Talk:Controversies about psychiatry

Many advocates and sufferers of severe mental illness criticize the legitimization of the following specific norms of clinical psychiatry, and for the following reasons.

They complain that psychiatric illness is a condition created for psychotherapy and other professional communities in which they have no confidence, participation, or representation (not even a little bit). 66.239.61.216 (talk) 14:44, 6 February 2016 (UTC)

They resent the legitimization in psychiatry of words like anosognosia, alexithymia, lack of insight, and treatment-resistance which are occasionally used irresponsibly as a cop-out or euphemism that belittles or blames the victim by portraying patients as vain or superstitious if they choose to argue with professional advice or choose their own treatment. 66.239.61.216 (talk) 14:44, 6 February 2016 (UTC)

They reject anti-psychiatry and consider its application to be functionally a straw-man fallacy and an ad hominem predatory conspiracy intended to suppress legitimate grievances by corrupting their good-faith intentions. It would be comparably childish and absurd to retort that a psychiatrist critical of advocates should be classified as an anti-depressant or an anti-psychotic. 66.239.61.216 (talk) 14:44, 6 February 2016 (UTC)

They argue that a small portion of psychiatric treatments, such as certain antipsychotic drugs, have side-effects that limit a person's abilities. Consequently for some patients, "treatment" is compared to replacing one form of disability with another. 66.239.61.216 (talk) 14:44, 6 February 2016 (UTC)

They assert that if treatment is assigned to them but they are not resigned to it, then they have an ethical right to refuse the diagnosis, to renounce the legitimacy of the prescription, and to reclaim from their care-givers any authority to treat them. 66.239.61.216 (talk) 14:44, 6 February 2016 (UTC)

They perceive that the problem of perverse power imbalance in psychiatry should be an ethical rather than a professional issue and that this problem could in practice be addressed by an advocate appointed for the patient but is not. 66.239.61.216 (talk) 14:44, 6 February 2016 (UTC)

Anti-psychiatry article

This article and Anti-psychiatry have a lot in common. I don't propose merging them but rather separating what is strictly "anti-psychiatry" (a term of the 1960s and early 70s) and the broader criticism of psychiatry. Otherwise the information is duplicated. --Cesar Tort 16:07, 5 June 2016 (UTC)

See discussion here: Talk:Anti-psychiatry/Archive 8#Fork_article.

--Cesar Tort 16:25, 16 June 2016 (UTC)

I'll say again that anti-psychiatry is not just a 1960s and 1970s phenomenom. There is a lot of relevant history before that. And there is still a lot of interest in anti-psych even today, as the recent references provided previously show. I really think the anti-psych article hangs together quite well, and am not in favour of making major changes to it. -- Johnfos (talk) 23:16, 16 June 2016 (UTC)

It's a long time since I edited this article and have forgotten some rules. My only question is: Does Wikipedia policy allow forked articles? If not, some changes must be done (hope that an admin reads this comment to offer his opinion). --Cesar Tort 00:58, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

Improving this article

I've slowly started to remove some material which seemed off-topic, and is already better covered elsewhere. And added a few things that seem highly relevant, but which have been overlooked till now. Comments are welcome. Johnfos (talk) 22:26, 21 June 2016 (UTC) Johnfos you are the king eh? No discussion first here? --Mark v1.0 (talk) 18:18, 7 October 2016 (UTC)

This article is heavily unscientific and should be completely deleted. As a medical student, I was kinda shocked, that this article was even featured on Wikipedia Cell.83 (talk) 12:19, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

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Tags

This article seems to have been tagged to within an inch of its life in May 2017, but there are no comments or talk related to the tagging??? Thepm (talk) 21:25, 2 September 2017 (UTC)

Had the same thought. I'm not really competent enough to change it though. Brettwardo (talk) 00:34, 29 November 2017 (UTC)

Merger proposal

Formal request has been received to merge the article Anti-psychiatry into Controversy surrounding psychiatry; dated: February 2018. Proposer's Rationale: Anti-psychiatry is part of the controversy surrounding psychiatry. Discuss here. Richard3120 (talk) 23:53, 21 February 2018 (UTC)

Anti psychiatry is part of controversies surrounding psychiatry. However, it is a significant and distinct movement. Whole books have been written about antipsychiatry - at least one that I know of Antipsychiatry: Quackary Squared by psychiatrist Thomas Szasz. It would be a disservice to not give the topic (anti psychiatry) its own article, IMO. Michael Ten (talk) 05:23, 18 March 2018 (UTC)

• Oppose: I fully agree with the view of Michael Ten. – Finnusertop (talk ⋅ contribs) 14:32, 18 March 2018 (UTC)

Improvements

This article is in dire need of rewriting from a neutral point of view. E.g., referring to electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) as "electroconvulsive torture" is simply unacceptable, as it does not represent the mainstream view of most modern medical practitioners—psychiatrists or otherwise.―Biochemistry🙴❤ 21:45, 17 July 2020 (UTC)

User:Biochemistry&Love Thank you for your edit. I noticed other parts had used "torture" in place of "treatments" in ways that did not make sense, and found this was a disruptive edit which I have now reverted. I think this article is worth adding protection to. Amousey (they/them pronouns) (talk) 01:24, 19 July 2020 (UTC)

@Amousey: Thank you as well, and I concur that protection may be beneficial for this article.―Biochemistry🙴❤ 22:31, 19 July 2020 (UTC)

What the hell is this article?

As a person working in the medical field, this article is seriously unscientific, dangerous and propagandistic. I was kinda shocked, reading that wikipedia actually has such an unscientific article. The potential dangers this article offers to people with psychological diseases is immense. People might get the idea that „psychiatry is a fraud“ and would not participate in a therapy. Please delete this article or modify it, but please don’t share unscientific, medically wrong and propagandistic information. Cell.83 (talk) 12:07, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

I agree that the article needs improvement. I think you might have a touch of the unscientific and propagandistic about you as well ({q| As a peron working in medicine}). The potential damage caused by the psychiatric profession is immense, so perhaps this justifies this article (but wikipedia cares about WP:Notability). I guess it depends how you define fraud. You don't get to tell people people what to do because you are a medical student, the information here will remain while consensus wants it to remain and it will be improved by the standards of wikipedia. Your credentials, or job means nothing here, and it's probably a good thing given your apparant zeal for censorship, and divine access to what is and isn't "unscientific" (hint - what your textbooks say is not "scientific", it is part summary of science, part practical summary, and part medical ideologyial dogma). It is a good thing that wikipedia stands separate from your medico-industrial complex with higher standards of truth (albeit through dependencies of the academia, media, and the medical professions byproducts). It's here to tell people the best approximation of the truth, you mostly care about telling patients what to do, and getting a job done. So yeah, wikipedia is bigger than you and doesn't care about your profession, and you don't get to tell it what to do. You do however get to make edits and arguments in agreement with its policies to improve it, or write acadmic sourcs that wikipedia will use Talpedia (talk) 06:47, 17 December 2020 (UTC)

I made some edits today (diff) in effort to begin the (lengthy) task of improving this article. Mark D Worthen PsyD (talk) [he/his/him] 19:35, 19 December 2020 (UTC)

? What the hell?! Medicine is a scientific profession of many hundreds of years. Psychiatry is a sub part of medicine which helped thousands and thousands of people. I have seen myself hundreds of people, who received help. Mental illnesses are serious and dangerous. And if you „don’t believe“ in mental illnesses that’s your problem. Because mental illnesses are real and people receive help in Psychiatries by doctors. This Wikipedia article was most definitely edited by people with no scientific knowledge and medical background who think that psychiatric methods of the 1930s are still in use today. By this definition surgery has to be fraud, considering the standards of 1930s surgery. Cherry picking on certain and unscientific news and calling the reality is just wrong and dangerous and might create the impression to mental ill people, that they should not search for help and should indeed just suffer by their illness. Whoever wrote the answer „psychiatry is damaging“ seriously needs to talk with the thousands of patients who are getting healed everyday by doctors from serious illnesses and who are happier than ever before. I am sorry for my not quite perfect English, but I guess you get my point. educate yourself and don’t spread false information. Cell.83 (talk) 22:11, 17 February 2021 (UTC)

Some people claim homeopathy and other forms of quackery have cured them, but that doesn't validate those practices as scientific. If mental illnesses exist, how come there is no objective test for the so called neurochemical imbalance? So far we have seen no evidence to support the hypothesis that "mental illnesses" are caused by such imbalances. Another point I make is that I have been diagnosed with ADD ADHD PDD PDD-NOS Aspergers (before it became non-canon), Bipolar disorder and many other meme maladies, by several different shrinks. If they had an objective means of diagnosing so-called mental illness the different shrinks would have come to the pretty much the same conclusion. Just as if Feng Shui was a science (which demonstrably it is not) 4 different Feng Shui experts contracted independently without any knowledge of the other or that they were guinea pigs would have arranged the furniture in exactly the same way despite never having met. Your words show great signs of the Dunning–Kruger_effect. You are what I call educated stupid, just because you have a fancy diploma and license to shrink does not mean you cannot be wrong. And I know plenty of people who have been harmed and traumatized by psychiatric concentration camps and tyranny due to psychiatry being in bed with the legal system and giving it the STD of corruption. You cannot help someone if you refuse to listen to their problem. Many people will continue to commit suicide each year because of the crimes against humanity committed by the fraudulent practices of psychiatry. Psychiatry is damaging to the whole profession of medicine. Imagine if scientific greats in astrophysics like Carl Sagan and Niel DeGrasse Tyson defended astrology from all criticism? If you want to be considered scientific you have to admit that you can be wrong and will be wrong. This is why whenever I asked skeptical questions to shrinks, psychiatry appeared to me more and more like a sick cult. If medicine is to survive it must divorce itself entirely from psychiatry and the meme of mental illness. 149.154.212.146 (talk) 16:02, 17 September 2022 (UTC)

Psychiatry is not medicine because a psychiatrist cannot diagnose a mental illness in the same way an actual doctor can diagnose diabetes or cancer. You don't "see" a mental disorder. In other words, a psychiatric diagnosis is political, it has nothing to do with science. 95.239.0.6 (talk) 18:08, 17 May 2024 (UTC)

oppose strongly Censorship over truth is not acceptable. All psychiatric practices are not okay and their criticism must come forward. RIT RAJARSHI (talk) 04:57, 30 May 2021 (UTC)

Deletion of this article

I suggested earlier the deletion of this article. I already made a lot of changes of editing this article, but still a lot of misleading information remains. The article is written heavily subjective, unscientific, medically refutable and against the common scientific and statistically known results. If the article is not deleted, it should at least be heavily modified. I am medical student and I can confirm that nearly everything of this article is written as propaganda and with the purpose to tell people with serious diseases not to visit a doctor. Sorry for my English, I am from Germany ;) Cell.83 (talk) 12:20, 17 December 2020 (UTC)

I was the one who removed your prod so I will take this opportunity to further explain my reasoning, while there are problems with the article I believe that there have been enough controversies about psychiatry for the article to exist, even though I do not necessarily agree with them. If you believe that this article should be deleted the next step is to start a AFD discussion so that a consensus can be reached. Greyjoy ^talk 12:38, 17 December 2020 (UTC)

Where can I propose the deletion of this article?

This article is written heavily subjective and contains a lot of misleading and incorrect information. First of all, the whole article was written by someone who wants to label psychiatry as a „fraud“. As a med student I have seen thousands of patients with suicide thoughts, borderline disorders and so on being healed in psychiatries by doctors. Psychiatry is a sub part of medicine which exist to heal „damage of the soul“. Modern Psychiatries are full of light and in modern complexes. People with serious mental illnesses have been healed. The authors of this article are using wrong information and are trying to convince people with mental illnesses not to participate in psychiatry. This is a seriously dangerous article, which does not represent reality I could probably write pages about this article, but my English might be not good enough. However, i still hope that my writing is understandable Cell.83 (talk) 22:21, 17 February 2021 (UTC)

• See WP:AfD for deletion (specifically https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion#How_to_nominate_a_single_page_for_deletion). I think it is unlikely that this article will be deleted on the grounds of WP:Notability and since it contrains a portion that is reasonably referenced, and I would argue against the deletion, but the decision would be made by WP:Concensus.
• Danger tends not to be a grounds for removal of content rather WP:Verifiability
• If any claim in the article is not WP:Verifiable it can be removed; if it does not represent the best and most up to date view on a topic new material can be found and it can be updated; if something does not seem to represent a view that is widely held by any group WP:Due based arguments can be raised to remove the material combined with an WP:Rfc if agreement cannot be reached with all editors.
• Umm, I think we've had similar conversations before, but I think it would be rude to ignore the contents of the argument, but we should not discuss this at length because this tends to be disruptive (see WP:NOTFORUM]]
  • Danger tends not to be the way that wikipedia thinks of things, since danger can be quite subjective. For example if you go to Psychosis now you can see someone whose viewpoints do not conform to medical consensus arguing that parts of that article should be deleted until rewritten.
  • There is a counter argument that psychiatry due to its use of coercion, use of medicine extreme side effects, stigmatization labelling, undermining of thought processes, social power, use for political aims by the state, misuse by families should be the subject to robust critique, this is a viewpoint held by many psychiatrists themselves.
• You are free to correct anything wrong with this article by finding better sources, and add sourced and relevant material that places this article is context, and contextualize any claim here by fnding better sources. This is a lot of influence and freedom to act, and people will help you do it. So i would suggest this approach rather than arguing that the entire article should be deleted, because you will be meet pushback. But again you can do what you think best, though I personally thing the motives that underlie them are dangerous and potentially damaging for patients and society as a whole Talpedia (talk) 13:54, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

How to best structure this article

I feel as if this article is a bit of a colletion of stuff. I want to work out how to organize it better. The medicalization setions seems quite long and might contain material that belongs in other sections.

Thinking through what it should look like:

• Lead
• Overview / with a historic framing - talk about ssasz foucault as well as history of treatment
• Discussion of treatment
  • Psychosurgery
  • ECT
  • Antipsychotics
• Diagnosis section - the concept of mental illness
  • Small discussion on social control (linking to main political section)
• "Self-interest" sociological discussion
  • Big pharma
  • Power
  • Medication
• Political section
  • Medicalization
  • Social control
  • Soviet Russia

How does this seem to people? Talpedia (talk) 21:59, 19 February 2021 (UTC)

 Great! Mark D Worthen PsyD (talk) [he/his/him] 04:14, 3 April 2021 (UTC)

Is this article written by Scientologists?

While I did a bit of research, I found a lot a similarities of this pseudo scientific article to articles provided by Scientology. I mean there’s no reason to provide an article about „controversies“ of a medical field. That would be the same, as if I would create an article about the „dangers“ of vaccines featuring wrong thesis and pseudoscientific quotes. The subjective writing of this article and the use of words is very similar to the structure of Scientology articles. Scientology, a religious cult, tried in the past and in the present to replace the medical field of psychiatry with their own pseudo scientific dianetics, of course without success, but they are kind of still trying. The article about psychiatry actually features a section of controversy and criticism, why would there be a need to feature a whole new article about made up controversies, other than to frighten mentally ill people. This is straight up dangerous, considering that mentally ill people might think it would not be a good choice to visit a doctor, who studied medicine and specialised in the medical field of psychiatry. I made an internship in med school in a psychiatry. The place had a lot of windows, colourful walls and a warm atmosphere. The doctors and nurses were nice and you could see the recovering process of mentally ill people. Thank you for reading my feedback and sorry for my language (English is not my first language) I will now report this article for deletion Cell.83 (talk) 09:48, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

Would you consider improving the article instead of tilting at windmills?

You could start with this list of problems, which appears at the top of the article:

• This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page.
• This article may be unbalanced towards certain viewpoints. (May 2017)
• The neutrality of this article is disputed. (May 2017)
• This article needs to be updated. (May 2017)
• The examples and perspective in this article may not represent a worldwide view of the subject. (May 2017)
• This article needs more medical references for verification or relies too heavily on primary sources. (May 2017)
• Some of this article's listed sources may not be reliable. (May 2017)

Sincerely, Mark D Worthen PsyD (talk) [he/his/him] 04:17, 3 April 2021 (UTC)

The criticisms that can be aimed at psychiatry are probably similar regardless of your motives, or religious or cult affiliations, but you are correct that scientology played a prominent role in the antipsychiatry movement. Though I do think that personal interactions with psychiatry by the organizations founder may have been a factor in scientology's distaste for psychiatry, you are probably correct that scientology "competes" with psychiatry. I doubt this is particularly unique to scientology, the church, psychologists, physical fitness trainers, social workers, and the law all to some degree "compete" with psychiatry in terms of the ills they try to solve. You might like to have a look at the book "system of professions" on the topic, I read it quite recently and it was interesting.

I agree that there is a risk of this article being a WP:POVFORK on the other hand much of the content here is interesting and might not be WP:DUE on the main psychiatry page. Hopefully POV here can be corrected by providing context from psychiatry itself.

As before I think, you can raise requests for deletion by following WP:AfD but I would disagree with deletion on the grounds or WP:Notability Talpedia (talk) 12:49, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

I support the OP of this section in continually creating new sections (four so far) on this talk page to express the point that we shouldn't let journalists, lawyers, human rights activists and so forth weigh in when they are critical of psychiatry and its practitioners in case people believe in what the critics have to say. Perhaps the vigour with which it is debated that psychiatry doesn't have meaningful controversies should itself serve as strong support for the OP's quest to have an article about debating psychiatry deleted (but I'm not sure if Wikipedia considers something like that). 176.46.113.248 (talk) 16:20, 27 November 2021 (UTC)

Hey, I assume you are being sarcastic but I'm not quite sure! If you are, then you'll notice the article hasn't been deleted. As a rule anyone can come along and express a view quite forcefully and perhaps this a good thing. The OP could have gone further and requested that editors consider if this article should be deleted with WP:AfD, but I believe elected not to do so. If you aren't being sarcastic :), you could open an AfD if you like - I would vote for the article to be kept! Talpedia (talk) 17:52, 27 November 2021 (UTC)

Szasz

Thomas Szasz expressly rejected anti-psychiatry. Nicmart (talk) 08:16, 16 April 2021 (UTC)

Antonucci

“The founder of the non-psychiatric approach to psychological suffering is Giorgio Antonucci.”

That is patent nonsense. Humans adopted many non-psychiatric approaches to suffering many millennia before Antonucci was born. Nicmart (talk) 08:19, 16 April 2021 (UTC)

Article request for criticism of psychiatry and psychology practices.

Anti-psychiatry is a movement rather than just criticism of psychiatry which has a connotation that entire stream of psychiatry is bad. But there are various kinds of practices in psychiatry and psychology which are criticised, obsoleted and changes with time, just like any other branches of science. Sometimes there is a delay in this change or updatation though. I want to request an article on criticism of psychiatric and psychology practice, and how it changes with time.

Controversies about psychiatry article discusses the subject of psychiaty as a matter of controversy, it does not have a discussion on individual practices and methods and their criticism.

Therefore I request an article on criticism of psychiatric and psychological "practices" rather than entire psychiatry and/or psychology. 04:29, 30 May 2021 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: Medicine, Race, and Gender

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 12 January 2022 and 3 May 2022. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Lr775, Meholl, Lmv54 (article contribs). Peer reviewers: Ashleyrensted, GraceRademacher.

Wiki Education Project: Medicine, Race and Gender

We (lr775, meholl, lmv54) are planning on adding a section on racism in psychiatry to this article. It will include a broad overview on examples of racism within psychiatry, particularly focusing on diagnosis. --Lr775 (talk) 21:30, 15 March 2022 (UTC)

In our work for WGST-239, we had limited time to make all the changes we desired to this page, but we do think our work was able to improve the page substantially. We ended up adding the "History of racism in psychiatry in the United States" section and making several edits to the other content, which were mostly grammatical and improving the neutrality of the text.

There are two recommendations we have for future work on this page, both related to the “History of racism in the United States” section. First, it could be expanded to include information beyond the United States. Second, the section should be expanded to discuss more than just anti-Black racism. These changes would expand the scope of our work substantially; we just did not have the time to do such an expansive revision. Lr775 (talk) 15:02, 4 May 2022 (UTC)

I'm a fan of these edits (though made a few tweaks). Similar compulsory sterilization programs that you refer to here took place in Nazi germany and parts of europe. Diagnosis of schizophrenia is still a lot higher amongst Black people, though I would want to find a source that specifically says that this is controversial (you have a number of actors that correlate with race). I'd be interested in expanding on some of the spurious diagnoses of slaves as well, but mostly because I'm quite interested in how bias can operate within diagnosis. Talpedia (talk) 22:58, 4 May 2022 (UTC)

szasz is mentioned.... this might be relevant to this article....

szasz is mentioned.... this might be relevant to this article....

maybe mention ideas in this essay about phlogiston as it relates to mental illness and Szaszian views. "Mental illness: psychiatry's phlogiston"

"Mental illness is to psychiatry as phlogiston was to chemistry. Establishing chemistry as a science of the nature of matter required the recognition of the non-existence of phlogiston. Establishing psychiatry as a science of the nature of human behaviour requires the recognition of the non-existence of mental illness."

"For example, Joseph Priestley (1733-1804), the great English chemist, could not relinquish the phlogiston theory, even after he himself had discovered oxygen and after Lavoisier's work swept the scientific world. He continued to view oxygen as “dephlogisticated air”. In a pamphlet titled, “Considerations on the doctrine of phlogiston and the decomposition of water”, published in 1796, he referred to Lavoisier's followers as “Antiphlogistians”, and complained: “On the whole, I cannot help saying, that it appears to me not a little extraordinary, that a theory so new, and of such importance, overturning every thing that was thought to be the best established chemistry, should rest on so very narrow and precarious a foundation”"

i am rather bias about this subject, so i wont make this addition myself. i just want to put this idea out there in case anyone feels it is a good idea. limitless peace Michael Ten (talk) 02:51, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

Updating the article

So... Is anybody willing to change the article to be a better one?

I would do it myself, but English isn't my native language. And my research strengths are related to literature and films only. Sebastián Arena... 13:53, 5 May 2024 (UTC)