Posted directly so all will see this incredible story ... It's like a movie -
cultureshock Tue, Feb 12, 2002 at 13:43:25
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As Censored by Clinical Psychiatry News . . . What They Don't Want Their Psychiatrists to Hear!"
by Bruce Levine, PhD
BrELevine@aol.com
On August 24, 2001, a freelance reporter, Joyce Frieden, working for the Clinical Psychiatry News Interviewed me. Frieden's general line of questioning was around (1)
What is your newly published book (COMMONSENSE REBELLION: Debunking Psychiatry, Confronting Society-An A to Z Guide to Rehumanizing Our Lives) all about? (2) You are speaking to America's psychiatrists, what advice do you have for them?
Several weeks later, the publicist my publisher had hired to promote Commonsense Rebellion (and who had set up the interview) emailed me this: "I just got a call from
Joyce Frieden who did the interview with Clinical Psychiatry News. She said, unfortunately, the editor 'nixed' the article saying it would be too much of a hard sell for their readers."
I have no transcript of the interview, but I do have some notes, and I recall talking about the following:
Commonsense Rebellion is about the huge expansion of the mental health industry, how it has been created by the pharmaceutical companies corruption of the major
institution of mental health, how this has not only created silly/invalid disorders, unreliable diagnostic procedures, ineffective and dangerous drugs, but something even more problematic: It has diverted us from examining the true societal sources for why so many of us seem to be having a difficult time living. Commonsense Rebellion is about how our increasingly impersonal and bureaucratic institutions--for example, our schools and workplace--have diminished our autonomy, community, and diversity and have created the ingredients for our emotional difficulties. Commonsense Rebellion is, above all else, about alternative solutions to emotional and societal difficulties.
My advice for psychiatrists? If you want to save your profession, you must admit that you made a horrible mistake in the late 1970s by becoming dependent on pharmaceutical company money. You can only save yourselves by coming completely clean--the American people are forgiving people.
Tell them that you arrogantly believed that you could control the drug companies, but that now the drug companies control you and your profession.
What younger psychiatrists might not know is that in the October 1984 American Journal of Psychiatry, the APA speaker-elect Fred Gottlieb cited research demonstrating, "the powerful influence of commercial [drug company]
sources on the nonrational prescribing behavior of physicians." In taking money from the pharmaceutical industry, he pointed out, "our inherent conflict of interest is obvious."
Of course Gottlieb's concerns were steamrolled by the APA leadership who arrogantly believed that they could control these giant pharmaceuticals.
It will help you also to admit that your leadership was wrong to smear and marginalize those who merely wanted to reform your profession--guys like Breggin, Mosher, and
Leifer-that you should have listened to them. But since you didn't pay heed, you are going to have to deal with folks like myself--who see your profession as too corrupt to be reformed.
Although you have a few more years of getting rich off of drugs, the tide is turning. With the TV commercials, the public is growing skeptical and cynical, and they are increasingly receptive to guys like me.
The mental health industry is more and more appearing to the public just like any other industry. A couple of years ago the public started to see slick SSRI commercials on TV. Just a few days ago, on Sunday Aug 19, 2001, the front page lead story of the New York Times was about how Schedule II psychostimulants were now, with pharmaceutical company pressure, being advertised on TV.
In the short term, drug-prescribing physicians will grow wealthy off this commercialization, but I predict pharmaceutical company's greed will kill the "golden
goose." The public, while previously trusting and naive about drug company influence on psychiatry, will now start to become as cynical about the mental health industry as they are about other industries.
The best adjective to describe your profession is "arrogant"--arrogant enough to think that you could let pharmaceutical companies pay for your house without them one day taking over your house. And this kind of arrogance not only makes you financially corrupt but makes you appear to most people as lacking a rudimentary understanding of how corporate life works--and thus is makes you look stupid to the public.
While in your narrow circles, guys like me are diagnosed as radical or extremist, I spend my time in the real world: the world of the general public, radio talk show hosts, and also with critical thinking folks on the entire political spectrum. While it may be difficult for some of these folks to understand issues like the invalidity of your diagnoses and the unreliability of your diagnostic techniques, they can all--whether they are on the left, the right, or whatever--readily understand that it is corrupt for the APA, NAMI etc. to take drug company money. And they easily understand how insane it is that you are orchestrating the psychiatric drugging of seven million American kids, with thousands of kids under two years old on Prozac and even more powerful psychiatric drugs.
Rest assured Commonsense Rebellion is not just another psychologist bashing only psychiatry. The American Psychological Association is just as arrogant as the American Psychiatric Association.
In 2000, the American Psychological Association, in its quest to win drug prescription "rights" for psychologists, formed its new Division 55, the American Society for the Advancement of Pharmacotherapy, and following the division's first meeting, the drug companies picked up the tab for libations and snacks at their first reception.
While psychiatry is, at the present time, more corrupted by drug company than psychology, it's not because of any moral superiority of psychologists. Commonsense Rebellion is about rehumanizing what psychiatry has dehumanized, and its about apologizing to those psychiatry has pathologized.
It's about reacquainting us with those aspects of our humanity which--though not fitting neatly into institutionalized existence--are in fact fully human. It's about confronting societal institutions that exist to meet their own needs--not human ones--and which are creating the current epidemic in unhappiness and self-destructive behaviors, which psychiatry is trying to drug away. Commonsense Rebellion is, above all else, about solutions that neither behaviorally manipulating psychologists nor drug-pushing psychiatrists are talking about.
COMMONSENSE REBELLION GET IT AT AMAZON.COM
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