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2025 Introduction
Doctors tell us we can't care for our bodies; shrinks want us to think we can't care for our minds. Psychiatry and psychology, taken together, are the third most evil and damaging field after pediatrics and dentistry. This collection of my essays indicts these “mental health” specialists for their frauds and the harm they cause to our health, peace of mind, and development. The first six chapters are the “Welcome to Drug World” section from Butchered by “Healthcare,” and the last is a new “term paper” I wrote about this subject.
Your mission here is to learn enough to reject these disastrous specialties and never think about them again. Once you are sure about that, you can quit reading.
If some delusional psychiatrist has addicted you or your loved ones to psych drugs, consider using oral ketamine for your withdrawal. This works well and is now widely available in the US. Since my trust for psychiatrists is identical to my trust for dentists, I recommend you see another specialty to obtain it.
NB: Although ketamine success in treating Parkinson’s has been reposted in a few unpublished cases, it made my symptoms worse and I got better after I quit it. I tried it for three months at eight milligrams a day subcutaneously, which is roughly eqivalent to 25 mg orally. Maybe it was not enough.
Download your free PDF of Butchered HERE, or if you prefer hard copies, they are available on Amazon HERE. I make no money on them after advertising fees.
Table of Contents
1. INTRODUCTION TO PLANET PSYCH
Most physicians view psychiatrists as somewhat feral animals. We suspect—with some justification—that many of their ideas are hot air. Unlike any other specialty, psychiatrists care for individuals who have normal laboratory and radiologic test results. They treat only patients with purely subjective problems. Psychiatrists pass on patients who have “organic” issues, such as thyroid disease, to others. These are the ones with identifiable physical signs, symptoms, and tests. Likewise, psychiatrists base treatment outcomes solely on their theories and observations of patient behavior rather than on measurable, objective results.
No other specialty has a sizable group of protesters who oppose its legitimacy. These include not only Scientologists but psychologists, scientists, journalists, and a few renegade psychiatrists. These “psychiatry deniers” believe that psychiatric drugs are harmful, ineffective, and vastly overprescribed. They question the specialty’s power to lock people up and force them to take damaging medications based only on their opinions.
Most of the public, however, sees psychiatry as valid, sensible, and scientifically based. Patients expect health insurance to cover the cost.
Mainstream psychiatrists believe the four primary drug categories they use—the stimulants, the SSRIs (Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors), the benzodiazepines, and the antipsychotics—are effective, beneficial, and cause little harm. Citing their close-range experience treating mental illness, they claim that these diseases are under-treated and that even patients with mild symptoms should take medications. Their studies and standards support this. However, these are so structurally compromised and biased by industry funding that they are essentially useless.
These “psychoactive” medications influence sleep, wakefulness, mood, behavior, and so forth. Unlike most drugs, they enter the brain by crossing the blood-brain barrier, which is a natural microscopic defense against toxins. Drugs that behave like this can alter or damage the entire central nervous system. Although these medications are commonly used and casually prescribed, taking them is a trap because addiction is common and frequently irreversible.
As you read the next few chapters, contemplate:
Mental health is America's most expensive medical sector, estimated to be $213 billion in 2018 (cardiology and cardiac surgery combined might be in second place, at $143 billion). [2025 note: the annual cost of cancer care in the U.S. is now estimated to be over $200 billion.]
A 2016 Scientific American source said one in six US citizens takes psychiatric medication. The Wall Street Journal said this is one in five, and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) claims that one in four of us have a mental illness.
Thirteen percent of all US citizens aged twelve and over received an antidepressant in 2017.
In the US, 9.4 percent of our children get diagnosed with hyperactivity (CDC, 2019), and about half get medication (New York Times, 2013).
Antipsychotics are considerably overused for nursing home residents. The vast majority of demented patients get them, mainly for the convenience of the caregivers and to cheaply decrease staffing levels.
2. “PSYCHIATRY IS IN DEEP CRISIS”
Psychiatry is the drug industry's paradise, as definitions of psychiatric disorders are vague and easy to manipulate. Leading psychiatrists are... at high risk of corruption and, indeed, psychiatrists collect more money from drug makers than doctors in any other specialty. Those who take the most money tend to prescribe antipsychotics to children most often. Psychiatrists are also “educated” with industry's hospitality more often than any other specialty. This has dire consequences for the patients.
—Peter Gøtzsche, Deadly Medicines and Organized Crime (2013)
The development of modern psychiatry: A few decades ago, psychiatrists were losing their status. Then, the fabrication of new diagnoses, along with the invention of medications to treat them, saved them economically. First, the antidepressants, and then the newer antipsychotics came to the rescue. This moved the specialty into the medical mainstream because the psychiatrists were the only ones who purportedly understood it all.
The novel diagnoses—some say concoctions—were enshrined in the psychiatric manual, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Pharmaceutical companies played a huge role in its creation.
The American Psychiatric Association (APA) started aggressive disease-mongering of the new ailments. They hired ad agencies to produce “public service” drug advertising. The corporations marketed the new supposed cures alongside.
By 2008, twenty-eight percent of the APA’s income came from drug companies. According to influence theory, this made the APA virtually a subsidiary of the companies. Senator Chuck Grassley (R, Iowa) publicized the story in a congressional investigation.
Ben Furman, MD, a psychiatrist in Finland, explained how it happened in a 2018 blog:
The psychoanalytic belief system was thrown out and replaced with the DSM and the biomedical doctrine: everyone should have a diagnosis, and everyone should have medication. The psychiatrists now treated all the conditions that had been treated with therapy with medication. This became the treatment of choice for almost all mental health conditions regardless of whether the patient was an adult, teenager or child. A patient without medication became a rarity. The data system of mental health services required clinicians to diagnose anyone who sought help.
The psychiatrists and corporations ignored studies showing damage from long-term drug use. They left disparaging critics out of the debate and out of the textbooks.
Finally, long after the science matured, a few of the doctors are telling the truth. In 2012, an editorial in the British Journal of Psychiatry said the psychiatric medication revolution was at an end. Others now echo this sentiment.
The DSM is a kind of chaotic bible used to promote mental diseases. With its code numbers used for insurance, some call it the billing bible. Created primarily by psychiatrists on industry payroll, it mutates and metastasizes every few years through a vote of the APA members. In 2017, after many editions, it was 947 pages long.
Insiders have decried its intellectual disarray for decades. It has become the perverse standard in the service of drug marketing. The following are a few inside opinions about it:
There was very little systematic research, and much of the research that existed was really a hodgepodge—scattered, inconsistent, and ambiguous. I think the majority of us recognized that the amount of good, solid science upon which we were making our decisions was pretty modest. —Christopher Lane in Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness (2007), quoting one of the DSM's contributors.
I pictured all these normal-enough people being captured in DSM-5’s excessively wide diagnostic net, and I worried that many would be exposed to unnecessary medicine with possibly dangerous side effects. The drug companies would be licking their chops figuring out how best to exploit the inviting new targets for their well-practiced disease mongering. I was keenly alive to the risks because of painful firsthand experience—despite our efforts to tame excessive diagnostic exuberance, DSM-IV had since been misused to blow up the diagnostic bubble.
Allen Frances, lead psychiatrist, DSM IV, author, Saving Normal (2013)
The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in 2013 finally tossed the DSM—psychiatry’s diagnostic system—into the wastebasket. —Bruce E. Levine, psychologist and journalist.
Of the 170 contributors to the most recent edition of the ... DSM... ninety-five had financial ties to drug companies, including all of the contributors to the sections on mood disorders and schizophrenia… Not only did the DSM become the bible of psychiatry, but like the real Bible, it depended a lot on something akin to revelation. There are no citations of scientific studies to support its decisions. That is an astonishing omission.
Marcia Angell (2011), former editor-in-chief of NEJM
The DSM’s diagnostic categories lack validity, and the NIMH will be re-orienting its research away from DSM categories.
Former NIMH Director Thomas Insel
The authors of the DSM seem more preoccupied with politically correct jargon than substance. There are hundreds of psychiatry blogs where participants argue obsessively about the terminology, and there is a massive effort in each edition to update it.
For example, they changed Mental Retardation to Intellectual Disability. In 2010, this change was written into federal law. Multiple Personality Disorder morphed into Dissociative Identity Disorder for the DSM-V. Other diagnoses were hatched, for example Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder and Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder. This was formerly Late Luteal Phase Dysphoric Disorder. For many more samples, scan the entire document online. I read it for hours and did not think it got any better.
To understand the DSM V better, see the following excerpt:
Criteria for Oppositional Defiant Disorder: A pattern of angry/irritable mood, argumentative/defiant behavior, or vindictiveness lasting at least 6 months as evidenced by at least four symptoms from any of the following categories, and exhibited during interaction with at least one individual who is not a sibling. Angry/Irritable Mood: 1. Often loses temper. 2. Is often touchy or easily annoyed. 3, Is often angry and resentful. Argumentative/Defiant Behavior: 4. Often argues with authority figures or, for children and adolescents, with adults. 5. Often actively defies or refuses to comply with requests from authority figures or with rules. 6. Often deliberately annoys others. 7. Often blames others for his or her mistakes or misbehavior.
Parents of boys need no other commentary unless they support using medications with pernicious side effects to suppress normal, but somewhat irritating, behavior.
The DSM has worldwide influence. It is the ultimate resource for courts, doctors, prisons, hospitals, and insurance companies. These diagnoses lock people into legal and therapeutic boxes, but they are of dubious benefit since the drugs work poorly and promote chronicity. Since withdrawal from these medicines is severe and mimics the conditions treated, long-term use becomes almost inevitable.
To get psychiatric drugs approved, corporations blatantly falsify research. The study deceits I reviewed in the FDA chapter are all used. Studies that show drugs do not work get concealed. Positive reviews get published multiple times, and the journals mostly only print the data that shows the drugs work. These last two tricks are such standard practice that the drugmakers have internal nicknames for them: “salami-slicing” and “cherry-picking,” respectively.
Another often-used fraud is to compare massive doses of an old drug, such as Thorazine, with standard doses of a new medication. This makes the side effects of the new one look modest.
In proper drug studies, patients who take a placebo are compared with those who consume the genuine thing. However, in some psychiatric research, the people chosen to receive the sugar pill recently discontinued an older antipsychotic such as Thorazine. They are having withdrawal effects such as severe restlessness (akathisia) and anxiety. Placebo patients should not have any reactions. When such a trial is over, the lie is told that the treatment group using the drug had fewer ill effects—fewer side effects—than the sugar-pill group, which is absurd.
Psychiatric drugs are disasters. For example, Hengartner and his colleagues did a 30-year prospective study of 591 depressed Swiss adults at the University of Zurich. They found that no use of SSRIs (Prozac-class medications) had better patient outcomes than some use, which in turn had better results than long-term use. After nine years, they reported that the SSRIs cause more depression rather than less.
The benzodiazepines (Valium-class drugs) relieve anxiety for a few weeks. But after about a month, they stop working. After this, patients require higher dosages to produce the same effects. Later, if the drugs are discontinued, months of agonizing dread, sleeplessness, and crippling nervousness commonly occur.
The original studies of Xanax for anxiety were for 14 weeks; after four weeks, it was working; after eight weeks, it was not; and at the end of the study, as the experimenters withdrew the drug from the patients, they got much worse.
The psychiatrists and the drugmaker ignored the longer-term results and claimed there was a net benefit based on the first four weeks. (See Robert Whitaker’s YouTube.) The FDA approved the drug, and it became not only the most commonly prescribed benzodiazepine but the most frequently prescribed psychiatric medication. But Xanax is addictive, and most physicians are well aware of this by now.
Other benzodiazepines are also hard to discontinue. Klonopin (clonazepam) is a chemically similar drug. One patient I worked with had used this 17-hour benzodiazepine to sleep every night for a decade. He decided to stop it. I wrote a compounding pharmacy prescription for smaller and smaller doses, so he tapered it over three months. He suffered with anxiety and sleeplessness the whole time, but felt better at the end. He said his energy and creativity both improved.
Another example: bipolar patients’ outcomes are profoundly worse in today’s medication era than they were before. Prior to the drugs, the disease often went away on its own. But now, we treat children who have psychological ups and downs with a stimulant or antidepressant before their first severe mania develops. The ones treated with antidepressants have four times increased chances of becoming “rapid cyclers,” which means they have frequent recurrences.
Robert Whitaker, a distinguished journalist, summarized the horrific medication problems in Anatomy of an Epidemic (2010):
Given what the scientific literature revealed about the long-term outcomes of medicated schizophrenia, anxiety, and depression, it stood to reason that the drug cocktails used to treat bipolar illness were unlikely to produce good long-term results. The increased chronicity, the functional decline, the cognitive impairment, and the physical illness—these are usual in people treated with a cocktail that often includes an antidepressant, an antipsychotic, a mood stabilizer, a benzodiazepine, and perhaps a stimulant, too. This was a medical train wreck…
Whitaker learned that most patients in emerging countries could not afford psychiatric drugs. Doctors there may even leave psychotic people unmedicated. The result is much less chronicity and some spontaneous cures. Almost half of the people with schizophrenia recover if they never get antipsychotics, but in the US, with treatment, this happens rarely or possibly never. History is also encouraging: before the drugs were developed, some studies showed the same thing. But since Americans now medicate practically everyone, comparison with placebo has become impossible.
In the US, mental illness, disability, and drug prescribing rose in tandem. Our psychiatric disability percentages have grown over tenfold during the modern medication era. Whittaker built a cautiously stated and well-referenced case that the medications were the cause. He also reported studies showing that within a few years, antipsychotics caused brain shrinkage in both monkeys and humans.
Psychiatrists have pressures to pass out medications. I interviewed one who said, “We cannot support our families unless we see a patient every ten minutes and give them the latest drug. Most of us know these are unproven, ineffective, and sometimes harmful, but people will not pay us just to talk with them anymore.”
David Healy further describes this circus in Pharmageddon (2012). The industry’s interest in funding psychiatry picked up when Prozac became available in 1987. As these SSRIs and other inventions became lucrative, corporations spared no expense for psychiatrists. They cater food, pay for meetings, arrange free hotel rooms, and sometimes provide first-class plane tickets for them. Lectures, trinkets, social events, limousine service, and massive exhibit halls are all available courtesy of the drugmakers.
These companies give some working psychiatrists $300,000-$400,000 per year. This creates the desired effect; for example, one group from the American College of Neuro-psycho-pharmacology published a claim (2004) that SSRIs did not cause youth suicides. They were discredited after the discovery that nine of the ten doctors on the panel had a financial relationship with the industry.
The psychiatrists have credible excuses. The phenomena they treat are chronic and poorly understood. No labs, physical testing, or examination findings help make the diagnosis. Studying treatment is difficult because every detail is subjective. I felt sorry for them until I read about their misbehavior.
Since nothing seems to help, in their frustration, they have historically tried about anything. Ice-water baths. Electrical brain shocks—electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). Overdosing with insulin to crash the blood sugar. Even a destructive brain surgery called lobotomy, for which the inventor received the 1949 Nobel prize in medicine. These were all discredited. ECT, for example, is no longer believed to be effective and at least a third of treated patients suffer substantial memory loss. Worse, the fatality rate is 1/1000.
Psychiatrists customarily use medication combinations. They prescribe Topamax and Lamictal, which are unpleasant anti-seizure medications, to treat various symptoms and side effects. Depression, drug abuse, anxiety, and bipolar disease are all treated off-label using these. Military psychiatrists are fond of giving these seizure treatment drugs to combat troops. They often throw antipsychotics into these “drug cocktails.” The side effects of all these medications include fever, hair loss, nausea, mood changes, dizziness, diarrhea, double vision, loss of appetite, and suicide.
Brexanolone is a steroid hormone approved in 2019 for postpartum depression. It requires sixty (60) hours of medically supervised intravenous injection costing $34,000.
Progesterone, a female hormone that rises during pregnancy and goes nearly to zero postpartum, can ease these symptoms. The 100 mg dose is a patent drug, but compounding pharmacies can inexpensively provide the larger doses required for this condition. There is little interest in this because there is no huge price tag.
Hallucinogens such as ketamine (which is used for date-rape) or LSD are recurrent fashions in psychiatry. Recent trials are underway to treat depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder using small doses of these, and there is a lot of enthusiasm in some circles. LSD has been considered disreputable and classified Schedule I since the war on drugs in the 1970s, even though it has no fatal dose and its toxicities are modest compared with many prescriptions. Although these therapeutic uses may have merit, I fear they are further abuses, even though there is no patented way to profit from these older drugs—yet.
The mental health industry’s ambition—now mostly realized—is to be the universal solution for every problem, and to use the drugs for nearly anyone. The National Institute of Mental Health says one in five US citizens “live with a mental illness.” Wikipedia (2020) noted that: “Worldwide, more than one in three people in most countries report sufficient criteria for at least one [psychiatric disorder] at some point in their life. In the United States, 46% qualify for a mental illness at some point.”
They were citing (respectively) the Bulletin of the World Health Organization and a 2005 paper by Ronald Kessler in Archives of General Psychiatry. He is the most widely cited psychiatric researcher in the world. He said in his paper: “Interventions aimed at prevention or early treatment need to focus on youth.”
Industry financing pushes this narrative. The money passes back and forth, and it is hard to tell what is industry propaganda and what comes from legitimate psychiatric sources—if there is such a thing. For example, MentalHealthfirstaid.org (accessed in 2019) is a link-farm for dozens of psychiatric groups of all genders and species. It says: “In the United States, almost half of adults (46.4 percent) will experience a mental illness during their lifetime. Half of all mental disorders begin by age 14 and three-quarters by age 24.”
They emphasize that besides fifty percent of adults, children, who are traditionally off-limits, should be drug candidates as well. The following chapters explain how seventeen percent of the entire US populace came to be using psychiatric drugs.
3. PROZAC AND RELATIVES
The medical profession is being bought by the pharmaceutical industry, not only in terms of the practice of medicine, but also in terms of teaching and research. The academic institutions of this country are allowing themselves to be the paid agents of the pharmaceutical industry.
Arnold Relman, MD, former editor NEJM (2002)
I wrote about a thousand Prozac-type SSRI prescriptions over my career, which might have been a half-million dollars in drug sales. I screened my patients, as I was trained, by merely asking them a few questions.
Peter Kramer's bestselling Listening to Prozac (1997) duped me. He said Prozac could save patients from common symptoms of guilt, fatigue, sadness, sleep disturbance, and even aches or digestive problems. He also claimed it could be a lifestyle drug similar to today's Viagra, boosting ordinary peoples’ performance. I learned later that the SSRIs are toxic, have limited utility, and the hype has produced vast overuse.
Industry marketed SSRIs as an improvement on the older tricyclic antidepressants. These cause sedation, and only a month’s supply is needed for suicide. Part of the promotion of the Prozac-class drugs was that sleepiness is mild, and even enormous doses rarely cause fatality.
Before the drug era, doctors thought depression was rare and most often self-limited to about three months. Now (2020), Wikipedia claims that 17 percent of the US population becomes depressed during their lifetime, making them all candidates for expensive, indefinite medication usage. Legions of paid Wiki contributors, many of whom work for pharmaceutical companies, make this source only a little better than a drug industry link farm.
A simple checklist is used to diagnose depression. A primary care medical assistant often administrates it. It is a list of nonspecific symptoms from the DSM. Many are opposites.
DSM criteria for depression: ✪ Depressed mood most of the time ✪ Lack of pleasure most of the time ✪ Significant weight loss or gain, appetite up or down ✪ Slow or speeded up thoughts and movements ✪ Feeling worthless or guilty most of the time ✪ Either fatigue or excess energy ✪ Cannot think or concentrate most of the time ✪ Thinking of death or suicide with or without a plan
No physical tests exist to verify the diagnosis. After waiting two weeks, doctors might commit a patient to these drugs for years—or even a lifetime. The industry promotes the disease, the medications, and the casual approach to treatment together.
“Prozac is not addictive,” according to the package label written by the manufacturer. True, there are no opioid-type withdrawals. However, after discontinuation, severe anxiety and depression are common. Other issues include suicide, feeling “electric shocks,” and tardive dyskinesia (TD), which is often manifest by continuous mouth movements. The drug companies claim most of this is because of the depressed state itself rather than medication effects. There were many consumer complaints to the Federal Trade Commission about these claims that antidepressants were not addictive.
When my patients sometimes stopped the SSRI drugs and had symptoms of depression and anxiety, I believed that it was their disease and not the drug withdrawal. I was told that they must use the medications long-term for them to work, so I told everyone to continue. It was bogus information, however.
The Selective Serotonin Re-uptake Inhibitor (SSRI) name was pseudoscience dreamed up in the marketing department of SmithKline Beecham. The “chemical imbalance in the brain” idea was the brainstorm of a sales copywriter in the 1950s. Knowledge of serotonin and other neurotransmitters was even more sketchy when Prozac was invented than it is now. Today, this seductive but mythical gibberish embarrasses researchers.
Similarly, “ACE inhibitor” or “angiotensin-converting enzyme” blood pressure medications were gobbledegook names used for branding. Lithium is an old therapy for bipolar illness with no sparkling, pseudo-scientific story associated with it. It is not patented or a money-maker, so no one will pay a copywriter to invent a marketing idea for it. Note: lithium causes sedation and occasional tardive dyskinesia. It becomes toxic in doses only slightly higher than the therapeutic ones. This can cause permanent brain damage.
The marketers said depression was like diabetes, and SSRIs were an “insulin” for brain disease. However, no clear relationship of depression to serotonin or other neurotransmitters was ever established, and the drugs all work about the same, with a similar lack of benefit. Jill Moncrieff in The Bitterest Pills (2013) confirmed this:
No chemical imbalance or other biological process that might explain drug action in a disease-centered way has been substantiated for any psychiatric disorder ... Most authorities now admit that there is no evidence that depression is associated with abnormalities of serotonin or noradrenaline, as used to be believed (Dubovsky et al., 2001). There is also little empirical support for the dopamine hypothesis of schizophrenia.
Ronald Pies, editor-in-chief emeritus of the Psychiatric Times, agreed: “The ‘chemical imbalance’ notion was always a kind of urban legend—never a theory seriously propounded by well-informed psychiatrists… [it was a] myth.”
Despite this consensus, nearly everyone still believes the metaphor and parrots the message. The idea is 1) your brain is damaged, 2) the drugs fix something, and 3) you need to take medications indefinitely.
SSRIs cause substantial harm. A 2017 literature review of randomized controlled trials in Frontiers in Psychiatry said these drugs are ineffective and damaging. It linked them to osteoporosis and movement disorders, including akathisia and tardive dyskinesia. They may double the risks of miscarriage and congenitaldisabilities. However, physicians use them off-label for pregnant women and during breastfeeding. Expectant mothers get severe withdrawal symptoms just like anyone else.
Sexual side effects occur in a range from 2% to 59% in various trials. In some studies, they never asked the patients about the issue. When used for premature ejaculation, about a third of men permanently improved, sometimes after just a few pills or even a single dose. This suggests significant long-term effects that are adverse for most people. Many patients report having long-lasting problems with having orgasms after taking and then stopping these drugs.
In the first nine years of Prozac's use, between 1988 and 1996, there were 39,000 FDA complaints, a record for any drug. This included reports of suicide, psychosis, abnormal thinking, and sexual dysfunction. Many patients taking the medication have sexual difficulties, are “emotionally numb,” and have “reduced positive feelings.” In October 2004, the FDA introduced a written warning about suicide in children and adolescents treated with SSRIs. The agency extended this in 2006 to include young adults up to age 25.
Antidepressants are touted as preventing depression for people having medical problems. Prophylaxis is a market for nearly anyone.
Industry hid SSRI-related suicides and violence. The manufacturers have always claimed suicide was because of the underlying depression and not the drugs. They altogether avoided addressing violence, and the psychiatrists parroted this. Even Dr. Healy believed it before he worked as a plaintiff's expert in the Stewart Dolin case. So did I. Healy changed his mind after he read the secret corporate documents produced by the defendant corporation during the lawsuit’s discovery process.
Dr. Healy learned from his review that Lilly concealed suicides. Their executives had written internally that they could “go down the tubes if we lose Prozac” and that a single big news story could do it. In 1985, a Lilly internal memorandum said that the increased suicides were 5.6 times greater than those associated with imipramine, an older antidepressant. Gøtzsche later evaluated a 2006 FDA meta-analysis of 100,000 patients and estimated that it under-reported suicide by a factor of fifteen.
SSRIstories.org has thousands of news clips about SSRI violence. Martha Rosenberg summarizes:
The only thing more shocking than the number of newspaper stories on the site is the number of previously healthy people who committed violence with no precipitating events. Twenty people mentioned here set themselves on fire. Ten bit their victims (including a biter who was sleepwalking and a woman on Prozac who bit her eighty-seven-year-old mother into critical condition). Three men in their seventies and eighties attacked their wives with hammers. In Midwest City, Oklahoma, a woman accepted a cup of tea from an elderly nurse she'd just met—and then strangled her. A twelve-year-old boy left in his cousin's car while she shopped at Target killed her five-week-old daughter, who had also been left in the vehicle. All were under the influence of psychoactive drugs. Did events like these ever happen before the psychoactive drug revolution? In one month of reports on the site, a fifty-four-year-old respiratory patient with a breathing tube and an oxygen tank and no previous criminal record held up a bank in Mobile. An enraged man in Australia chased his mailman and threatened to cut his throat… for bringing him junk mail. A fifty-eight-year-old Amarillo man with no criminal history tried to abduct three people and killed an Oklahoma grandmother in the process. A sixty-year-old grandmother in Seattle killed three family members and herself. And fourteen parents drowned their children, a crime no one had heard of before…
Lilly’s publicity machine tried to claim that Scientologists perpetrated the entire story. They are well-known to hate psychiatry, and their reputation is cultish, litigious, and generally unpopular.
The internal documents obtained at discovery when Lilly was sued revealed that their policy was to settle and seal Prozac cases. By 2000, they had spent about $50 million on these settlements. Other internal records showed that the corporate employees believed this was a “relatively insignificant” cost. If a lawsuit forced them to alter the labeling or withdraw the drug, losses might have been in the billions of dollars.
Completed suicides are ordinarily 4:1 men to women, but SSRI-related suicides are about the same rate for each sex. A New Zealand study of 1829 people taking SSRIs found suicidal thinking in 39 percent. Healy did a simple one-month project where he gave Prozac to twenty healthy volunteers who had no depression. Two of the twenty had severe suicidal thoughts that slowly went away after stopping the drug. When mild depressives are treated, the primary drug effect could be akathisia, the unbearable agitation. This is the symptom Stewart Dolan experienced.
Suicides for people between 15 and 64 years old increased by a third during the era when SSRI prescribing took off. The data is from the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics between 1999 to 2017.
In Let Them Eat Prozac (2004), David Healy says that we trust pharmaceutical companies just like patients trusted Harold Shipman, a physician who murdered over 200 people using heroin. Healy says that relationships of trust like this make serial killings easy, comparing the drug companies to killers1.
CONCLUSION
The Japanese judge antidepressants as harshly as they judge stimulants, if that is possible. Their public health system is at least as good as ours. Taking these drugs into Japan is illegal. You can go to jail if their customs agents find Prozac in your luggage. To avoid this, you must petition them to bring your supply in.
Japanese studies of the SSRIs versus the older antidepressants found negligible differences, just like the Western studies. They have allowed only a few drugs of this type into their country.
German regulators did not believe Prozac was worthwhile at first. Their FDA-type agency looked at the evidence during its original approval process. They said, “Considering the benefit and the risk, we think [this drug is] totally unsuitable for the treatment of depression.” They noted that the patients’ self-ratings in the studies showed that the drug did not work. This was contrary to those of the doctors,’ whose evaluations claimed it did2. Germany later capitulated to the drug companies and allowed Prozac into their country. However, they required a stern warning on the product labeling about issues in the first weeks of therapy and the potential need for accompanying sedatives.
Summary: SSRIs may help for severe depression, but only for a brief time. If your depression puts you in bed full-time for months and you can barely resist killing yourself, you may want to risk the drugs. If you do, you must accept the risk that the medications themselves will enable you to get up and commit suicide or harm others. For moderate depression, the drugs work poorly or not at all. For mild depression, which is their current primary use, these medications are ineffective.
Casual prescription of SSRIs is unconscionable. Allowing the pharmaceutical publicity machine to promote them for brief adjustment disorders, mild sleep problems, and even grief reactions is a travesty. I wish I could say that awareness of this situation has percolated through the psychiatrists and primary care physicians. Unfortunately, industry propaganda has overwhelmed all the other narratives. In some years, SSRIs have been the most prescribed drugs, even ahead of blood pressure medications. Between 1996 and 2005, US antidepressant usage rose from 5.8 percent to 10 percent of the population, and by 2017, it was 12.7 percent.
1 For much more about this violence than most readers can stomach, see Deadly Psychiatry and Organized Denial (2015) by Peter Gøtzsche.
2 May 25th, 1984 communication to Lilly US from Lilly Bad Homburg
4. ANTIPSYCHOTICS ARE DISASTROUS
The person who takes medicine must recover twice, once from the disease and once from the medicine.
William Osler, MD
I had trouble believing psychiatry was such a complete mess. I had referred people for talking therapy, and it seemed beneficial. I prescribed SSRI antidepressants and benzodiazepines such as Valium many times and had convinced myself they were helpful.
I heard the story that psychiatric hospitals had emptied soon after the antipsychotics became available. My psychiatrist colleagues were utterly convinced their medicines worked. I thought it was credible.
In medical school, they assigned me to the schizophrenia floor during my psychiatry rotation. Many people there were in the throes of deep insanity. I saw quick, dramatic improvements after we gave them medications. I read the studies that showed antipsychotics improved these symptoms for at least a few weeks. My mentors taught me that these people should continue taking the medications lifelong.
Later in my career, I treated violent and aggressive people with Haldol and Thorazine when working in the emergency department. They improved—or at least went to sleep.
I often saw patients whose symptoms recurred after stopping their medicines. When they were put back on the drugs, they mostly got better. I thought at the time that this proved the drugs worked, but I was wrong. Psychosis is commonplace during withdrawal from these addictive antipsychotic medicines.
Antipsychotic drugs work for severely impaired psychotic patients over the brief term. These people, who are often labeled schizophrenic, have a partial or complete loss of contact with reality combined with irrational or spurious thoughts, and they may hear voices. Note that visual hallucinations are something different, and usually due to drug abuse.
Patients like this are often inconvenient or intrusive for other people. They can rarely work, and a few are violent. About sixty percent attempt suicide, and fifteen percent are successful.
Antipsychotic drugs improve this group’s behavior. More accurately, they suppress people’s responses at the price of noxious, often permanent side effects. Hallucinations and suicidal thoughts seem to vanish—probably along with most other thoughts. Patients stop running away from home, but holding a job is next to impossible. Long-term institutionalization is the only other option to control them when they are symptomatic. This amounts to the same thing, for it always comes with drugs.
Tragically, we give the vast majority, perhaps 99 percent, of these toxic medications to people who have none of these severe symptoms. Most prescriptions are for “mood” disorders such as depression and a cornucopia of other issues, including even insomnia. Aggressive children get medicated frequently, even though the FDA does not approve these drugs for kids under five. Many are given to toddlers under two.
Health effects: “Typical” or first-generation antipsychotics such as Thorazine and Haldol were marketed as a treatment for insanity since the 1950s, but they have horrendous side effects. These include involuntary movements that look like Parkinson’s disease. Rigid muscles with painful spasms are also common. Akathisia, an uncontrollable restlessness that occasionally results in suicide, occurs in 25 percent. The neuroleptic malignant syndrome, which is a violent elevation of body temperature, is rare but life-threatening.
Tardive dyskinesia (TD) is the best known of these problems. Twenty to thirty percent of people taking these drugs get it, and 500,000 individuals in the US have it. Involuntary movements are characteristic. Patients' tongues, arms, and legs may make strange motions. Their cheeks, jaws, and noses contort. Eyelids spasm, eyes move around, and the patients may make unintentional sounds. The psychiatrists call these “worm-tongue, fly-tongue, or rabbit-face.” Caregivers may never recognize the drug(s) as the cause, and they may blame and punish patients.
TD usually occurs after six months to two years of treatment but may happen after just a few months. When the drugs are discontinued, the syndrome often lingers, or sometimes it begins for the first time. Many patients who use these medications must continue them because this effect frequently gets worse without them. The brain’s grey matter shrinks, which is proof of damage. TD is also associated with premature death.
Antipsychotics destroy physical health. Stroke, seizures, weight gain, blood clots, heart attacks, pancreatitis, and heart rhythm disturbance are linked with them. There has never been a recall by the FDA, only a black-box warning.
The newer “atypical” antipsychotics include Abilify and Zyprexa, available since the 1990s. Their marketing proclaimed that they produced less TD and other related damage. Initial studies suggested that the tardive dyskinesia rate was a quarter of that for the older medications. Later trials focusing on TD revealed that there was little substantial difference between the older and newer drugs.
Like the first generation, the atypical antipsychotics cause health problems: stroke, blood clots, weight gain, heart attacks, and diabetes. They cut up to twenty years off of patients’ lives, and they also shrink the brain. Eli Lilly, the developer, concealed these adverse effects, despite being aware of them from the initial trials.
The lawsuits: The NY Times reported (2007), “Lilly spent $1.2 billion since 2004 to settle lawsuits from 28,500 people who claimed they developed diabetes or heart problems after taking [Zyprexa]. At least 1,200 more lawsuits are still pending.”
In 2009, the company settled a federal criminal indictment for $1.4 billion. The allegations were illegal marketing, including pushing the drug for children off-label. The fine was affordable because the gross revenue for Zyprexa was $4.7 billion in 2008 alone. They sold $4.6 billion in 2011 as the drug went off-patent. According to a 2017 Kiplinger report, Zyprexa was then the thirteenth best-selling drug of all time.
In 2009, Pfizer settled allegations surrounding Geodon, another atypical antipsychotic, for $2.3 billion. These included paying physicians to increase their prescribing of medications for children. During this time, the FDA censured three of Pfizer’s doctors for research misconduct, and they suspended two from working with the FDA. One, Richard Borison, received a fifteen-year prison sentence. He pleaded guilty to 36 charges of theft, making false statements, and violating the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO). They ordered him to pay restitution of $4.26 million.
The studies and commentary: Robert Whitaker, in Psychiatry Under the Influence (2015), wrote that psychiatric studies had a fatal flaw: the sugar-pill control groups were distorted or absent. It is hard to find comparison patients in a society where everyone takes pills. The industry designed numerous trials to produce the desired results, manipulated them during execution, or purposefully misinterpreted their findings.
Whitaker said that atypical antipsychotics were failures:
The hyping of these is now viewed as one of the more embarrassing episodes in psychiatry’s history, as one government-funded study after another failed to find that they were any better than the first-generation antipsychotics. In 2005, the NIMH’s CATIE Trial found “no significant differences” between the atypicals and their predecessors. Furthermore, this study revealed that neither the new drugs nor the old ones could be said to work effectively.
The medication advocates claimed this study favored the drugs.
A 2019 German analysis showed that, since 2011, over half of all the drugs they studied were worthless or no better than older medicines. Among these, psychiatric drugs were the least effective of all the recent ones entering their marketplace.
Two prominent psychiatrists, Peter Tyrer and Tim Kendall, wrote in the Lancet (2008) that the atypicals were now being exposed:
As a group, they are no more efficacious, do not improve specific symptoms, do not have a different side-effect profile than the first-generation antipsychotics, and are less cost-effective. The… atypicals can now be regarded as invention only, cleverly manipulated by the drug industry for marketing purposes, and only now being exposed. But how is it that for nearly two decades we have, as some have put it, been beguiled into thinking they were superior?
“The spurious advance of antipsychotic drug therapy.”
Another commentary said that the increased costs and many other problems outweighed any advantages of the new medications (Australian Prescriber, 2004).
Marketing drove the atypical antipsychotics to incomprehensible profits. In 2014, the top eight psychiatric medications had $20 billion in sales, and of this, $7.2 billion was the new antipsychotic Abilifyalone. It was also the top-selling drug in the US that year. Cochrane Reviews said it was no improvement over the other atypical medicines. Consumer Reports does not recommend it at all. Its retail cost that year was $30 to $40 for a single 2 mg pill—$2700 for a 90 day supply.
CASH PRICES OF ATYPICALS (GOODRX.COM):
(Listed as brand names, but most have generics.)
3/25/20 prices of: Average price:
*Geodon 30 capsules, 80 mg. $287.29
*Zyprexa 30 mg capsules, 5 mg $161.13
*Abilify 30 capsules, 5 mg $677.40
*Promepar (Thorazine) 30 tab, 25 mg $153.34
*Resperdal 30 tablets, .5 mg $56.36
Saphris 30 tablets, 10 mg $722.19
Invega Trinza (injection/3 mo, Costco) $8036
Abilify Maintena (injection/vial, Costco) $2252
Rispderdal Consta (inj. 50 mg, Costco) $1011
Note: GoodRx.com offers cheaper prices
*off-patent, except for the injectable
Physicians force many patients to take these drugs. Atypicals are used for people with dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, for example. But studies showed that for this group, they work no better than placebos, they double long-term dementia rates, and the patients die sooner.
There are few suitable ways to deal with sick psychiatric patients’ behavioral problems because they are captives of their condition. Once they start, they are also drug captives —they cannot stop the medications without getting worse. We cannot let people run off and wander the streets or attack other residents at their facilities. And we consider physical restraints inhumane.
Current prescribing custom is to use heavy doses of medicines for nearly everyone in nursing homes. Few institutions have the caring, knowledgeable supervision required to select the least damaging and smallest quantity of drugs and then monitor their people. Even fewer institutions have sufficient staff to pursue a facility-based restraint model, i.e. locked doors, without using drugs. This is expensive.
Most people feel awful when they take antipsychotics. Some sleep all the time. Many discontinue them and they get frightening withdrawal symptoms. These may include unprovoked, uncontrollable rage. It becomes a vicious cycle of degeneration with more drugs, worsening conduct, and finally forced treatment with monthly injections. Patients believe the process is inhumane and despise it. With the use of drugs that create permanent damage, recovery from the initial problem is unlikely. There is no way to tell, anyway—the medications are taken indefinitely.
Studies show more suicides for patients who have more hospitalizations and take more drugs (this might not be cause-and-effect, but I think it is). People with schizophrenia who take medicines have worse functioning over the long term than those who never used drugs (again, that this might not be causal).
The homelessness crisis, which seems like such a mystery, is easily explained. The bulk of these people have been chewed up and spit out by our psychiatric system. Many are suffering permanent consequences of using the drugs.
The mental health industry is a lot like the prison system or the Hotel California of the Eagles song—it is much easier to get in than to leave. The drugs keep patients locked in place1.
Antipsychotics conclusion: Psychosis is an intractable, poorly understood problem with no known cure. Since it sometimes goes away on its own, the best thing for the patient may be to do nothing—but this is neither easy nor convenient in most cases. Social rules say that those who trespass on the rights of others need control, but coerced drugging violates individual rights. Institutional observation of patients for several months during their first psychotic episode might allow management of mild cases without medication. Since drug therapy is near-universal in the US, no one knows for sure.
5. CONCLUSION: LIVING ON PLANET PSYCH
Working psychiatrists address formidable problems, and we must respect their experience treating severely impaired patients. There is a definite place for their drugs, even the antipsychotics, but they should only be prescribed to a fraction of those who take them now. (Yoho’s 2025 note: We would be better off without them.) Forcing people to take medication breaks down the doctor-patient therapeutic trust. This should be reserved for the most intractable problems.
For more healthy individuals—who are victims of universal overprescribing—the drugs cause much more harm than good. People seem to forget that life is full of challenges. Long-term use of a pill will not fix these. Even if they were side-effect free, which they are not, these drugs just put issues off.
The atypical antipsychotics, SSRI antidepressants, and stimulants have infested healthcare through a process of industry promotion, physician payoffs, and diagnosis creep. Antipsychotics are likely the most damaging drugs ever widely used.
With the leadership of industry and their cosseted, lapdog doctors, psychiatric medications are prescribed indiscriminately to nearly anyone entering a physician’s office with a psychological complaint. The short-term benefits of controlling crazy, violent, and antisocial behavior has been indecently extended to decades of expensive, damaging drugging for one in six US adults. Worst of all, we push the medications into the mouths of many of our treasured children under two.
EPILOGUE: SUICIDES IN THE AMERICAN MILITARY
These have mirrored the rise of antidepressant and antipsychotic prescribing. Frequently, psychiatrists use these drugs together, sometimes with anti-seizure medications. This supposedly reduces headaches and produces better sleep. Military Times says one in six soldiers—110,000 people—take psychoactive drugs.
Larium, a drug used to prevent malaria, causes psychosis, hallucinations, delusions, paranoia, aggression, and suicides. We have known about this for over a decade, but it is still prescribed. Personnel taking the drug have committed murders.
There is almost a suicide a day in the US armed forces. By itself, this is not firm evidence that these drugs cause suicide. Soldiering is a grim job with immense stresses and occasional brain trauma. But when we use these drugs in combination, as is the military pattern, no-one knows how they perform. It has never been studied.
1 For many other anecdotes, see Whitaker’s MadInAmerica.com blog.
6. PATIENT TIPS: SURVIVING PLANET PSYCH
Here on Planet Psych, the biggest obstacle is that the psychiatrists and the rest of us look at the scene the same way. The doctors think the medicines work because they watch their patients. The rest of us all know someone (maybe us) who swears these drugs have helped them. All this seems irrefutable. Why is it necessary to debunk something so obvious?
To review: Much of psychiatric patient behavior is because of the drugs, and the most commonly seen symptoms are because of withdrawal. This mimics the conditions being treated. Rather than proving the medications work, these symptoms are proof of brain alteration or damage. This confuses every observer. Once patients take these drugs, most are stuck on them indefinitely, both because they are addicted and also because their caregivers sincerely believe the medications help.
Can you ever quit them? That depends. For some, the best path is to stay on the drugs. But if you have a strong internal compass and understand the medications, stopping them may be worth a try because you might feel better. Since withdrawal is unpredictable, you need your doctor to monitor you. A compounding pharmacy can make up progressively weaker pills for you to take during the months that this will take.
Stuart Shipko, MD, a California psychiatrist, thinks that although these drugs are not specific treatments for mental problems, they are the only alternatives for the sickest people. When his patients are considering therapy, he fully discloses the chances of TD and other permanent issues. He tells them that the medications are “neurotoxic” rather than saying they are addictive. Most people consulting him decide against using them.
He has decades of experience trying to get people off the drugs, and he says that quitting might be possible after short-term use. However, when patients have taken these medications for years, this is typically agonizing and may be futile. Some people deteriorate and a few become psychotic. Up to six months after stopping, a severe reaction such as chronic, unremitting restlessness may still occur. Medication tapering can take up to two and a half years.
Patients who quit should read the books by Peter Gøtzsche, Peter Breggin, Robert Whitaker, and Jill Moncrieff, plus the stories on survivingantidepressants.org. Gøtzsche’s Mental Health Survival Kit (2020) is particularly valuable. It explains why psychiatric medications are such disasters and instructs how to discontinue them.
Psychoactive drugs are justified long-term only for people with crippling mental problems. Perhaps they are justified only for patients who are seriously disrupting the lives of others. When these medications are used, the patient must accept brain damage. Although using them may help behavior over the brief term, over time they make most problems worse. The system railroads many people into institutions and forces them to take medications. Patients need advocates, preferably relatives, who can help them. Judges automatically rule for commitment on the most trivial of grounds, and psychiatrists have little time to consider much but the convenience of everyone else involved.
7. YOHO TERM PAPER
Pharmaceutical Money and Professional Interests Hijacked Psychiatry and Psychotherapy and Produced Scientific Collapse
Psychiatry, psychotherapy, and psychoanalysis have become subjects of intense scrutiny due to pervasive institutional corruption, methodological weaknesses, and limited empirical support for their central claims. This examination synthesizes academic research that documents these concerns, drawing on peer-reviewed studies, systematic reviews, and institutional analyses that reveal patterns of professional misconduct, commercial influence, and therapeutic failure.
The evidence demonstrates that these disciplines suffer from institutional corruption"¹ - a systemic distortion of professional practices and scientific integrity through powerful external influences, particularly pharmaceutical companies and professional guild interests. Rather than isolated incidents of individual misconduct, the data reveals structural problems that compromise the fundamental reliability of psychiatric diagnosis, treatment efficacy, and research validity.
Pharmaceutical Industry Manipulation
The pharmaceutical industry has achieved unprecedented control over psychiatric research and practice through what researchers describe as "epistemic corruption" - the systematic compromise of medical knowledge systems.² Industry funding creates a measurable bias in clinical trials, with pharmaceutical-sponsored studies showing a 27% increased likelihood of producing favorable efficacy results and a 34% increased likelihood of drawing favorable conclusions compared to independent research.³
This corruption operates through sophisticated mechanisms that traditional bias assessments are unable to detect. Companies employ "ghost management" systems whereby they fund, design, organize, audit, analyze, and write up medical research that they then publish under the names of academic institutions.⁴ This process allows pharmaceutical companies to maintain the appearance of independent scientific validation while controlling every aspect of the research process.
The scope of financial influence is staggering. Between 2014 and 2020, pharmaceutical companies paid psychiatrists $340 million, corrupting every aspect of drug testing and marketing.⁵ These payments create systematic incentives that prioritize commercial interests over patient welfare, with companies routinely manipulating trial data, suppressing negative results, and promoting off-label uses without adequate safety data.
Academic Institutional Capture
Professional psychiatric organizations are financially dependent on pharmaceutical funding, creating a "medical-industrial complex."⁶ The American Psychiatric Association (APA) restructured itself after 1980 to accommodate massive industry funding, fundamentally altering its mission from public health protection to market expansion for psychiatric products.
The APA adopted a disease model in 1980 with the DSM-III, laying claim to societal authority over psychiatric diagnosis, research into biological causes, and drug treatments.⁷ This created powerful guild interests that aligned with pharmaceutical profit motives, as both benefited from expanding diagnostic categories and promoting biological explanations for psychological distress.
Academic medical schools have been similarly compromised. Faculty members routinely serve as paid consultants, speakers, and advisory board members for pharmaceutical companies while simultaneously conducting research and teaching students.⁸ This creates pervasive conflicts of interest that influence curriculum development, research priorities, and clinical training in ways that favor pharmaceutical interventions over alternative approaches.
Diagnostic Invalidity and Scientific Weakness
Psychiatric diagnosis suffers from fundamental reliability problems that undermine its scientific credibility. Its subjective nature, combined with the absence of biological markers for mental conditions, makes the field vulnerable to commercial manipulation and diagnostic inflation.⁹
Research demonstrates that psychiatric diagnoses lack the consistency and validity required for scientific classification systems. Inter-rater reliability is poor across major diagnostic categories, with different clinicians frequently reaching other diagnostic conclusions when evaluating the same patients. This unreliability extends to treatment selection, making evidence-based clinical decision-making impossible.
Commercial interests rather than scientific discoveries have primarily driven the expansion of diagnostic categories in successive DSM editions. Many new diagnoses were explicitly created to extend pharmaceutical patents and expand markets for existing drugs.¹⁰ This process has medicalized everyday human experiences and emotional responses, creating massive populations of "patients" requiring pharmaceutical intervention.
No Biological Validation
Despite decades of research and billions in funding, psychiatry has failed to identify biological markers for any major mental disorder. The chemical imbalance theory of mental illness, which has been promoted extensively to justify pharmaceutical treatments, lacks empirical support and has been largely abandoned by researchers.¹¹
This absence of biological validation distinguishes psychiatry from legitimate medical specialties, which base their practice on measurable physiological abnormalities. Without objective diagnostic criteria, psychiatric practice relies on subjective interpretation of behavioral checklists, creating enormous potential for bias and error.
The lack of biological markers also prevents outcome measurement based on physiological improvement. Instead, psychiatric research relies on subjective rating scales that are easily manipulated and may not reflect meaningful clinical change. This methodological weakness allows pharmaceutical companies to claim efficacy for treatments that provide no genuine benefit to patients.
Drug Failure
Meta-analyses of psychiatric medication effectiveness consistently reveal small effect sizes that may not represent a clinically meaningful improvement. For antidepressants, the most extensively studied psychiatric medications, the difference between drug and placebo effects is often within the margin of measurement error.¹²
Moreover, published research on psychiatric medications is systematically biased toward positive results through selective publication practices. Studies showing negative results are routinely suppressed, while positive studies are published multiple times in different forms to amplify their apparent significance.¹³ This publication bias creates a false impression of therapeutic effectiveness in the literature.
Long-term outcomes for patients receiving psychiatric medications are often worse than those receiving no treatment. Psychiatric drugs create physical dependence and withdrawal syndromes that can be more debilitating than the original symptoms they were prescribed to treat.¹⁴ The widespread use of psychiatric medications has coincided with increased rates of mental illness and disability rather than the reductions that would be expected from effective treatments.
Psychotherapy Failure
Systematic reviews and meta-analyses of psychotherapy prove that it does not work. Up to 50% of patients receiving it show no clinically significant improvement, and 5-20% experience adverse effects, including treatment failure, symptom deterioration, emergence of new symptoms, suicidality, occupational problems, social difficulties, and therapy dependence.¹⁵
Several methodological biases inflate the apparent effectiveness of psychotherapy. Studies typically exclude patients with complex presentations, multiple diagnoses, or severe symptoms—precisely the populations that seek treatment in clinical practice.¹⁶ This selection bias creates artificially positive results that do not generalize to real-world clinical settings.
Comparative effectiveness research reveals minimal differences between various psychotherapy approaches, suggesting that specific therapeutic techniques may be less critical than non-specific factors, such as attention, hope, and the therapeutic relationship.¹⁷ This finding undermines claims that particular psychotherapy methods have specific therapeutic mechanisms or advantages over alternatives.
The field's emphasis on manualized treatments and standardized protocols may reduce therapeutic effectiveness by preventing clinicians from adapting their approach to individual patient needs. Research indicates that therapist factors are more significant predictors of outcome than treatment modality, suggesting that the personal qualities of individual therapists are more important than their specific training or theoretical orientation.¹⁸
Psychoanalytic Failure
Psychoanalysis faces the most severe effectiveness challenges among mental health approaches. The field has been criticized extensively for its failure to adopt empirical research methods, its reliance on unfalsifiable theories, and its poor treatment outcomes.¹⁹
Karl Popper famously characterized psychoanalysis as a pseudoscience because it generates hypotheses that cannot be empirically refuted.²⁰ The field has remained largely isolated from scientific psychology and psychiatry, maintaining its theoretical framework through training institutes that operate outside academic institutions and resist empirical evaluation.
When psychoanalytic treatments have been subjected to rigorous evaluation, the results show minimal effectiveness compared to other approaches or no treatment. Methodological flaws, including small sample sizes, the absence of appropriate control groups, and subjective outcome measures limit the few positive studies of psychoanalytic therapy.²¹
The theoretical foundations of psychoanalysis, including concepts such as the Oedipal complex, unconscious conflict, and childhood determinism, lack empirical support and are inconsistent with the current understanding of human development and psychology.²² Many psychoanalytic concepts have been thoroughly discredited by research in developmental psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience.
Educational Corruption
Mental health training programs have become vehicles for pharmaceutical industry influence, with curricula increasingly focused on biological explanations and drug treatments rather than comprehensive approaches to human psychological distress.²³ Medical schools and psychology programs receive substantial funding from pharmaceutical companies, creating institutional pressures to emphasize pharmacological interventions.
Continuing education programs for mental health professionals are frequently sponsored by pharmaceutical companies and designed to promote specific products rather than provide objective scientific information.²⁴ These programs often present biased information that favors expensive new medications over established treatments or non-pharmacological approaches.
The guild interests of professional organizations create additional pressure to maintain existing practice patterns even when evidence suggests they are ineffective or harmful. Professional licensing requirements and specialty certifications often emphasize adherence to standard practices rather than critical evaluation of treatment effectiveness or patient outcomes.
Research Misconduct
Academic research in mental health fields is compromised by systematic misconduct, including ghostwriting, data manipulation, selective reporting, and suppression of negative results.²⁵ Pharmaceutical companies routinely hire academic physicians to serve as nominal authors on research papers that are written by company employees or contracted medical writing companies.
This ghostwriting process allows companies to present commercially motivated research as independent academic work, deceiving readers about the true source and purpose of published studies. When these fraudulent practices are discovered, medical journals rarely issue retractions or corrections, allowing false information to remain in the scientific literature indefinitely.
Financial conflicts of interest among reviewers and editors compromise the peer review process in psychiatric journals. Many psychiatric journal editors receive substantial payments from pharmaceutical companies, creating obvious incentives that favor the publication of industry-friendly research over critical analysis.²⁶
Medicalization of Normal Experience
The expansion of psychiatric diagnosis has led to the medicalization of normal human experiences and emotional responses. Grief, shyness, academic difficulties, relationship problems, and other common life challenges are increasingly labeled as mental disorders requiring professional treatment and often drugs.²⁷
This medicalization process serves commercial interests by creating vast markets for psychiatric products and services. However, it also stigmatizes everyday human experiences and may prevent individuals from developing coping mechanisms and social support systems.
The emphasis on biological explanations for psychological distress has been shown to increase rather than decrease the stigma associated with mental health problems.²⁸ Contrary to professional claims, biological explanations lead to greater social rejection and pessimism about recovery compared to psychosocial explanations.
Resource Misallocation
The focus on individual biological treatment diverts attention and resources from social and environmental factors that contribute to psychological distress. Research consistently shows that poverty, unemployment, discrimination, trauma, and social isolation are major predictors of mental health problems.²⁹
Programs addressing these social determinants of mental health show greater effectiveness than individual psychiatric treatment in reducing population-level distress. Housing-first programs, poverty reduction initiatives, and community support services demonstrate superior outcomes compared to traditional psychiatric interventions.³⁰
The massive resources devoted to psychiatric research and treatment could potentially achieve greater public health benefits if redirected toward addressing social conditions that create psychological distress. The current system prioritizes profitable individual treatments over cost-effective population-level interventions.
Professional Resistance to Reform
Mental health professions have shown remarkable resistance to criticism and reform despite mounting evidence of systemic problems. Professional organizations routinely dismiss critics as "anti-psychiatry" activists rather than engaging with substantive critiques of current practice.³¹
This defensive response prevents necessary self-examination and reform within the professions. Instead of addressing documented problems with diagnostic reliability, treatment effectiveness, and commercial influence, professional leaders focus on protecting their authority and market position.
The training and socialization of mental health professionals create strong psychological incentives to maintain existing beliefs and practices. Professionals who have invested years in learning particular approaches may be psychologically unable to acknowledge evidence that their methods are ineffective or harmful.
Institutional Resistance
Mental health institutions, including hospitals, clinics, and academic programs, have developed organizational structures and financial arrangements that depend on current practice patterns. Changing these systems would require fundamental restructuring that threatens established interests and revenue streams.
Insurance reimbursement systems favor brief, standardized treatments that can be easily documented and billed. This creates financial pressure to maintain current diagnostic and treatment approaches even when evidence suggests they are ineffective.
Regulatory agencies, including the FDA, have been captured by industry influence and lack the independence necessary to ensure that psychiatric treatments meet appropriate safety and efficacy standards.³² The revolving door between regulatory agencies and pharmaceutical companies creates obvious conflicts of interest that compromise public protection.
Conclusion
The evidence documenting corruption and ineffectiveness in psychiatry, psychotherapy, and psychoanalysis is a damning indictment of contemporary mental health practice. These fields are plagued by pervasive institutional corruption, driven by the influence of the pharmaceutical industry and the interests of professional guilds. Diagnostic practices lack scientific validity and reliability. Treatment approaches show minimal effectiveness and may cause more harm than benefit. Academic research is compromised by systematic misconduct and commercial bias.
The scope and depth of these problems suggest that reform efforts focused on individual practices or specific abuses are insufficient. The documented pattern of institutional corruption necessitates a fundamental restructuring of the mental health professions, encompassing their financing, training, research methods, and regulatory oversight.
Without dramatic reform, these professions will continue to prioritize commercial interests over patient welfare, perpetuate ineffective and potentially harmful treatments, and divert resources from more promising approaches to reducing human psychological distress. The evidence suggests that the current system functions primarily as a mechanism for extracting profit from human suffering rather than providing assistance to those in need.
A more effective approach to mental health might emphasize social and environmental interventions, community support systems, and non-medical responses to psychological distress. However, implementing such changes would require overcoming powerful vested interests that benefit from maintaining the current dysfunctional system.
Footnotes:
8. Key resources for this essay:
1. Cosgrove, L. & Whitaker, R. (2015) - "Psychiatry Under the Influence: Institutional Corruption, Social Injury, and Prescriptions for Reform"
· Provided the core theoretical framework of "institutional corruption"
· Documented the "three economies of influence" (guild interests, pharmaceutical money to APA, pharmaceutical money to academic psychiatry)
· Essential for understanding how corruption operates systematically rather than through individual bad actors
2. Sismondo, S. (2021) - "Epistemic Corruption, the Pharmaceutical Industry, and the Body of Medical Science"
· Introduced the concept of "epistemic corruption" and "ghost management"
· Provided empirical evidence on industry bias in clinical trials (27% increased likelihood of favorable results)
· Key for understanding how pharmaceutical companies control research from design to publication
3. Whitaker, R. (2021) - "Anatomy of an Industry: Commerce, Payments to Psychiatrists and Betrayal of the Public Good" (Mad in America)
· Documented $340 million in pharmaceutical payments to psychiatrists (2014-2020)
· Showed how Open Payments legislation failed to reduce corruption
· Provided concrete data on the scope of financial influence
4. Amsterdam, J.D., McHenry, L.B., & Jureidini, J.N. (2017) - "Industry-corrupted psychiatric trials"
· Exposed specific cases of research fraud including Study 329
· Documented ghostwriting and data manipulation practices
· Provided the "ghost management" concept and specific examples of misconduct
5. Cosgrove, L. (2020) - "Institutional Corruption and Social Justice in Psychiatry" (Psychiatric Times interview)
· Elaborated on how guild interests shape psychiatric practice
· Discussed social determinants of mental health being ignored
· Provided framework for understanding psychiatry's resistance to reform
6. Lundh, A. et al. (2017) - Cochrane Review on industry sponsorship and research outcome
· Provided the empirical foundation showing 1.27x risk ratio for favorable results with industry funding
· Demonstrated that bias occurs despite good methodological quality
· Essential evidence that industry funding itself should be considered a bias factor
7. Paris, J. (2017) - "Is Psychoanalysis Still Relevant to Psychiatry?" (PMC)
· Comprehensive critique of psychoanalysis's lack of empirical support
· Documented Popper's characterization as pseudoscience
· Provided evidence on psychoanalysis's isolation from empirical research
8. Klatte, R. et al. (2018) - "Adverse effects of psychotherapy: protocol for a systematic review and meta-analysis"
· Documented that 50% of psychotherapy patients show no improvement and 5-20% experience adverse effects
· Provided evidence that psychotherapy effectiveness is often overstated
· Essential for the treatment ineffectiveness section
9. The comprehensive Wikipedia articles on "Controversies about psychiatry" and "Anti-psychiatry"
· Provided excellent overviews with extensive additional references
· Documented historical problems including lobotomy, ECT issues, and segregation
· Served as valuable starting points for finding primary sources
10. Light, D.W., Lexchin, J., & Darrow, J.J. (2013) - "Institutional corruption of pharmaceuticals and the myth of safe and effective drugs"
· Provided broader context on pharmaceutical corruption beyond psychiatry
· Documented how FDA has been captured by industry interests
· Essential for understanding regulatory failure
These sources provided the empirical evidence, theoretical frameworks, and specific examples that formed the backbone of the analysis. The Cosgrove/Whitaker work and the Sismondo research were particularly foundational for establishing the institutional corruption framework that runs throughout the document.
9. MORE REFERENCES
If you're unsure whether you’ve fully grasped the point of all this, download and review these quotes by psychiatrists. They reveal their confused state of mind. Thanks to Jim Arnold of the Liar’s World Substack for compiling these.
Whores of the Court: The Fraud of Psychiatric Testimony and the Rape of American Justice (1997) by Margaret A. Hagen is an expose of the faulty testimony of psychologists, psychiatrists, and social workers and its detrimental influence on jurors in criminal and child custody cases.
Psychology Gone Wrong: The Dark Sides of Science and Therapy (2015) by Tomasz Witkowski will tell you which parts of psychology are supported by scientific evidence, and which parts are simply castles built on sand. This is the first book which comprehensively covers all mistakes, frauds and abuses of academic psychology, psychotherapy, and the psycho-business (from the book blurb). Spoiler: all parts are built on sand.
Final Analysis: The Making And Unmaking Of A Psychoanalyst (1990) is a brilliantly written expose of analysis. The former Projects Director of the Sigmund Freud Archives exposes psychoanalytic training as a bizarre, inequitable socialization process and reveals what the gurus of psychoanalysis are really like. My favorite here.
The Myth of Mental Illness (republished 2010) by Thomas S. Szasz. The 50th anniversary edition of the most influential critique of psychiatry every written. “By diagnosing unwanted behavior as mental illness, psychiatrists, Szasz argues, absolve individuals of responsibility for their actions and instead blame their alleged illness. He also critiques Freudian psychology as a pseudoscience and warns against the dangerous overreach of psychiatry into all aspects of modern life.”(From the blurb.) The most important book here but unreadable for me. Maybe I already knew too much.
Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance
This is Laura Delano's story, who at the age of 13 was diagnosed as bipolar and prescribed a mood stabilizer and an antidepressant. Pre-diagnosis, she was elected the class president, earned straight-As, and a national squash ranking and then she became "a professional psychiatric patient." This diagnosis changed her life to one filled with psychiatrists and over 19 drugs, for 14 years, she went to psychiatrists, was hospitalized, and attempted suicide.
“Psychology is Charlatanry” website
The field of psychology is rarely where the brightest students go. The knowledge is shallow, the scientific rigor is nonexistent, it is an echo chamber of biased opinions, and very low effort is required to do the job.
Working in a hard science field requires knowledge, intelligence, logic, and reasoning skills; meanwhile, psychology would be considered a soft science (if we can even consider it a science) that doesn't require any of those qualities. The human brain and mind are too complex to fully understand, even for the brightest individuals, so don't expect miracles from a psychologist. Sadly, they are the ones that have the authority to lock down in psych wards who they disagree with, and due to their liberal tendencies and lack of Christian morals, conservatives, and Christian families are prime targets for them.Going to a psychiatrist has become one of the most dangerous things a person can do.
“Was Freud a Scam Artist?” article
"Almost All Scientific Fraud in Psychology Backs Up Leftist Dogmas" on YouTube HERE and HERE
Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche
American-style depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and anorexia have begun to spread around the world like contagions, and the virus is us. Traveling from Hong Kong to Sri Lanka to Zanzibar to Japan, acclaimed journalist Ethan Watters witnesses firsthand how Western healers often steamroll indigenous expressions of mental health and madness and replace them with our own. In teaching the rest of the world to think like us, we have been homogenizing the way the world goes mad.
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