Doctors say that psychological problem is caused because of some chemical imbalance in the brain but how far it true? Human body is controlled by brain and the brain controls our body with the help of the Central Nervous System (CNS). The brain and the CNS consist of millions of cells called neurons. Inside the brain there are certain chemicals what control these neurons are called neurotransmitters. Neurotransmitters like Serotonin, GABA, Dopamine, etc act on these neurons to perform certain activities in the brain. Doctors say that these neurotransmitters cause psychological disorders if the levels of these chemicals become abnormal. But there is no such tool to find out the right chemical balance for someone’s brain. According to psychiatry depression can occur if the serotonin level drops in someone's brain and that's why doctors are treating depression with drugs like SSRI (Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor) which prevents the level of Serotonin from dropping. But targeting these neurotransmitters with drugs doesn’t resolve a psychological problem but causes more serious damage to the body because it disrupts the brain's own chemical regulation system and it spoils the natural tolerance to stress. Moreover there are two factors that these drugs affect our body and they are Dependency and Tolerance. When someone takes a psychotropic drug like SSRI or Benzodiazepine then the brain starts to be dependent on them and slowly the efficacy of these drugs decreases by time because of tolerance. Therefore the patient suffers from more health problems with certain symptoms and needs to get a higher dosage to reduce those symptoms. This process of increasing the dose goes on for the lifetime and the patient never gets any permanent cure. Is this really a medical treatment or just a drug abuse?
Benzodiazepines are anxiolytics that is used for short-term relief from anxiety and stress but some doctors prescribe these drugs for long term use. As a result the patient gets addicted to them. These drugs are like alcohol and if someone stops taking them after a long time causes a phenomenon called Post Acute Withdrawal Symptom (PAWS). There are a series of mental and physical problems that the patient suffers from PAWS and they include memory problems, impaired concentration, sleep disturbances, anxiety, nausea and vomiting, etc. Therefore taking a psychiatric treatment means you are ready to welcome more problems in your body at any risk and doctors don't really bother about that. Benzodiazepines work similar to alcohol and withdrawal symptoms are similar to that of alcohol and that’s why it doesn’t seem worthy to include Benzodiazepines in a prescription for a long time. If doctors say that alcohol is harmful then why not Benzodiazepines?
Psychiatry is nothing more than marketing of madness
Citizen Commission of Human Rights (CCHR) of USA is a Human Rights department which is dealing with psychiatric abuse and says that psychiatry is nothing more than marketing of madness, where doctors are prescribing psychotropic drugs only for marketing purpose rather than treating any psychological problem. Depression can be cured by finding the right solution to the problem which is causing the depression but taking a psychiatric treatment is not the right solution. Support from friends and family members is very important but most patients don’t get it properly as a result they need to be more dependent on drugs and doctors. Psychotropic drugs causes disease related to movement disorders like Tardive Dyskinesia and Akathisia which are very difficult to cure and sometimes irreversible.
Psychiatrists don’t even tell the patients about the possible side effects and withdrawal problems that could occur after stopping the drug abruptly. Most psychiatrists also don’t do proper diagnosis of the patient before prescribing any psychotropic drugs. They do the treatment in trial and error process and each time a drug doesn’t work or causes any side-effect, they prescribe another drug to replace it. The biggest pitfall of psychiatric treatment is that every prescribed drug could cause adverse reactions and side-effects to a person. And to cure the side-effects of the previous drug, a second drug is prescribed and if the second drug causes side-effects then another drug is prescribed and it’s a never ending process. Therefore the patient starts to develop more complicated problems than the problem for which he started the treatment. Every psychotropic drug gets tolerance if used for a long time and the efficacy of the dose decreases. That’s why the psychiatrist increases the dose so that it would work like before but each time the dose is increased the body develops tolerance to it after a certain period of time. Finally when maximum dose is reached then there is nothing that could be done to help the patient with drugs and then the psychiatrist recommends Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT). In ECT electric current is passed through the patient’s body to the brain that cures depression and other mental illness. However ECT can do more damage to the brain if given improperly or repeatedly and there is no way a doctor could verify the condition of the brain before and after taking ECT. We get confirmation about diabetes by doing blood sugar test. An X-ray report can proof if some has a lungs disease or not but there is no such physical test to prove that if someone has a psychological problem like bipolar disorder. Then how can we say that the treatment provided by a psychiatrist will be the right one if it is given only based on symptoms.
Therefore psychiatry seems more like homeopathy than any practical allopathic medical treatment and here the treatment is done only based on symptoms but not on any proper medical tests. Psychiatrists are consulting the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) to detect any psychological disease. But the diseases that are mentioned in this manual were never verified scientifically. For example having ups and downs in life is termed as bipolar disorder but till now it has never been scientifically proven. Doctors simply say that psychological problems happen because of chemical imbalance but how a doctor will find out what is the right chemical balance for someone’s brain if there is no tool to measure it? Whatever psychological disease is mentioned in the DSM are introduced by few psychiatrists just to make financial profit by adding more drugs for the treatment of such labeled diseases. Once homosexuality was considered to be as psychological problem but as the public of some countries have accepted this culture, homosexuality was removed from the DSM and not taken as mental illness anymore. Therefore there seems no reason to rely on psychiatric treatment as there is no proper scientific base to it. Universities who are running psychiatric courses should be banned because psychiatry is nothing more than experimentation and marketing of drugs. If black magic is not science then psychiatry also doesn’t meet the scientific standards of today’s world. Most psychiatrists are convincing people by saying that they are suffering from chemical imbalance problem but chemical imbalance theory itself is a hoax. Now the picture is clear that it’s the psychotropic drug or the treatment that ruins the life of the patient but not the mental illness itself. Therefore we should become aware of it so that nobody becomes a victim of psychiatric abuse innocently.
(The author is related to IT background. He can be reached at debojitacharjee@gmail.com