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Witchdoctors & Psychotherapists |
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If a group of witch doctors declared that a fifth of Americans needed their services, who would pay attention? But a group of semi-witch doctors recently made the same contention. And some are taking their pronouncement (and the need for taxpayers to buy their services) very seriously. The occasion? A group of “mental health providers” got together and said that 21 % of those living in Colorado needed mental health services in the past year, and only a third of those potential patients got “treated” (Denver Post 10/19/03, 6E). This “problem” is not unique to Colorado, either. The American Psychological Association apparently believes that “approximately 30 percent of the nation’s adults suffer from a diagnosable mental health disorder” (Holloway, JD. “US mental health system needs less stigma, more consumer input,” Monitor on Psychology. 2003;34(8):20-21). What are the consequences of not getting treatment? “Suicides, lost productivity, and homelessness,” said the Denver Post editorial board. But the evidence for “mental health treatment” reducing suicides, increasing productivity, or decreasing homelessness is mighty thin. Carefully controlled studies of the beneficial effects of such treatment on suicide, productivity or homelessness (!) are either absent or have reached equivocal results. Yet the Post pulled all the sympathy levers with: “Children, the elderly, the poor, rural residents and racial and ethnic minorities, as well as gays, lesbians and transgender individuals, suffer the most” from the lack of contact with mental health practitioners. You have to wonder what is entailed by “suffering” of this sort. The Rocky Mountain News said that the authors of the study dismissed the argument that if two-thirds of the people who supposedly need treatment are getting along without it, maybe they don’t all need it, calling such logic “the unfortunate triumph of ‘common sense.’” We’d say it as the prudent triumph of common sense and everyday experience. Mental health professionals have an unfortunate tendency to define the demand for their services as nearly infinite. After the Columbine shootings, a team of trauma experts concluded that at least 21,653 people in and around the school were in need of therapy—or 10 times the total number of students and staff—and an incredible 359,041 were at moderate risk for counseling (10/1 2/03, 7E). Psychiatrist Nat Lehrman recently noted that: Science seeks to find norms, such as blood pressure, while religion focuses on ideals. In terms of human behavior, science supposedly examines what we do, while religion addresses what we should do. But when we come to psychiatry, we find that it is far less a science than a religion because it defines in fact how people should act. “Judaism,” said Lehrman, “says we choose between good and evil, but Freud said we cannot really do so because of our traumatic childhood experiences. He therefore sought explanation for current distress in those earlier experiences. This is a basic error.” Lehrman continued: Any ordinary behavioral imperfection, any deviation from the narrowest type of standard, can now be given a diagnostic label, with one or more drugs then often prescribed. Millions of restless children are being medicated—primarily with Ritalin, a close relative of amphetamine—because of so-called Attention Deficit/Hyperactive Disorders. Shyness is now called a disorder, with drugs to “treat” it. Erectile dysfunction is another. So is failure to achieve supreme orgasm each time one makes love. Psychiatry itself has been defined as the only business in America where the customer is always wrong. Psychiatry was peculiar enough when it largely confined itself to the hospitalized. Its clients were odd, and so were its practitioners. But since the 1950s, when psychiatry decided to clothe itself in “mental health” garb, it has gotten more and more intrusive into everyday life. “Mental health” professionals tell us how to deal with interpersonal relations like marriage (though their rates of staying married are no better, and often worse, than other professionals), social problems such as how to treat homosexual practitioners (the American Psychological Association has formally “deplored” discrimination against “people who engage in or have engaged in homosexual activities”), and even international relations (numerous “mental health” associations have condemned the war in Iraq). The proportion of the populace that mental health professionals want to “serve” is growing and growing. We can soon expect the day when the “ill” will outnumber the “well.” Perhaps Western Civilization truly is “nuts.” [From Family Research Institute March 2004 letter. Used with permission. See <www.familyresearchinst.org>.] PAL V12N4 (July-August 2004) |
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