Written 03.04.08
Am I too naive to think that the principal aim of a hospital should be to help its patients? Well, apparently I am, because during the last two years that I have been working at one of the nation’s top psychiatric hospitals, I’ve seen very few examples that would back up this idea. The overwhelming majority of people and procedures employed by the psych hospital have very different objectives, ranging from maximizing the profit to minimizing the effort, and culminating in an all-consuming urge to cover one’s ass. Among the people who genuinely tried to struggle with the system and help the patients, during these two years some have been fired, and some have “gotten used to it”, but no one lasted long. As a matter of fact, I am fairly close to losing my job right now, after an argument with a charge nurse yesterday, during which she tried to din into me that the most important thing for her was not to lose her license. Not that I cared too much, because I had already given the termination notice anyway.
Too many people assume uncritically that if they go to a psychiatric hospital they will get help; even more believe that their children/parents/spouses will be helped if they send them there. This is what all the propaganda is about. But it is a lie. A mental hospital in this day and age is not an institution of help - it is an institution of confinement, much like a jail. It is a place in which kept are people who have not committed a crime but have nonetheless made their relatives or friends very uncomfortable with their being around. This point is so obvious that it doesn’t even need to be proved; just look at all the door locks and security guards in any mental hospital. If this institution was helpful, people would want to be there, and none of this would be needed.
Really, think about all the homeless people, all the battered spouses, all the terrified youngsters going through a psychotic episode, all the misunderstood children and suicidal adults longing for understanding or at least for a pacific place to curl up in the corner and sleep it over. Think about everyone who needs to get away from their environment for a while. If the proclamations of the psychiatric industry had some truth in them, if there really existed a place where they could relax and get help, those people would line up to get into this kind of institution! Obviously, a psychiatric hospital is not such a place, because most of the patients hate it there and struggle to break out. Until, of course, they lose their life drive and become dependent on the system.
Now, this is of course not to imply that the mental hospitals are completely worthless. There are people, and many, out there who are either morbidly stupid or completely out of their minds. They cannot survive in a demanding environment of a today’s city and therefore need to be confined and cared for. But to assume that the same mental hospital is a helpful place for all the able people just going through a difficult time, is a tragic mistake.
People who send their relatives to a psychiatric hospital never find out what actually happens there. Parents are told all kinds of stories about how helpful the place is and how much therapy their children receive. They don’t know that the therapy is heartless and superficial, or that the place is extremely boring and unfriendly. They never see their kids crying and begging a nurse for a breath of fresh air after being indoors for days and weeks, or being dragged to their room on the floor by uncaring strangers. They never observe their kids’ free spirit being broken into submission; if they did, they would not forgive themselves.
If there is only one thing to be remembered out of this whole journal, it is this. Please, don’t put your children and loved ones in a psychiatric hospital for help. Put them there because you want to confine them, get rid of them, forget about them! Put them there because you don’t care, or because you hate them - but not because you love them. Don’t fool yourself thinking that you are doing them good. Because nothing can be farther from the truth.
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There are things everybody knows about psychiatry. We don't even realize where this knowledge comes from - it's everywhere and nowhere in particular. You don't have to be a professional anymore to know - and accept as a commonsensical reality - certain psychiatric "truths."
Mental disorders are due to chemical imbalance in the brain. This chemical imbalance somehow has to do with the genes, and so mental disorders can be inherited. Someone who is suffering from a psychiatric disorder needs to see a psychiatrist; if he doesn't want to, he must be tricked or forced into doing it, because it's for his own good. A psychiatrist can reliably differentiate between disorders, as well as between disease and normalcy. Once the diagnosis is established, the best currently available treatment is the medications. They are scientifically proven to work.
The above are just a brief sample of the ideas of modern psychiatry - "psychiatric myths" - that are more or less uncritically accepted by the community. Yet how many of those ideas actually make sense, if you look at them with a fresh, unbiased eye? Not a whole lot, it turns out. In fact, most of them range somewhere in between well-intentioned simplifications and deliberate lies.
The logical question then is "why?". Why are things in psychiatry happen in a way that is dramatically different from their public representation? Well, I am not too much concerned with it here. Whatever the reason, this is what is really happening, and it is in the interest of everybody to re-examine the myths of psychiatry.
Mental disorders are due to chemical imbalance in the brain. This chemical imbalance somehow has to do with the genes, and so mental disorders can be inherited. Someone who is suffering from a psychiatric disorder needs to see a psychiatrist; if he doesn't want to, he must be tricked or forced into doing it, because it's for his own good. A psychiatrist can reliably differentiate between disorders, as well as between disease and normalcy. Once the diagnosis is established, the best currently available treatment is the medications. They are scientifically proven to work.
The above are just a brief sample of the ideas of modern psychiatry - "psychiatric myths" - that are more or less uncritically accepted by the community. Yet how many of those ideas actually make sense, if you look at them with a fresh, unbiased eye? Not a whole lot, it turns out. In fact, most of them range somewhere in between well-intentioned simplifications and deliberate lies.
The logical question then is "why?". Why are things in psychiatry happen in a way that is dramatically different from their public representation? Well, I am not too much concerned with it here. Whatever the reason, this is what is really happening, and it is in the interest of everybody to re-examine the myths of psychiatry.