I don't know if anyone will ever read this Blog, or care about the issues I feel I have to raise. I am 52 and since I was 26 I have been told by mental health professionals that I have a "mental illness".  But it is beginning to dawn on me like a terrible awakening that "mental illness" could actually be a construct of society and the psychiatrists who are making a very good living out of telling people they are "ill" and need "treatment" like someone with a physical illness.  And then of course there are the massive pharmaceutical companies who deliberately seek to hide the inadequacy of the drugs they market for every form of human distress imaginable. 

What is happening to us, when children who can't sit still in a boring classroom are drugged until they are zombified into conforming?  I thought that we fought the Nazis, and yet the scenario that is unfolding in today's "enlightened" society seems like something Hitler could have dreamed up.  The thing is that human distress is not something which can be fixed with a chemical.  The drugs marketed for "mental illness" actually damage the brain and make it harder for the distressed person to make sense of what is happening to them and recover.  Lobotomy has been outlawed, and yet the neuroleptic drugs routinely prescribed to people in psychiatric units and out-patient clinics have exactly the same effect as a lobotomy, dulling the higher brain functions and turning bright, intelligent and gifted people into "zombies" with robotic movements, staring eyes, and expressionless faces.  Then when these people lament the loss of their former selves and cry, they are called "depressed" and yet another drug is added to the cocktail.  The way people are treated in the mental health system is nothing short of a violation of human rights, but the reason these people hardly ever complain is because they are made to feel that the system is doing all this to them "for their own good". 

The fact that people with no history of mental illness will show psychotic symptoms after four days and nights of sleep deprivation, surely would indicate that the brains of people with "mental illness" are not in fact that different to everyone else's.  There is no scientific evidence for the widely held belief that mental distress is caused by "a chemical imbalance in the brain" which can be fixed with chemicals. The complex chemical workings of the brain are still as yet largely not understood, and so tampering with them is bound to be a very dangerous thing to do. 

Electro-shock therapy is still routinely used, especially on the elderly who more obviously do not do well on medication, because they suffer more from the Parkinsonian-type symptoms which manifest as side-effects of neuroleptic drugs. ECT is prescribed as a treatment for depression, but in reality all that happens is that the person feels a temporary euphoria afterwards as the brain tries to function after it has been so badly damaged.  A single shock treatment is never presecribed, but always several sessions.  Some people in the past have had as many as 200 shock treatments.  If a psychiatrist could only be licensed to prescribe electro-shock treatment if he was first prepared to undergo a course of such treatment himself, it would very rapidly disappear as a "therapy".

I am speaking as someone who has spent time in a psychiatric unit and I have seen first-hand the effect of the "system" on real people, who are treated with less respect than criminals when their only crime has been to find this world a difficult place to survive in, and to be reacting to life circumstances which would be unbearable to anybody.  They all have a story to tell but nobody wants to listen.  For example, when people mostly live in two-person units, of course it becomes unbearable when the cherished partner dies.  Such an event would be a lot less catastrophic in a tribal society, where a person would be surrounded by other very close loved ones, and where there might be a strong belief in people living on as ancestral spirits to be reunited with later.  I have seen so many cases of elderly people finding themselves in a mental hospital because their partner has died and they cannot cope with this.  Nobody wants to know about why they are in there.  There is no sympathy, love, or understanding on offer in a psychiatric unit. They are diagnosed as "mentally ill" and treated either with brain-damaging electro-shock therapy and/or mind-numbing chemicals.  How can it be that these people have held down a job, raised a family, paid taxes, been model citizens, done everything that "normal" people do, but then in later life they are deemed to have had a "mental illness" all along, which has lain "dormant", only to surface now and to be in need of "treatment"?  This quite simply does not make any sense at all.  And it makes me question whether "mental illness" is something to be treated in the same way that diabetes or heart disease can be treated, or whether it is something which has been constructed for the advantage of clinical psychiatrists and the huge, profiteering, unethical, drug companies they live in the laps of.

It is so much easier to blame the individual, to see mental distress as an "illness", a chemical "disease of the brain", which can be "cured" or at the very least "controlled" , than to try to understand what may be going wrong in our society, where materialism and the persuit of wealth is a poor substitute for a life of real meaning and purpose.  If we were to let all of the thousands of "ill" people we usually lock away, walk around the streets doing "mad" things, wouldn't we begin to question whether the way we are made to live is actually good for the human spirit? 

Modern psychiatrists want to perpetuate the myth of a physical cause for mental problems, because this legitamises their profession and puts them on a par with consultants who treat physical illness.  Consultant psychiatrists are actually grossly overpaid for what they do.  Any fool can write prescriptions all day.  Even in a psychiatric hospital, they have very limited contact with their patients.  They prefer it that way, because if they started to see the patients as people rather than "interesting cases", if they saw them the equals which they actually are, they might have to question what they are doing to them in the name of a "scientific" approach.