Psychology Today

Patients today get stained by the specious medical diagnoses of biological psychiatry.

This public health measure is well meaning. Good enough maternal love ought to be the highest value in our society. In practice this means the destructive use of antidepressants.

Two-year-olds on anti-psychotics and biological markers for psychosis

My opposition to psychiatric drugs is not just that they are harmful, dangerous, and destructive. That would be plenty motivation enough. And it is. But in addition, my profession, which I love and value, has been hijacked by the APA and Big Pharma.

Trauma is not some bizarre thing that happens to us and mysteriously sends everything off kilter. It is a violent extension of the routine processes of the brain, as to how we write our plays of consciousness through the limbic system. All throughout life, trauma defines the negative element of our environment. Trauma consists of abuse: sadism and cruelty; and deprivation.

Why was the insanity plea nullified in the movie theater killings in Aurora, Colorado? The answer is simple - because the carnage was so horrendous that there was too much public pressure in favor of the death penalty. There was no way the insanity plea would be allowed. Nonetheless, Holmes was clearly and incontrovertibly psychotic and delusional.

Dreams have fascinated people from the beginning of time. People believe dreams foretell the future; that they have psychological meanings; we commune with sprits and the dead; that there are visitations from ancestors; dreams are filled with omens and auguries. They are steeped in mystery, as if written in some kind of secret code, decipherable to a special few.

Cobain is the poster child for emotional devastation. And yet, at the same time, there is something in his music which resonates powerfully with his generation. This documentary affords us a view as to how it all got established and played itself out – his pain, his shame, his his inability to relate, his drug addiction, his art, his suicide.

The basic principle for the development of human personality is at one with Darwinian evolution. Psychotherapy is the treatment that addresses the human issues in precisely the way they were constructed in the first place.

Understanding the interplay of temperament and trauma reveals the fiction of ADHD.

The hope for a molecular-biochemical explanation for psychiatry is false. It is believed we are on the verge of proving that psychiatry is a brain disease, no different from cancer or diabetes. But there is a paradigm that fully illuminates psychiatry - the ‘Play of consciousness, which is consonant with biology, neuroscience, and evolutution.

Psychiatry is fast approaching a death spiral which we as a society may not be able to recover from. In many residencies, psychotherapy is not even being taught. Many psychotherapists of all professions have been intimidated by specious neuro-biochemical theories, while others have simply given up. And now, there aren’t many remaining good therapists in practice anymore.

Now we have the false promise that the hallucinogen Ketamine, street name - Special K - raises hope as a treatment for depression. This tells us how far afield, my field, psychiatry has really gone - that it is even a consideration to use an hallucinogen for the treatment of depression.

I have stayed away from speculations about Robin William’s suicide. I don’t know what pushed him over and neither do you. It is important however, to take note that he was taking two antidepressants. And he began taking Seroquel a week before he committed suicide.