Is psychiatry evil?

This resource is a wikidebate, a collaborative effort to gather and organize all arguments on a given issue. It is a tool of argument analysis or pro-and-con analysis. This is not a place to defend your preferred points of view, but original arguments are allowed and welcome. See the Wikidebate guidelines for more.

Some think psychiatry is evil. Are they right?

Psychiatry is evil

Arguments for

• Argument for Psychiatry is evil per the detailed arguments and quotations from literature from Wayne Ramsay.
  • Objection Even with all the sources and quotations, this is liable to be one-sided.
  • Objection Wayne Ramsay mostly quotes notorious anti-psychiatry malcontents. Nothing to see there.
    • Objection Labeling someone as "notorious anti-psychiatry malcontent" does nothing to address the substance of the arguments they make and is a cheap rhetorical smear, much like claiming that anyone who is critical of psychiatry is associated with Scientology.
• Argument for Psychiatry violates human rights by forced "treatment" against the patient's express will to the contrary.
• Argument for Psychiatry has a history of gross abuse of patients and denial of the harm, including insulin shock therapy and lobotomy.
• Argument for Psychiatrists routinely lie in courts, as per Wayne Ramsay evidence.
• Argument for Even for the voluntary patients, psychiatrists often fail to inform them of undesirable effects of the proposed "treatment".
• Argument for Unlike genuine medicine, psychiatric diagnosis is based on classification of psychological behavioral signs and it never identifies any underlying entity or cause. This stands in contrast to blood tests, medical imaging, etc. The Diagnostic Statistical Manual (DSM) is not a result of empirical science but rather of voting based on opinions and guesses.
  • Objection Basing diagnosis only on symptoms does not need to be such a bad thing, as long as the treatment has a good chance of alleviating the symptoms. There are syndromes in non-psychiatric medicine as well. A person who takes aspirin for headache does not need to depend on identification of underlying entity or cause.
• Argument for Psychiatry behaves like a priestly cult.
• Argument for Psychiatrists' "treatments" are often a form of punishment more cruel than punishments awarded for actual crimes such as murder.
• Argument for The psychiatric profession and psychiatric drug trials are corrupted by huge money from Big Pharma, and therefore, statements originating from that profession and these trials are untrustworthy.
• Argument for Psychiatric drugs kill more people than they save, per Peter C. Gøtzsche.
  • Objection A link to an article or relevant book is missing.
• Argument for Pharmaceutical companies marketed psychotropic drugs off-label (for uses not approved by FDA and not covered by relevant clinical trials), which likely resulted in significant harm and positively resulted in huge profits. Off-label marketed psychotropic drugs included Paxil and Wellbutrin by GlaxoSmithKline (antidepressants), Risperdal by Johnson & Johnson (antipsychotic), Depakote by Abbott Laboratories (antiepileptic), Zyprexa by Eli Lilly (antipsychotic), Seroquel by AstraZeneca (antipsychotic) and Abilify by Bristol-Myers Squibb (antipsychotic). For more, see Wikipedia: List of largest pharmaceutical settlements.

Arguments against

• Argument against Psychiatry improves lives of many patients, sometimes saving their lives (of people vulnerable to suicide). The excesses of psychiatry are relatively rare.
• Argument against Some psychotic patients would commit murder and psychiatric drug intervention prevents that.
• Argument against Not all psychiatrists are evil.
  • Objection That is not the motion. The motion is that psychiatry is evil on the whole, not that every single psychiatrist, e.g. Peter Breggin or Joanna Moncrieff, is evil.

Further reading

• Controversies about psychiatry, wikipedia.org
• Why Psychiatry is Evil by Wayne Ramsay, J.D., wayneramsay.com
• 10 Reasons Why Psychiatry Lives On—Obvious, Dark, and Darkest by Bruce Levine, PhD, 2019, madinamerica.com
• Desperate Remedies by Andrew Scull, 2022, madinamerica.com
• Is psychiatry evil?, quora.com
• Cracked: Why Psychiatry is Doing More Harm Than Good by James Davies, 2014