Psychopathology - pseudo science for profit
"Can you cure me?
No! I get paid by the hour!"
The lack of concern in harming others and of creating situations through which others are harmed,
with the primary intent of acquiring personal gratification through profit or gain, is indicative of clinical psychopathology.
The DSM is a western psychiatric manual listing every psychiatric ailment. It is in essence, a Consider for example, the DSM listing V15.81: Non-compliance with Treatment. The patient is here considered to be mentally ill if she does not comply with the iatrogenic physician's drug regime, incarceration, or other so-called 'treatments'. Power, authority, and violence in medical care of the sort that Foucault and others have so nicely demonstrated are indeed aided by such tautologies of psychiatric iatrogenic nosology. An epidemiologically and experimentally bereft pseudo-science (viz Regush; Tallis; Levine; Szatz, and a host of other researchers in this area).
The success of psychiatry's practitioners in creating an unproven, very lucrative, and epistemologically flawed business (neé 'discipline') has led to great suffering for many – largely poor and underprivileged – in many cultures. There are essentially no DSM designations which can be or have been validated by proper neurological, biological, genetic, or chemical research. (Unfortunately an appalling misunderstanding by bandwagons of neurologists of fMRI studies show not only poor science, but a sad lack of understanding of the mathematics of neural networks and other mis-appropriations from AI research.) Psychiatrists label others (the majority of whom derive from a lower social class and who are poor) by evaluating a series of 'symptoms'. Such symptoms are not founded in pathological diagnoses. There is no laboratory testing, no microbiological quantitative/chemical analysis, no fMRI to locate possible lesions or blockage, no X-ray to locate severed vessels, no consideration of social class or culture, no blood analysis... in fact no differentiation whatsoever supporting a diagnosis of 'disease'.
Psychiatry and its poorer neighbor clinical psychology, are simply opinions. Like fortune-telling there is absolutely no scientific bases to the field.
In 1929 Rockefeller funded the creation in Germany of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Eugenics and Human Heredity to further this belief in selectively breeding humans. Both institutions employed and more importantly created, many psychiatrists who traveled widely on Rockefeller's behest. These institutions under psychiatrist Ernst Rudin became the headquarters for the world wide Eugenics movement and the well documented travesties that followed therefrom.
Control of groups that differ in outlook from that of authority has since been a legacy deeply embedded into psychiatry, which has been often used as an instrument of the state. The compliance of psychiatric control in the gulags, torture, its application in military, advertising, public relations, and its willingness to experiment with and sterilize those suffering autism, retardation, epilepsy, and more are but a few of many more possible examples.
The gulags of Russia are still filled with political prisoners incarcerated because they fit the DSM (Putin makes good use of psychiatrists in suppressing dissent; other countries do the same). The country with the highest number of people incarcerated (the US) has linked psychiatry to the criminal justice system so strongly that poor, inappropriately skin-toned, or dissenters are routinely labeled criminally insane by these faux 'specialists' claiming "chemical imbalance" in the brains of these unfortunate individuals. Are there blood tests? Is there a double blind metric for this claim? No. It is all made up pseudo-science for the enrichment and power of a few.
Claims by this business, for that is what it is, for drug efficacy are highly questionable. Reduction of symptomatology has absolutely no relationship to cause or to hypothesized process involved. So-called bio-psychiatry is merely a continuation of this sort of sham. The brain is not understood, the processes involved are not understood. These people are making meaningless claims from incorrect use of statistics. Not one proof of alleged biochemical link to DSM category has ever been scientifically validated. There is no objective, scientifically valid (i.e double blind, proper hypothesis construction, correct use of statistics, proper and objective data collection) method to accurately and predictably correlate physical, biochemical, anatomic abnormality to any DSM or psychiatric category of "disease". Junk science is junk science, regardless of the monies, propaganda, and belief systems involved.
Consider for example the concept of an "unconscious mind" which such belief systems promulgate. It is of great value for this industry to have widely propagated the concept – tautologically unproven and unprovable – of an unconscious mind controlled by habits largely unknown to the individual, which only they can help uncover and 'cure'. Further, the negative power and authority relationships (viz. Foucault's extensive writings in this area, particularly his work on "The Clinic"), so clearly built into the assumptions of this business model are ignored by the perpetrators of this pseudo discipline. Sand-castles based upon assumptions of "unconscious mind", "id", "superego", "schizophrenia", "biochemical brain imbalance" or any other of the unprovable and ill advised inventions of the junk science that permeates psychiatry are prime examples of Argument By Gibberish. Labeling something is not proof that it exists or that it is of any help to anyone whatsoever.
Worse yet, the extension of this idea of an unconscious mind to a group unconsciousness mind has similarly infiltrated mainstream discourse, and is taken as factually proved. Hence there is a well prepared ground of common knowledge to the effect that free will is subject to limits and control of a homunculus named 'the unconscious mind'. A concept Descartes dismissed as a fairy tale unworthy of intelligent men, now sadly accepted despite absolutely no scientific or logic bases for such postulates. But again, concepts from phrenological measurement through to brain 'chemical imbalance' have earned charlatans status and power for decades.
The research literature on the harm the pseudo-science of psychiatry has caused is large, as is that on the harm caused by such schemes as those perpetrated by Maslow, Rogers, Durkeim, Auden, Jung, and others who postulate imaginary homunculi which must somehow be placated or appeased. As with iatrogenia in medicine, iatrogenia in psychiatry and clinical psychology is well documented but sadly ignored by the majority. Real science is anathema to a disciple founded upon the fervent belief in its own propaganda... and the money to be made therefrom.
Update: Thanks to the several folks who wrote me to share their insights in this area. However for the person (a psychiatrist??) who wrote a lengthy diatribe suggesting I obviously knew nothing about the brain, please see here and scroll down to the postscript at the bottom of the page. Thanks.