularly.

This is how privileged “men of hard science” react when their monopoly and livelihood are threatened by facts. Fortunately, Whitaker has had the courage and independence to press on.

Many years ago William Glasser was denied a position at UCLA because he refused to buy into the medical model. In the 1980s Peter Breggin was threatened with having his license revoked because of comments he made on an Oprah Winfrey television show. (He won his case in court.) From outside the psychiatric establishment, Whitaker now joins this admirable pair.

Gentlemen, I raise a glass to you.



*It is worth noting that prior to taking up the ice pick, Freeman analyzed 1400 autopsied brains and found no differences between the normal and the schizophrenic (p. 115).


Postscript. One of the many tragic ironies in the history of science is the story of Ignaz Semmelweis who discovered the significance of and recommended—futilely in his lifetime—the use of antiseptic procedures in childbirth.

Semmelweis died a brutal death in an insane asylum.

Suffering in 1865 either from a breakdown because none of the “men of hard science” would listen to him or from Alzheimer’s disease or from syphilis, he was deceptively lured to a mental hospital. When he tried to leave, he was severely beaten, put in a straitjacket in a dark cell, doused with cold water, and given castor oil. Two weeks later he died . . . of septicemia, or blood poisoning, which he had argued was the cause of childbed fever and that the poisoning could readily have been prevented by washing the hands with chlorine.

The Barbarity of Modern Psychiatry

It is no accident that Thomas Hobbes—the “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” guy—advocated dictatorship. He was a materialist, one who holds the philosophical notion that consciousness is an illusion, at best an effect or non-causal by-product of the brain. Materialism denies free will and therefore assumes that all of our behavior is determined either by internal bodily functions or by external environmental events. The mind plays no role in influencing behavior. To avoid living in a nasty, brutish, anarchical society, says Hobbes, we need a strong, controlling central government to tell us what to do.

Today, the field of psychiatry is dominated by the theory of materialism. As a result, most of its practitioners have no qualms about imprisoning people against their will, then equally forcibly giving them electro-convulsive shock treatments or neuroleptic (psychotropic) drugs or performing surgery on them. The coercion is considered good medical practice, made possible by the government-sanctioned licensing and patent monopolies, the government socialized and cartelized medical-insurance system, and the laws regulating state-run mental hospitals and wards. The effects of the treatments are not cures for so-called mental illness (“biochemical imbalances”). They amount to total control over unwanted behaviors and their ultimate consequences often are irreversible brain and body damage.

The story is exhaustively documented in Peter Breggin’s 1991 book Toxic Psychiatry.* The culprit is the “medical model” that says psychological problems such as anxiety, depression, and paranoia are physiologically based and must be treated medically, with electroshock, drugs, or surgery. Yes, psychosurgery of the Ken Kesey type is still practiced today in the twenty-first century. Courses on psychotherapy, Breggin points out, are no longer taught in most medical schools that train psychiatrists. The outrage of it all, he demonstrates, is that there is no scientifically valid evidence for the physiological cause of any of these problems.

In page after page, chapter after chapter, Breggin cites researchers, many of them psychiatrists, who acknowledge that no causal connection has been demonstrated between brain physiology and psychological problems. Quite the contrary, evidence of brain damage due to electroshock, drugs, and surgery is abundant. For example, tardive dyskinesia and brain shrinkage are two common effects of the typical “treatments.” The terms “chemical straitjacket” and “chemical lobotomy” are used to characterize the results of some drug use and the immediate, short-term effect of drugs (and shock and surgery) is described as “blunting the personality,” “flattened affect,” and “subdued behavior.” The patients, in other words, look and act drugged. (More here and here.)

The treatments are instruments of restraint, especially of the hyperactive type of behavior that may occur in prisons and mental wards . . . and in schools.

Yet, as William Glasser says, so-called schizophrenics are “just lonely people.” And, as Breggin concurs, the root of the problems most often is family abuse (verbal and physical) or neglect.** The solution is Carl Rogers’ “unconditional positive regard” and nurturing talk therapy. Safe houses run by uncredentialed amateurs, psychiatric survivors in some cases, produce far better results for schizophrenics than any of the shocks, drugs or surgeries of psychiatrists.

Why do establishment psychiatrists persist in using the medical model when the evidence against it continues to pile up? Materialism, of course, is no small theory that blinds them to the contents of consciousness and possible psychosocial causes of mental stress. As academic researchers, some do what other academics have been known to do when discovering embarrassing facts: they bury them in tiny footnotes (all found by Breggin) or relegate their confessions and cautions to post-research interviews (all again found by Breggin) long after the headlines of supposed drug success have played out in the press. And then there’s the blatant conflict of interest, acknowledged by too few psychiatrists, of the millions of pharmaceutical company dollars that are fed to the profession.

“Modern psychiatry,” as Breggin puts it, “is not about counseling and empowering people. It's about controlling and suppressing them.” Its history dates to the seventeenth century but its tactics too often over the years have been those of the Inquisition: subjugating “behaviours unacceptable or inconvenient to those in power” (Models of Madness, p. 14). Mental hospitals of the nineteenth century, and even of the twentieth, have been called snake pits; inmates then, and still today, were and are treated as objects, not people with problems to be resolved.

Consider the eugenics programs of the 1920s and ‘30s in both the United States and Nazi Germany. Both were promoted in the name of science by psychiatrists; hundreds of thousands of people were sterilized or killed during that time and the death houses of the Nazi psychiatrists became the models of concentration camp gas chambers (1, 2). (In the United States compulsory sterilizations continued well into the 1960s.) And let us not forget the political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union, the incarceration of political dissenters. Abuse? Yes. Surprising? No, given the philosophical premise of materialism. (And China?)

Consider also the 1992 federal Violence Initiative of the National Institute of Mental Health. It proposed psychiatric interventions to identify and treat children allegedly biologically and genetically predisposed to violence. Presumably the targeted children would have been treated with drugs. Because there is no evidence whatsoever of a genetic connection to crime or violence and because most victims and perpetrators of violence in the United States today are African Americans, accusations of racism quickly quashed the plan (1, 2, 3, 4).

But again, this is what materialism can lead to. Total domination. Consciousness is irrelevant. Psychosocial causes of behavior are only an illusion.

Thomas Szasz likened the questionable science of modern psychiatry to alchemy and astrology. Perhaps it should be called totalitarian science.



* In the twenty-one years since the publication of Toxic Psychiatry, evidence against the shock-drug-cut approach to helping distressed people has only increased. See Breggin’s web site for detail.

** Glasser and Breggin, both psychiatrists who heroically stand up to the authoritarianism of the profession, are not the only practitioners who talk and work in this manner to help so-called schizophrenics. See, for example, the authors of Models of Madness. Chapter 5 explains why I keep saying “so-called” about schizophrenia; John Read argues that it is an invalid concept.

“Children Don’t Have Disorders; They Live in a Disordered World”

The title of this post comes from psychiatrist and attention-deficit/hyperactivity-disorder (ADHD) critic Peter Breggin. It’s a variation of Maria Montessori’s line to “control the environment, not the child.” For Montessori, children develop healthy psychologies—become “normalized,” to use her term—by being left free to pursue their own interests and choose their own educational work, provided the surroundings of the classroom are made safe and stimulating. Drugs are a cruel and totally unwarranted control of the child.

Most children who exhibit the well-known ADHD symptoms are simply failing to handle the boredom, confusion*, or authoritarianism, or all three, of school, home, and other environments in which they live and play. They are not diseased kids, possessing neurological or biochemical imbalances, who require addicting, cocaine-like stimulants to cow them into submission. They are youngsters trying to learn, and have fun in the process, but their world is complex and often the opposite of fun, especially school. What they desperately need is to be left free as much as possible to pursue their own interests and, when they request it, one or several adults to be their friends, to pay attention to them, to listen to their pleasures and worries, and to be their coach and confidant. What they most decidedly do not need are William Glasser’s seven deadly habits (p. 13): criticizing, blaming, complaining, nagging, threatening, punishing, and bribing. All of these habits, of course, are staples of their world—and ours, but many children do not know how to cope with them. What they also most definitely do not need is to be made to feel stoned or spaced out.

Labeling children with ADHD stigmatizes them as inadequate and, as a result, induces unearned guilt, because the adults who recommend the drugs are actually blaming them for their behavior even though the theory behind the whole psychotropic drug mantra is materialism and determinism. A child who acts up in class, or who does not pay attention, according to the adults, must be controlled. Something, so the adults say, is wrong with the child, not with the adults’ methods of relating to the child. The message is clear. Donna Bryant Goertz says that medication today is the new spanking.

The evidence for a physiological basis of ADHD behavior does not exist. The experimental studies do not uphold the belief. This is especially confirmed when the ADHD researchers themselves admit that the children improve during summer vacation and when taught in smaller, more attention-focused classes. Indeed, when looking at the psychiatric professions’ nine symptoms of inattention and the nine symptoms of hyperactivity-impulsivity, I can say that I have often exhibited everyone of them—today, when I was a child, and in all the years in between. I also know too many highly successful people, and have heard of many others, who, if the medicines had been available when they were children, would have been drugged to the hilt and probably had their futures destroyed.

The criteria to look at concerning ADHD are Glasser’s (p. 256)**: if your child can watch and understand television, play video games, and use a computer, do better for some teachers than for others, do better in one subject than another that requires the same level of reading and understanding, and has good friends he or she enjoys being with, then it is highly unlikely that there is anything wrong with your child. Glasser (click educational, last clip on the page) piercingly and humorously puts the issue in perspective when he says that the worst attention deficit disorders in the world are husbands and wives, because many of them so often do not listen to each other!

As I have said in these pages before, the solution to helping so-called problem children is to let them go fish. “Many are just plain bored of sitting at a desk in a classroom and are sick of having adults lord their size and power over them.” Going fishing, though literally possible at the Sudbury Valley School, is metaphor for getting adults off their backs and more generally for removing confusion and authoritarianism from their lives.



*I say “confusion” because some parents today who have rejected the authoritarianism of their parents and grandparents have nevertheless failed to provide structure and consistency for their children. Similar behavior can result. Some schools can also provide this confusion.

**I’ve simplified these criteria. See pp. 255-59 in Choice Theory for a fuller understanding of Glasser’s analysis of the so-called learning disabilities. Glasser calls psychotropic medicines “brain drugs,” refusing to grant them the honorific “medicines,” and refers to their side effects as effects. There’s nothing secondary or “side,” he says, about the effects of brain drugs.