To commemorate the International Day of mental health, experts are talking about the fact that dozens of regularly diagnosable mental disorders are the product of psychiatrists’ fiction. These professionals just like to give medical labels to human suffering.
Back in 1850, a respected doctor from New Orleans, Dr. Samuel Cartwright, wrote in the well-known New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal about a mental illness called drapetomania. He described the tendency of slaves to escape as a disease. New Orleans then was one of the centers of the slave-owning South, and local plantation owners were dissatisfied with their black slaves zeal for free life. Dr. Cartwright says they had a “compulsive tendency to freedom,” which was treated as illness.
Of course, drapetomania had never been in the list of mental disorders, compiled by the American Psychiatric Association, and homosexuality used to be there for a long period of time (“sociopathic personality disorder” of gay people was treated with electroshock), just as female hysteria (mood swings caused by the mythical wandering of the uterus in the body) and many other non-existent nowadays mental disorders. Some experts have no doubt that existing diseases will be excluded from the official list with time.
Because of this list, millions of people are now firmly addicted to powerful antidepressants that treat “chemical imbalance”, which the critics say does not exist in nature. A number of cases of mental disorders in children (autism, bipolar disorder, attention deficit, hyperactivity disorder, etc.) are growing at dizzying speed.
During the last 10 years, the number of U.S. children diagnosed with bipolar disorder has increased by 40 (!) times. In 2007 alone, half a million children (20,000 children under the age of 6) received prescribed medications that a decade before had been considered valid only in the most severe cases of mental illnesses. The side effects of these drugs include obesity, diabetes, and suicidal tendencies. Make your own conclusions and avoid psychiatrists.
