Flipswitch

On this episode we give some common responses to some common anti-psychiatry claims.  On our last episode, we went over five common claims made by the anti-psychiatry/anti-psychology movement and this time we aim to answer them.

We also introduce guest co-host Jenn.

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It’s Emily here, about to go off to college…scared out of my mind. So far, I’ve just been worrying about packing, putting the actual packing off.  Procrastination is something I may never cease to do.

Recently, we did a show on Anti-psychiatry. Twice. So far, I think this has been my least favorite show–partly because it causes me stress leading to a headache which mostly stems from the frustration that I get from the topic in general.

Anti-psychiatry -> stress –> symptoms of stress –> frustrated/sad/unhappy Emily

I think the most frustrating part about the Anti-psychiatry movement is that I don’t necessarily disagree with everything about it.  It’s hard to be one-sided with this matter.

It’s like this: I know what’s right in my mind and I agree with almost everything having to do with psychology; BUT then there’s that smidge of opposition in my mind. For example, the 3rd argument of the Anti-psychiatry movement: Drugs are bad. A lot of the time when dealing with prescription drugs of any kind, the whole process of prescribing in itself is sort of an experiment because a doctor doesn’t really know whether a particular drug will work for that specific person or not. What the doctor and patient have to do, though, is try it out, because there is a chance the drug may help. However, sometimes a drug can do more harm than good. It’s very difficult to pick sides with this issue, because sometimes, the Anti-psychiatry movement does have a point, especially when they say drug companies aren’t solely motivated by caring and health, but also profit.

Despite all of the headaches this topic has caused me, I do think it’s important to talk about it because if it isn’t brought up, if people don’t hear both sides, then they won’t be able to determine what they believe in or agree with on their own; and then they’ll just settle with the only side they’ve heard, and THAT certainly isn’t fair.

Emily

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One of the clear things that keeps being returned by the critics of psychology is the number of abuses that have been done in its name over the years.  Some of these arguments are simply undeniable history.

Here’s a quick list of some bad mojo that’s gone on in the name of psychology:

Drapetomania: slaves are messed up because they don’t like being slaves.

Homosexuality: Up until at least the 70’s and actually even the 80’s, the gender of the person you had sex with could determine if you were mentally ill or not.  It took years of political activism by homosexual advocates to get the American Psychological Association to reverse its position.

Lobotamies: They used to push a spike into your frontal lobe, making you into little more than a zombie.  At the time, the inventor of this process was hailed as a genius for his “humane” treatment of mental illness.

Institutionalization of undesirables: At one time, it was not uncommon for unwed teen mothers to be such a shame to their families that they would be shipped off to mental institutions.  It was also not uncommon for “unruly” wives to be deemed mentally ill.

The horrid nature of institutions: In the 1970’s, an institution serving the mentally ill named Willowbrook was investigated for it’s horrid conditions.  It was one of the first times that photographic evidence of the nature of just how bad things were at such institutionswas recorded.  Films on Willowbrook are still available and it was the case that made Geraldo Rivera a household name.  Sadly, this was not an isolated incident.

And on and on.  There are a million of these little factoids in the annals of psychology.  The critics say these alone should be sufficient cause to cease and desist all psychological practice.

But the greater point that such critics make is that, all too often in the past, society has used the word “mental illness” to do horrible things to people that had done nothing wrong save make society a little uncomfortable.  Further, they point out that it is a society that would ship pregnant women to asylums in shame that are disordered.  Today, this is only a matter of degree.  These positions have been made quite public by philosophers and psychiatrists such as Michel Foucalt and RD Laing.

“You’re messed up because you’ve got depression.  It’s you.  It has nothing to do with the fact that you can’t get a job because the economy has tanked.  No, it must be you.”

You know what, say the anti-psychology people:  It’s all a scam!!!

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The anti-psychology crowd is quite divided on this general claim: Psychotherapy doesn’t work.

On the one hand, they claim there is no such thing as mental illness, and so, any therapy that looks to cure it is simply wrong headed.  In addition, this side claims, the idea that simply talking to someone for one hour a week is somehow changing all that much is kind of ridiculous, and they point to a certain segment of studies that support that notion.  Oh wait, one thing does change, they say:  you’re out a hundred bucks after a visit to the learned “talker.”

On the other hand, another section of the anti-psychology crowd, claims that while there are no mental illnesses, we cannot deny that people have problems, be they life problems or whatever, and helping people come up with ways that they can overcome these problems is valuable.  This side of the argument points to the fact that, throughout time, there have been various versions of what are now known as psychologists or counselors; someone you would talk to about the issues you’re dealing with.  As well, they recount the myriad of instances of people that have been helped.

That being said, both sides of the anti-psychology crowd agree that in a better world, psychotherapy would look quite different.  It would, if it existed at all, focus on ways to be honest with one’s self and ways to take responsibility for one’s own behavior and would never in any way be forced upon anyone.  And certainly, it would not just always be about sitting in a room simply talking.

Still there remains a huge contingent that just says, “Look, save yourself all that money and just go and get a good friend to listen to you complain.  Then straighten up and take responsibility for your life.”

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Interestingly, supporters of anti-psychology share much in common with the old anti-illegal drug campaigns of D.A.R.E. with their slogan “Just say no to drugs”, only in this case, they mean “Just say no to psychiatric drugs of any kind.”

If you couple this argument with the previous argument that disputes the existence of mental illness, this position isn’t that surprising.   After all, why would you take a mind-altering substance for an illness that doesn’t exist?  And of course,not to mention, it’s all a scam!

But the anti-psychology supporters don’t just rest there.  They take their case a step further by claiming that drugs are not only useless but actively harmful long-term to the average person.  They claim that drugs alter the brain in such a way that it was never meant to be altered, thereby, setting up the brain to react negatively biologically to the intrusion of these drugs.

Think of it this way: if you keep throwing little pieces of metal into a running engine, that engine may continue to run for a while, but it will, sooner or later, get bent out of shape and just kind of stop all together after a while of running very poorly.  So it is with the claims of the bad effects that psych meds have on people.  Each medication, so the claim goes, is like throwing little spikes into the pathways of your brain, slowly but surely causing your brain to burn out.

Plus,  they say, there are a huge amount of side effects that can cause problems at least as bad as the original reason for seeking treatment.  If an anti-psychotic makes you unable to walk well or makes you gain 40 lbs; then, not only will you be upset about what was going on in your life, but you’ll be upset that you’re overweight and having trouble walking as well.  And in some cases, the side effects can even kill you.

But mainly, so the anti-psychology argument goes, psych meds just don’t work.  They have little effect that’s better than a sugar pill and what studies do show benefit from them were done with questionable science conducted mainly with large amounts of money from the drug industry that just wants to, once again, separate the sucker from his hard earned cash.

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In this supplemental, the crew mulls over some of the arguments we discussed in our first anti-psychology/anti-psychiatry.

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Popularized by a slew of old school psychiatrists, most notably, Thomas Szasz, this is another oldie but goodie from the supporters of anti-psychology:  there is no such thing as mental illness.

As the argument goes, illness is a medical concept based on the biology as used in medical practices, practices that have the ability to confirm and deny the existence of illness based on very strict physical scientific tests.  Yet, psychology can identify conclusively no causative origin of “mental” illness in the body.  Psychologists can’t look at the brain and say, “that’s where the depression comes from. take that part away and people will go back to a nice happy state of being.”  Nope, it’s a sham!

Instead, say the anti-psychology crowd, what they’re doing is suggesting that “acceptable” behavior is what the body must be like when it’s working, and if someone misbehaves, it must be because their body is out of whack.  So, to the anti-psychologist crowd, what we’re talking about is not “illness” in the traditional sense, but “behavior” and the ordinary natural problems of life that occur.  And this goes all the way to even the most extreme of cases.  The mania of bipolar disorder?  Not an illness but an expressed choice.  The disorganization of word salad versions of schizophrenia?  Not a an illness but a bad way of dealing with the world.

So, to these people, there is no reason to stigmatize people as somehow “disordered” or “mentally ill” if their grief over the loss of a loved one lasts a long long time.  Grieving is normal even if it takes a long time.  There is no such thing as a mentally ill slave that want to escape the slave master.  And there is no such thing as depression clinically.  It’s just people understandably getting upset about natural life problems, even if they have a hard time expressing it.  Unfortunately, they say, we’ve chosen to use medical metaphors to describe behavior, metaphors that we have come to believe are real; falling for our own hype about being psychologically scientific with diagnosis.

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Argument number 1:   All psychology is a scam!!!!! If there is one mantra that arises from the anti-psychology/anti-psychiatry movement over and over again, it is one simple idea:  All psychology is a scam.

Flim-flammery!  Shennanigans! Hocus pocus!  Baloney! Snake oil! Hoax!  Fraud! Suckers’ game! and on! and on! and ON!  Yep, this is THE central thing that anti-psychology types keep coming back to over and over again.

Psychology is “supposed” to be full of learned experts that can peer into the human mind and unravel it for you in intricate ways that they can offer to you in order to tell you quote “the truth” unquote and “heal” you.  Just one problem, they say.  None of that is true.  After all the years of training of your average psychologist, there is virtually nothing that they know that can’t be learned over a weekend with a send away kit from the ACME “Make Me a Psychologist” Company.  Their so-called “treatments”  don’t work, and never have, all too often making things at least worse if by nothing else than separating the unsuspecting sucker that buys into this smoke and mirrors from his or her hard earned cash.  Nope, these people are simply trying to feel superior to the rest of us by saying they’re experts of the mind, while stigmatizing normal behavior by saying it’s a “brain abnormality” when what they really mean is that society simply doesn’t like such normal behavior.  They cozy up to drug companies who are all too happy to dope us all up on the prozium du jour so that we sleep instead of take charge of our own lives.

And the antipsychology crowd turns to the past for its arguments as well.  “Have you even seen the horrible abuses that happened in the past because of psychology?  They used to say slaves were “mentally disordered” because they wanted to escape slavery.  We’re supposed to trust these folks?”  And much much more.

No, these people are modern day priests in a growingly secular society.  You see, it used to be the preacher that told you what was okay in the religion practiced by a society.  Now, with the rise of science, it is a psychologist that determines what reality is and, more important to our discussion, what it is not.  But of course, they have no more insight than did the charlatan preachers of old.  Perhaps much less in fact.

Instead, the anti-psychology crowd say two things: first of course is our trusty old mantra of “it’s all a scam!”  But further, to them, the ultimate goal of this scam is social control of people by a small group of elites and the apparatus of the state.  Not to mention, separating a sucker from his money!

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Our last show was on the basic arguments of the anti-psychiatry/anti-psychology movement. This movement has been highly critical of psychology, sometimes calling for abandonment of medical terminology in diagnosis, sometimes calling for an end to psychopharmacology, and sometimes calling for the ceasing and desisting of the whole enterprise of therapy.   The whole reason we’re doing these two episodes is to give people a familiarity with the very bare basics of the movement and some responses to it.

Why?  Because sooner or later, someone dealing with a chronic mood disorder will run into someone listing many of these same arguments or at least some variation of them.  If the average person has never considered some of these arguments, it can be tempting to unadvisedly completely discontinue treatment, even when discontinuing that treatment may have disastrous consequences.  In addition, such claims often make people feel quite guilty (guiltier than is already common with a mood disorder) for not being able to adequately and quickly come up with responses to such claims.  A person dealing with bipolar disorder may feel in their heart that they well are aware of what effect their medications are having on them and how well they’ve helped, but simply cannot express well enough anything to counter such claims.

But it’s also important for everyone to decide for themselves what is right and wrong.  The anti-psychology movement has made good arguments here and there that must be considered, regardless of views of the movement in totality. Unfortunately, the little war that the anti-psychiatry movement has with the mainstream anti-psychiatry movement has all too often been marked by the mainstream simply ignoring any points of the anti-psychiatry movement regardless of their merit, while, in turn, the anti-psychiatry community has amped up its rhetoric, making outrageous charges at times that can only lead to people dismissing them as cranks.

With that in mind, we’re doing this series to roll out five of the biggest claims of the anti-psychology/anti-psychiatry movement.  These are by no means all of the arguments that their movement makes, but they are the most representative of the flavor of arguments to which one will find one’s self responding.

Here at Flipswitch, we openly admit that we have a bias against many of the more outlandish claims of the anti-psychiatry movement.  We are disturbed by the seeming hero worship in that community, the use of linguistic gymnastics to make points and the vast oversimplification of complex issues that occurs all too often with some of their claims.  That being said, we still will try to be as fair as possiblto the spirit of their arguments.

We will by no means go to the extreme depths of detail that some of these positions entail, instead giving you broadbrushed strokes of ideas.  In that spirit, we’d like to emphasize that this is not a forum to proselytize for or against the movement.  Instead, we’re much more interested in how such discussions affects a person with a mood disorder, how the rhetoric of such conversations can be ratcheted down, and how one can move forward to take control of their own health.

In the end that’s what it’s all about.

In the next few day, each day, we’ll roll out one of the arguments from our show that we highlighted in text form, so you can get a flavor for the intormation.

The Flipswitch Crew

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On this episode, we open up the Anti-psychology/Anti-psychiatry can of worms.  People with any kind of mood disorder are going to run into these ideas sooner or later; so, we unpack some the arguments and see what the Flipswitch crew thinks.  This episode is the 1st of a 2-part episode on the anti-psychology movement.  On this episode we focus simply on laying out the in broad strokes what some of the major arguments of the movement are.  On the next episode, we’ll focus on some of the common responses to the the anti-psychology movement.

We always defer to the knowledge of your doctors, and suggest you consult him or her if any of these arguments resonate with you.  Asking questions is always a good thing, but get another informed opinion before you start making any major decisions like discontinuing treatment.

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