Bruce E. Levine

Global fraud and noble lie: psychiatrists lead all the worst lists

From worst outcomes to receiving the most gifts, psychiatrists top the bottom of the lists. Their patients have the worst results in healthcare. Suicides are up 35% and continue to increase. Antidepressant use is up 400% and depression is everywhere. People with mental health disorders can expect a 10–25 year shorter lifespan. Its practitioners accept the most tainted money from Big Pharma to push its drugs. The drugs it prescribes not only don’t work, but long term they make things worse. Brain disorders are bogus inventions, unbacked, untested, unproven. Psychiatry is as corrupt a calling as there is.

And for all this failure, psychiatry is the only branch of medicine where patients are forced to take meds by law and can be forcibly confined to institutions where they will be pumped full of them until they die (AOT, or Assisted Outpatient Treatment). Psychiatric conditions are so ill- and inaccurately defined that they are continually added or dropped from the catalog, confusing everyone — including doctors. It’s hard to say worst of all, but psychiatry is in the throes of describing almost everyone as mentally ill, and putting them on drugs for life, right from childhood. In A Profession Without Reason, Psychiatrist Bruce E. Levine lays out a horror story of confusion and abuse that outside of medicine would be considered criminal.

Enter Spinoza

The word Reason in the book title brings in the savior of this otherwise horrendous and hellish tale that amounts to a global fraud. Levine is a big fan of the Dutch philosopher Baruch (Bento) De Spinoza, whose whole focus seems to have been the power of reason in dealing with the foibles of humanity. There is constant back and forth about Spinoza’s short but remarkably prolific and fruitful thoughts, and the miasma of psychiatry today. It keeps the book moving at a really brisk pace. Everything wrong with psychiatry today seems to have been dealt with conclusively by Spinoza in the 1670s. We have not advanced from there at all.

Spinoza was sharp. Rejecting his own religion, Judaism, he taunted the rabbi who threatened to have him excommunicated. He offered to help him do it. Outcast, Spinoza made his living grinding lenses for microscopes and telescopes, and developed a large circle of immensely supportive friends, the intelligentsia of The Netherlands. Free speech was generous in Holland, but not that generous. Spinoza played his cards cagily, pushing the limits right up to point where he could have been incarcerated and declared insane himself. It happened to a close friend of his. He realized his magnum opus was unpublishable, so he locked it away in a desk that he willed to friends to get it out of the country. They curated, translated and published it. It was banned all over, which increased the demand for it worldwide. Spinoza had played it correctly.

The stigma and the pain

Meanwhile in psychology, people were being declared insane and imprisoned. It set a baseline of fear that has never been broken. People are afraid of those who don’t conform to prescribed behavior. They might turn violent. They might harm themselves. They might get into trouble. So unlike any other medical condition, mental health problems can be dealt with by third parties — having other people committed to institutions — or by the courts, the aforementioned AOT. Uniquely, the patient has no say in these matters. So quite naturally, patients are afraid to reveal their issues. The more one tells a doctor, the more one puts oneself at risk in the psychiatry world. It could be a life sentence, without any trial, or even charges.

It might not be so bad except that the institutions never cure anyone; they make them worse. People with schizophrenia, for example, are told outright they have a brain disease that is incurable. This has the immediate effect of inducing crippling depression in them. The meds they are given do not cure anything at all. Short term, some have been shown to relieve some symptoms, but barely more than placebos do. Long term, they damage the brain, ensuring their mental health will deteriorate and their symptoms become visibly worse. Unfortunately, psychiatry considers giving placebos unethical, so it keeps pumping proven ineffective but harmful drugs into patients instead. This is a new form of ethics Spinoza would not recognize.
Peer to peer beats professionals

Levine shows that just as Spinoza said, community is what helps. Schizophrenics in an open and safe community of like suffers actually get better. Many never have another episode again. In a peer-to-peer environment, without doctors, pills or regulations, they help each other, and the glow from making a difference in another sufferer’s life does wonders for them.

Schizophrenia is not a death sentence; most often, it eventually goes away. Unless of course the patient is imprisoned in an institution or jail, forced to take endless damaging meds, and treated like — well, a mental case. Levine says “the greater the tension, fear and anger that an individual who is considered to be mentally ill creates, the more serious their mental illness is considered to be.” Testing and measurement don’t enter into it. The simple truth is schizophrenics who refuse to continue their antipsychotic medications have the best outcomes.
The insane brain isn’t

Calling mental health issues brain disease is flat out wrong, and psychiatry is in denial over it. Nothing has ever been shown to be different in the brains of schizophrenics than in healthy people, including twins. Pills to treat these diseases have no basis, but they produce increasing damage themselves.

But psychiatry is in denial for a really good reason. The drug companies pay them millions every year to prescribe these drugs for life. And doctors do, by the billions of dollars’ worth annually. Levine says 75% of the nearly 32,000 psychiatrists in the USA are on the take from Big Pharma.

Incredibly, psychiatrists think this is fine, as long as they admit it. Admitting being on the take absolves them of criticism in advance. Levine calls it the normalization of corruption. It is not even controversial anymore.

Sane vs insane. You decide.

Putting things in perspective, Levine cites conditions that are considered mental health problems, versus what is sane. For example, hearing voices inside the head is a sure sign of brain disorder, unless of course, it is the voice of God. That’s OK. At the same time, being a miser and never spending a cent in the compulsive pursuit of the most money possible is not a disorder of the brain. Believing people are chasing you indicates brain disorder, but believing in miracles like stopping the sun is rational. Levine gives the example of Opposition Defiant Disorder (ODD) that requires tranquilizers to make the patient conform. It is an extreme diagnosis, but at the other extreme, he says, there is no such condition as Submissive Compliant Disorder. Because submissive compliance is what human life is all about. It is the basis of all organization and religion. It also enables parental abuse and authoritarian leadership, for example, and that is what society willingly accepts. It is only Opposition that is insane.

On religion

Spinoza was all over the irrational beliefs espoused by religion. He could not accept that the bible was the word of God. It was clearly made up and edited by men. Instructive stories perhaps, but nothing like truth. He could not justify an all-knowing God who had specific and minute plans for everything in his Creation down to the bacteria in Spinoza’s microscope trays, suddenly bending physics and stopping Nature at the request of a single human’s prayer to accommodate their wish. It’s insulting to God. Yet this is where psychiatry is today.

The infamous DSM

The DSM — the bible of brain diseases — is continually updated. Those whose disease is dropped from the latest edition because it cannot be shown to be real — are therefore suddenly cured. They no longer have a mental health disorder! And the stunning number of brain disorders on the books mean that about one person in four has one. Pretty much anyone can be nailed with the damning label of mentally ill.

And yet, Levine says no major study has ever supported the reliability of the disorders listed in the DSM. He says Spinoza would have viewed its authors “as having no aptitude as scientists, philosophers or storytellers … The behavioral classification system of the DSM would likely provide no intellectual stimulation for him.” Unfortunately, it provides today’s doctors with unimpeachable authority to declare mental illness.

Homosexuality was a brain disorder until recently. Homosexuality meant you were not sane. You were mentally ill. Then suddenly, it was dropped from the DSM and all those people were instantly cured.

Even the chairman of the DSM’s fourth edition (2010) admitted: “There is no definition of a mental disorder. It’s bullshit. You just can’t define it.” At the same time, he called those diagnoses a “noble lie” that might help some patients “cope with life.” So psychiatry is built on a lie.
A real disease?

The facts are that western societies diagnose mental disorders far more than less developed societies. While mental disorders are so common in the West, they hardly affect life elsewhere. This also makes Levine’s point about even calling them diseases. There has never been proof that (the current fashion of) biochemical imbalance has any connection whatsoever with mental disorders. The Editor in Chief Emeritus of Psychiatric Times calls biochemical imbalances “urban legend.” All the prescriptions for supplements have been baseless. No mental disorders show up in brain scans. The brains of the mentally ill are no different than average. Treating them for life with meds that cause more issues than they correct is criminal.

The same holds true for genetics. There is no gene or combination of genes that trigger or express mental illness. Mental illness cannot be treated with gene therapy today. Levine describes Nazi Germany where schizophrenics were systematically put to death. At least three quarters of them. Yet far from eliminating their nefarious genes, there are far more schizophrenics in Germany today than in the 1930s and 40s.

For Levine, citing Spinoza, it used to be that clergy declared sanity or insanity based solely on their own opinion. Today, psychiatrists declare sanity or insanity based solely on their own opinion, because there are no valid tests. And psychiatrists do that far more often than even clergy did.
Tapping the child market

The latest fashion is to get children in on brain diseases. Attention deficit disorder, opposition defiant disorder — there all kinds of flavors psychiatrists can label children with and put them on anti-psychotics for life. Foster children are famously all suffering from brain disease. They are loaded with anti-psychotics and tranquilizers to keep them from any thoughts of independence, rebellion or justice. Then they have to add anti-convulsives to deal with the antipsychotics built up in their bodies, and psychiatrists have created a drug-addled mental case out of a foster child.

However, people addicted to prescription opioids are not considered mental cases. They are instead victims. They may turn to violent crime to feed their craving, but that’s to be pitied, not feared. They are not mentally ill. But a bored child is.

Even the armed forces aren’t safe from psychiatrists, who have put one of every six soldiers on antipsychotic meds. In nursing homes, it is 20%. America is way overmedicated for phantom disease.
Attacking the source

Levine goes after his peers with a machete. He says “a suicide expert who conducted an in-depth assessment of risk factors would predict a patient’s future suicidal thoughts and behaviors with the same degree of accuracy as someone with no knowledge of the patient, who predicted based on a coin flip.” Those judgments, he adds, tell us more about the doctor than the patient. Three hundred fifty years ago, Spinoza said what Paul says about Peter tells us more about Paul than about Peter. Or as every child knows about name-calling: it takes one to know one.

American original

This has a long, glorious history in America. Levine points to Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, who is considered the father of American psychiatry. He called runaway slaves mentally ill for the act of trying to escape. To him, it demonstrated clear brain disease, because they would not play the game. Similarly, anyone protesting the federalism of the new republic was insane. He called this particular disease anarchia.

It’s always been about control. Any threat to authority is a clear case of mental illness. Limit people’s range. Curb their enthusiasm. Don’t let them step out of line. This has always been the mantra of power.

Grim future

Psychiatry is in a tough place. Levine points out that if brain disorders could be measured and treated, patients and families would want a trained professional to treat and cure the condition. Unfortunately for psychiatrists, “that specialty is not psychiatry. It is neurology.” Psychiatrists are in a direct conflict of interest, milking it for all they can while it lasts.

Levine ends the book with a massive fireworks display of what Spinoza would say about psychiatric issues today, based directly on what he did say in the 1670s. From conflicts of interest to tolerance to reason to suicide to consensus reality to conceptualization to madness to resistance to fear to resentment to freedom and stunningly much more, Levine sends roman candle after roman candle up to explode before readers’ eyes. It is a lovely and powerful conclusion. Perfect, really.

Spinoza died at 44. It cannot even be imagined where his mind would have led us had he lived even a normal lifespan.

This book could have been a simple damning indictment of psychiatry, filled with tables and statistics. Instead, it is a brilliant illumination of its subject. The interweaving of the modern with the philosophical assessments of Spinoza is a masterstroke, making it far easier, not to mention exciting, to digest both. It is a fine accomplishment by Levine. For psychiatry to have yet to catch up to a young philosopher 350 years ago should be controversial enough. But A Profession Without Reason has made it far more.

David Wineberg… (mehr)

Contrary to what the title suggests this is not much of a "how to" book at all. Levine makes suggestions throughout the book, but it's really just a sober indictment of modern industrial society from a clinical psychologist's perspective. He spends a great deal of the book condemning mainstream psychology and especially psychiatry for treating problems with social causes as if they should and can be solved on the individual level.

My favorite part that comes to mind is his mention of Gautama Buddha as someone facing deep psychological turmoil. Levine says that Buddha was able to drop out of his society and meditate under a fig tree for several weeks when he faced his internal crisis. His legacy is a testament to the success of the method of psychological treatment he underwent. Contrast that to anyone in our hyper-policed industrial society who might decide to "drop out" and sit under a tree to meditate. "Most likely he would be picked up by the police, given a psychiatric evaluation, hospitalized, drugged, and perhaps electroshocked."

Levine's suggestions consist of little, obvious areas of our lives where we can escape the "assembly-line society:" make contact with people you can connect with; spend time in natural settings; find outlets for creative expression.

Worth reading.… (mehr)