A "must read" -The Last Psychiatrist: The Epidemic of Mental Illness: Because

The Last Psychiatrist: The Epidemic of Mental Illness: Because

First, the 15 minute med check had a much bigger impact on the pharmacologization of psychiatry than the meds themselves. Psychiatry has always had medications, they just had an hour to decide which one to use. You tell me I have 15 minutes minus 5 minutes for the chart and the bathroom to deal with a man who likes heroin and hates me, well, suddenly I have to believe that Zyprexa is awesome. Forget science, it's the 96th Thesis: Again: We assert that we are alone in our offices with no support, time, or margin for error; and we believe that antipsychotics can save both patient and physician, or else all of us are lost.

SSI hasn't tripled because more people are disabled; SSI tripled because more people have no other source of income. That's not my fault, but it has most decidedly become my problem. I don't mean they're faking, I mean it is in the government's interest to promote the "awareness" of "mental health" so that people have a place to go to get services while being removed from the rosters of ordinary people. "Wow, the unemployment rate is falling!" You don't say.

It's a carny act, and Angell is part of it. Is Big Pharma responsible for the explosion in child psychiatry? Really? So it isn't anyone else's fault, I guess. Those diagnoses are sufficiently vague that when the kid starts fighting in school or getting in trouble with the law, the solution is assumed to be psychiatric. The government wants us to believe Ritalin can fix this, and Ritalin, BTW and FYI, is generic. If you abolish psychiatry you won't reduce the SSI at all, the masses will move to whatever the government next creates as a conduit for social services; a conduit that is sufficiently separated from itself so as to offer plausible deniability. "What the hell do we know about Detroit?" one G-man says to another. "It's a medical problem."

If, however, you abolish SSI then you will reduce psychiatry to the size of neonatal endocrinology. If you uncouple social services from "medical disability"-- not abolish them, just find some other, better, more logical way to distribute them-- you'll change America forever. Stop promoting a culture of disability.