Dear Editor, Media reports on the latest research into so-called “schizophrenia”, is just another attempt to shroud a psychiatric label in medical legitimacy.
After a century of research, there is a complete absence of objective proof that “schizophrenia” exists as a physical brain abnormality. The first patients to be diagnosed with “schizophrenia” were later found to have been suffering from a virus that caused inflammation of the brain resulting in bizarre behaviour.
In practice, there is abundant evidence that real physical illness, with real pathology, can seriously affect an individual’s mental state and behaviour. Yet psychiatry completely ignores this weight of scientific evidence, preferring to assign all blame to illnesses and supposed “chemical imbalances” in the brain that have never been proven to exist, and limits all practice to brutal treatments that have done nothing but permanently damage the brain and the individual.
Rather than returning the patient to good health, the drugs used to treat “schizophrenia” cause damage to the body’s nervous system and result in permanent impairment and even death. Completely ignorant of what they are dealing with, psychiatrists simply prefer the expedient approach of “throwing a hand grenade into a switchboard to fix it”.
Ty C Colbert, author of Blaming Our Genes, says, “Diagnosing someone as schizophrenic may appear scientific on the surface, especially when biopsychiatry keeps claiming that a genetic brain disease is involved. But when you step back and observe from a distance … you wonder how they can justify their work. This is not science.”
And Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus Thomas Szasz states: “Schizophrenia is defined so vaguely that, in actuality, it is a term often applied to almost any kind of behaviour of which the speaker disapproves.”
He further states: “If schizophrenia, for example, turns out to have a biochemical cause and cure, schizophrenia would no longer be one of the diseases for which a person would be involuntarily committed. In fact, it would then be treated by neurologists, and psychiatrists would then have no more to do with it.”
Psychiatric researchers have dissected, labelled and analysed the brain, while assailing the public with the latest theory of what is wrong with it. What is lacking, as with all psychiatric theory, is scientific proof.
Brian Daniels,
National Spokesperson,
Citizens Commission on Human Rights (United Kingdom).
