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Is psychiatry evil?

This resource is a wikidebate, a collaborative effort to gather and organize all arguments on a given issue. It is a tool of argument analysis or pro-and-con analysis. This is not a place to defend your preferred points of view, but original arguments are allowed and welcome. See the Wikidebate guidelines for more.

Some think psychiatry is evil. Are they right?

Psychiatry is evil

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Arguments for

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  •   Pro Psychiatry is evil per the detailed arguments and quotations from literature from Wayne Ramsay.[1]
    •   Objection Even with all the sources and quotations, this is liable to be one-sided.
    •   Objection Wayne Ramsay mostly quotes notorious anti-psychiatry malcontents. Nothing to see there.
      •   Objection Labeling someone as "notorious anti-psychiatry malcontent" does nothing to address the substance of the arguments they make and is a cheap rhetorical smear, much like claiming that anyone who is critical of psychiatry is associated with Scientology.
  •   Pro Psychiatry violates human rights by forced "treatment" against the patient's express will to the contrary.
  •   Pro Psychiatry has a history of gross abuse of patients and denial of the harm, including insulin shock therapy[2] and lobotomy. See also W:Insulin shock therapy and W:Lobotomy.
  •   Pro Psychiatrists routinely lie in courts, as per Wayne Ramsay evidence.[1]
  •   Pro Even for the voluntary patients, psychiatrists often fail to inform them of undesirable effects of the proposed "treatment".
  •   Pro Unlike genuine medicine, psychiatric diagnosis is based on classification of psychological behavioral signs and it never identifies any underlying entity or cause. This stands in contrast to blood tests, medical imaging, etc. The Diagnostic Statistical Manual (DSM) is not a result of empirical science but rather of voting based on opinions and guesses.
    •   Objection Basing diagnosis only on symptoms does not need to be such a bad thing, as long as the treatment has a good chance of alleviating the symptoms. There are syndromes in non-psychiatric medicine as well. A person who takes aspirin for headache does not need to depend on identification of underlying entity or cause.
  •   Pro Psychiatry behaves like a priestly cult.
  •   Pro Psychiatrists' "treatments" are often a form of punishment more cruel than punishments awarded for actual crimes such as murder.
  •   Pro The psychiatric profession and psychiatric drug trials are corrupted by huge money from Big Pharma, and therefore, statements originating from that profession and these trials are untrustworthy.
  •   Pro Psychiatric drugs kill more people than they save, per Peter C. Gøtzsche.
    •   Objection A link to an article or relevant book is missing.
  •   Pro Psychiatry is to be damned per the book Deadly Psychiatry and Organised Denial by P. C. Gøtzsche. A review of the book is available.[3] A 2024 book by Gøtzsche in similar vein is freely available online.[4]
    •   Objection The titles of the books read like fear mongering.
  •   Pro Pharmaceutical companies marketed psychotropic drugs off-label (for uses not approved by FDA and not covered by relevant clinical trials), which likely resulted in significant harm and positively resulted in huge profits. Off-label marketed psychotropic drugs included Paxil and Wellbutrin by GlaxoSmithKline (antidepressants), Risperdal by Johnson & Johnson (antipsychotic), Depakote by Abbott Laboratories (antiepileptic), Zyprexa by Eli Lilly (antipsychotic), Seroquel by AstraZeneca (antipsychotic) and Abilify by Bristol-Myers Squibb (antipsychotic). For more, see Wikipedia: List of largest pharmaceutical settlements.
  •   Pro Some German psychiatrists in 20th century advocated sterilization or killing of psychiatric patients; their recommendations were implemented by the Nazi regime.[5]

Arguments against

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  •   Con Psychiatry improves lives of many patients, sometimes saving their lives (of people vulnerable to suicide). The excesses of psychiatry are relatively rare.
  •   Con Some psychotic patients would commit murder and psychiatric drug intervention prevents that.
    •   Objection Men are statistically much more likely to commit murder than women. Perhaps mandatory testosterone suppression therapy would reduce murder rates. That does not seem to be an acceptable reasoning.
  •   Con Not all psychiatrists are evil.
    •   Objection That is not the motion. The motion is that psychiatry is evil on the whole, not that every single psychiatrist, e.g. Peter Breggin or Joanna Moncrieff, is evil.

References

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  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Why Psychiatry is Evil by Wayne Ramsay, J.D., wayneramsay.com
  2. ↑ ‘A landmark in psychiatric progress’? The role of evidence in the rise and fall of insulin coma therapy - PMC by Robert Freudenthal and Joanna Moncrieff, published online in 2021
  3. ↑ Deadly Psychiatry and Organized Denial. By P. C. Gøtzsche. (Pp. 372; ISBN: 978-87-7159-623-6 Soft cover.) Copenhagen: People's Press, 2015., a book review by Iver Mysterud, 16 Jan 2017, cambridge.org
  4. ↑ Is psychiatry a crime against humanity? by Peter C. Gøtzsche, 2024
  5. ↑ Psychiatric Genocide: Nazi Attempts to Eradicate Schizophrenia, Schizophrenia Bulletin, Oxford Academic

Further reading

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