The Citizens Commission on Human Rights Canada

The psychiatric/pharmaceutical industry spends billions of dollars a year in order to convince the public, legislators and the press that psychiatric disorders such as Bi-Polar Disorder, Depression, Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD/ADHD), Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, etc., are medical diseases on par with verifiable medical conditions such as cancer, diabetes and heart disease.  Yet unlike real medical disease, there are no scientific tests to verify the medical existence of any psychiatric disorder.  To counter this obvious flaw in their push to medicalize behaviors, the psychiatric industry will claim that there are certain medical conditions that do not have a verifiable test so this is why there isn’t one for “mental illness.”  This is frankly a lame argument; Whereas there may be rare medical conditions that do not have a verifiable medical test, there are virtually no psychiatric disorders that can be verified medically as a physical abnormality/disease.  Not one.

In fact the “brain scans” that have been pawned off as evidence that schizophrenia or depression are brain diseases, are simply bogus.  Most have not been done on drug naive patients, meaning someone who has not been on psychiatric drugs such as antipsychotic drugs, documented to cause brain atrophy (shrinkage).  Other brain scans have shown the brains of smaller children to show smaller brains in comparison to larger/older children and then claimed children with ADHD have smaller brains. None have been conclusively proven to verify mental disorders as abnormalities of the brain.

If there were such verifiable brain scans, or in fact any medical/scientific test that could show a physical/medical abnormality for any psychiatric disorder, the public would be getting such tests prior to being administered psychiatric drugs.

This is fact: There are no genetic tests, no brain scans, blood tests, chemical imbalance tests or X-rays that can scientifically/medically prove that any psychiatric disorder is a medical condition.  Period.

This is not to say that people don’t get depressed, troubled, or even sometimes act psychotic.  For example, can soldiers returning from war experience extreme and often debilitating stress?  Yes.  It is something wrong with their brain?  No.  It’s the horrors of war. Can mothers become distraught after a joyous occasion such as the birth of a child?  Yes. Is it a brain abnormality or mental disease?  No. And is the most humane solution to put these people on drugs documented by international regulatory agencies to cause mania, psychosis, worsening depression, heart attack, stroke, sudden death?  Or for new or nursing mothers to risk birth defects or damage to their infants from being prescribed such powerful drugs?

The primary reason people take psychiatric drugs is because they’ve been told they have a medical condition called a psychiatric disorder, which then justifies taking drugs to treat it. This is a brilliant marketing campaign, but it is not science.  Any drug changes behavior or mood, whether cocaine, alcohol, marijuana or heroin. This does not mean someone who acts or feels differently on cocaine does so because they had a cocaine imbalance which the cocaine then corrected. It means that drugs changes mood, emotion and behavior.  But while the illicit use of drugs is universally frowned upon, and considered a bad way for people to deal with their problems, psychiatric drugs are made out to be “good” drugs, despite the fact many are more addictive than cocaine or heroin, and have side effects that rival such hardcore street drugs as LSD, heroin and crack cocaine.

The larger problem is that the biological drug model (based on the bogus mental disorders are a disease marketing campaign) prevents governments from funding real medical solutions for people experiencing difficulty.  And there are workable, non-harmful medical treatments that do not receive government funding because the psychiatric/pharmaceutical industry spends billions of dollars on advertising and lobbying efforts, including hundreds of their pharma funded “patient’s rights” groups to counter any medical modality that does not support their biological drug model of mental disorders as a disease. Why?  Billions of dollars in revenue for the psycho/pharma industry would be lost. This is an industry that time and again, has been proven to put profit above patients lives.