It is a sham because its worldview is wrong and it is the wrong name for what the profession does.
According to Gemini 3 Flash, the word psychiatry comes from:
- Psyche (ψυχή): Originally meaning “breath,” it evolved to mean “spirit,” “soul,” or “mind.” In a modern medical context, it refers to the mind.
- Iatreia (ἰατρεία): Meaning “healing” or “medical treatment.” This comes from iatros (ἰατρός), which means “physician” or “healer.” (You see this same root in words like pediatrics or geriatrics).
So the term is supposed to mean someone who heals the soul, spirit, and/or mind.
And therein lies the problem. Today’s psychiatrists do not do this.
First, they do not acknowledge that souls or the spiritual realm exist, and second, they do not heal.
So, a better term for psychiatry and psychiatrists would be something akin to “Lobotomists” and “Lobotomy”.
Although they no longer cut out people’s brains, the motto of psychiatry is “no brain, no problem”, and today’s psychiatrists are all about different forms of lobotomy, whether it is chemical lobotomy or electrical lobotomy. This is how the entire profession approaches mental health. It’s the medical equivalent of beating the living daylights out of patients until they’re barely alive, at which point the quack declares, “Voilà! All better!”
That isn’t to say that the profession is entirely worthless. You just need to know what it’s good for. And the honest answer is, very little. Going to a psychiatrist is like playing Russian roulette. You might get lucky, or you might end up shooting yourself. Yes, I am warning you to be very cautious when dealing with them.
I speak from experience, but don’t take my word for it. Listen to psychiatrists yourself.
So what do desperate parents and struggling patients do when they’re in the middle of a mental health crisis? What options do they have?
Before we get to that, we need to acknowledge that psychiatry isn’t the entire problem. Part of the problem is us. We in the West have adopted the worldview of psychiatrists, and this worldview is simply wrong. Psychiatry pretends that the spiritual world doesn’t exist. It considers it “not scientific”. This is complete nonsense. The spiritual world does exist. This is a fact, but it’s not a fact that everyone is aware of, because we have deadened ourselves to it. And when it does present itself in our lives, we come up with remarkable stories and explanations to divert our gaze from it. The spiritual world is subtle. Like Wi-Fi signals, it’s invisible to most people’s daily experience, and it requires a certain level of awareness to begin to notice it. But it is not “unscientific”. It is possible to study it and create a kind of science out of it, and many people do.
So when problems that have spiritual roots occur in people’s lives, these can manifest as mental health crises. But then people turn to psychiatrists, who deny that the spiritual world exists, and who have absolutely no tools or even language for dealing with it. And therein lies the trouble. The entire profession is incapable of dealing with what are often spiritual problems, because it is in denial of reality, and this denial in turn makes it a dangerous profession that has caused immense harm to hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people (or more).
Now, the same can be said of religious nutcases. In fact, it’s in part because of them that we collectively appear to have embraced such practices as psychiatry because psychiatry appears effective on the surface. It’s often the case that you take a pill and the voices go away. You take a pill, and suddenly you can focus. You take a pill over months, and suddenly the depression appears to disappear. Can religion do that? No, of course, religion can make war, and do bad things, but it can’t suddenly fix your mental health. This is the story we’ve told ourselves.
What we’ve done is we’ve thrown out the baby with the bath water and have simply changed the priesthood. We have not changed reality. Reality is still there, and like the religious nut jobs, we’re still missing the mark. The spiritual world didn’t disappear just because Risperidone was invented. Consciousness, and the fundamental themes of the universe, of good versus evil, angels versus demons, didn’t pack up its bags and go away. These are all still here. It’s just that we’ve figured out how to isolate chemicals from plants and mess with them so that we can patent them and make money while giving people chemical lobotomies and deadening their spiritual awareness. That’s all that we’ve done.
If you are satisfied with that, perhaps psychiatry is for you. Just be warned: many of the chemicals they sell may lead you to self-destruction.
For those interested in alternative solutions to mental health, options do exist.
One of the problems that people have with those in a mental health crisis is overwhelm. The “patient” can become very difficult to manage. They can become aggressive or self-destructive in extreme ways. And the reason for this will be obscured. It can be something this person is unwilling to share verbally with you because they don’t trust you. As an example, someone hearing voices may be unwilling to share this information with others, because they don’t want to be locked up in a nuthouse and strapped to a gurney and given electrical shocks. Because that’s actually something we do with such people. In this case, it’s an example of us being the schizos, not the schizo. The person hearing voices in this instance is being remarkably rational by keeping this information to themselves, and those who want to do ECT are the crazy ones.
So what is needed is an approach that involves a lot more love than what we’re currently offering to people going through mental health crisis. That is the approach that centers like Windhorse Integrative Mental Health take. It turns out that there are people who are willing to be paid to be friends and roommates for those going through a dark night of the soul. Instead of lobotomizing the mentally ill, they are sent into a community that is designed to support them while they acknowledge the difficulty they are going through in a compassionate way. I recently met someone who worked there, and I was shocked to hear that such an approach actually exists in America. These centers are few, but hopefully we will see this approach to mental health grow.
We need more spiritually aware and advanced approaches to mental health.
We need to stop pretending that we can make people well by zapping them or chemically castrating them. These loveless and compassionateless approaches will never be the answer. They will only create more trauma. It’s time to embrace a different paradigm, and to get back that good portion of the bath water we foolishly threw out.