Psychiatry needs a user's manual

Psychiatry may be a nice tool, but only if you know how to use it, and whether it is the right tool for your tasks. Unfortunately, modern psychiatry is usually sold to the customers without a user's manual; the patients have to figure everything out by themselves.

As with any powerful tool, such approach is bound to be dangerous. Many a patient have suffered a great deal from psychiatric enterprise, only because they didn't know what to expect from it. Everybody knows how to behave if you're stopped by the police, but very few people seem to have any idea what they ought to do in a psychiatrist's office or a mental hospital.