Pre-watch comment: I am psychiatry-critical. I have been diagnosed with Autism, ADHD, Bipolar 1, experience occasional auditory and visual hallucinations and paranoid delusions when I am under extreme stress and dealing with burn-out, and have a lifetime of seeing spirits or things that are "not there". I also used to have diagnoses for CPTSD and OCD, both of which I resolved with extensive personal work. I am not on any medications at this time. For anyone who has not experienced paranoid delusions before, they are a little bit like having an OCD-fuelled panic attack. If you are someone who is able to "double bookkeep" (remain aware of both "consensus" ("real") reality and your subjective reality), you know, logically, that your delusions are not real, but they feel extremely compelling, and your thoughts associated with them feel very disorganised and chaotic. It is scary and unpleasant, and the anxiety and fear is so compelling that it is natural that some people would not be able to discern between consensus reality and their subjective realities. In the past, being told that I was experiencing psychosis did not help my symptoms at all, it just made me more anxious and worsened my mental state because I was worried about "being crazy". I have had clinicians compliment me on being "smart" because I am able to double bookkeep, as though people who experience psychosis and can't do so are less intelligent than I am. It is disgusting. When anyone finds out that you experience symptoms of psychosis, their demeanor immediately changes: they regard you with pity or as though you are somehow less than them, as though you are incapable of reliably reporting your own symptoms in any health event. Medications (including SNRIs, SSRIs, lithium, stimulants) did not help me, they made me sick and only masked my symptoms to make me appear "normal" for other people without actually improving my mental health, and the anxiety associated with feeling like there is something "wrong" with me only worsened my mental health. Psychiatry was not effective for me, so I learned to manage my mental health with meditation and introspection, to prevent myself from becoming so stressed that I become paranoid, and radical acceptance of my own psychology. So what if I see things? So what if my subjective reality can be different from consensus reality? My family and ancestors were colonised by the ancestors of the people who claimed that there was something "wrong" with me for being different, their descendants decided that people who did not fit into their mold of "normal" were sick, just like how they once decided that my ancestors' spiritual and cultural practices were "satanic". In extant hunter-gatherer societies, and the cultures of my ancestors, people who experience symptoms that modern day clinicians might label as "schizophrenia" are recognised as people who happen to have a natural spiritual acuity and connection to the spirit realm, and receive training to manage the fear and paranoia, and learn how to deal with the spirits. In doing this, they become valued spiritual leaders in their communities. There are many different lenses for interpreting mental health, for deciding what is "illness" and what is natural human variation. Modern research into trauma and treating PTSD was helpful for understanding my own mind and resolving my trauma, but I do not treat psychologists' and psychiatrists' word as gospel because their treatments and the culture associated with it only caused further mental distress. For some, the route of psychology and psychiatry may be helpful, but the scars of colonisation, the sanism and ableism I have personally experienced, and my experiences with alternative spiritual methods actually helping me, leave me critical. In an ideal world, the insights gained from modern psychology, and medication for the people who actually find it helpful, would be just as available to people seeking help as the traditional pre-Christian methods of their ancestors. At this point in time, I feel like a lot of psychologists are kind of re-inventing the wheel with regards to mental health, which offers new insights, but also has its own problems. Pre-Christian cultures had tens of thousands of years of trial and error to come up with methods to treat conditions such as Bipolar disorder and schizophrenia spectrum disorders, while modern Psychology is still in its relative infancy by comparison.

I would never have considered myself “anti-psychiatry” before I tried getting mental health care myself. Too often I’ve had completely inappropriate and dangerous medication combinations given to me without proper warning and with very poor or no care when it’s ended badly. I’ve also been pressured into taking medication with the threat of forced institutionalization, and when I ended up getting institutionalized I realized that the only psych ward in my area is actively a very physically dangerous place to be, with rampant abuse from staff and no protection from other patients. I left injured and traumatized, with mental health professionals holding the threat of returning me over my head to get me to take or do what they wanted. I remember talking to friends who were struggling and realizing that I could not recommend that they see a psychologist or therapist (which I often had done in the past) without feeling like I was also putting them in physical danger. I know there are places and people who are not this way! There is also good data supporting the use of talk therapy and various medications. I just can’t consider myself “pro-psychiatry” while it continues to be so so dangerous to so many people, especially those who are rural, low-income, psychotic, non-white, etc.

You're right. Your video on asylums was excellent. It was my first video of yours. My own thoughts on psychiatry is fluid. I both think that medicine and counseling can be life changing; I just also know those changes can open the world or close it down. It's like flying a plane - not to be undertaken lightly.

I trained last year at the Philadelphia Association, the school started by RD laing. Was great! Please note RD laing's community house program did not die when they left Kingsley Hall. They still have two houses in London, to this day! PA therapists have always been open about how they may have their own issues, that they are also working through. And let's face it--that may be true of psychiatrists and psychologists more generally. Laing's school made a crucial intervention, by saying caring professionals really needed to look towards themselves.....

a big step towards ligitimising psychiatry and psycotherapy would be for patients to be informed of the success rate of the person treating them at treating that condition, and their average time in treating the problem. maybee use this information to calculate the cost of treatment - say if the patient is told it will take 52 weekly 1 hour sessions the cost of treatment could be a certain price split into 52 weekly payments - if the treatment takes longer its at no cost to the patient as the patient has already paid & if it takes longer than 2 years without the issue resolved its fully refunded. this would ensure that only effective methods and practicioners are profitable - inefectine ones simply shouldnt be in business.

So I can finally claim, Psychology isn't a real science?

1963 ???

Wild information 😮😮😮😮😢😢😢😢 CONTROLLING HUMANS 😢 EVIL Medicines. Interesting information . Thanks!

I‘m really glad someone is talking about this with the complexity and insight it deserves because the amount of sheer dogmatism around this illness really does make me feel uncompfortable in the ways people are so afraid to look at this diagnosis the same way we would any other psychiatric disorder or illness.

Avoid legal drugs PUSHERS. 👎👎👎👎👎👎

Interesting. Negative drug pushers.

Hate mind altering drugs & harmful side effects 😮😮😮😢😢😢😢😫🥱😱

my own personal pre-watch opinion: mixed. i have a very long and storied mental health history that i won't delve too deeply into, but it started at age 12. my treatment history includes a wide array of medications, inpatient stays, talk therapy, and even ECT. many of these treatments had extremely adverse effects. i also was misdiagnosed with BPD as a 15 year old, which has greatly negatively impacted my trust in psychiatry. but all that being said, i did have a lot of issues that certain medications and talk therapy were able to really help me with, so i don't believe it's all bad. i think psychiatry is like any other field, in that there are many more people in it that do know what they're doing and genuinely want to help than people who don't.

‘It’s all in your head’ is such a ridiculous sentiment- yes, it’s all in my head - that’s the problem!

I just took MDMA for the first time a couple weeks ago. My only regret is not doing it sooner. For the first time in my life all of my anxieties and insecurities just dissolved and I was able to feel a genuine sense of compassion and connection towards myself and others. Even though I was high as a kite, the experience made me feel more sober than I’ve felt in…forever. As if I had just come off of a decade long depression bender. Maybe I’m deceiving myself, but I have noticed that things just feel a little bit lighter lately. I still have a lot of the same old problems, but I no longer feel this intense sense of hopelessness that makes addressing those issues difficult. The self-flagellating voice is still there, I’m just not as prone to buy whatever bs it’s selling me.

I’m pro-psychiatry because severe mental health disorders have a biological basis and medication does help. There is a danger of over medicating or being on meds too long though, especially since there are side effects of any medication. But I am becoming quite anti-psychology. It has never helped me and actually makes me worse. It is not scientific and is based on arbitrary norms of human behaviour. We need to expand the definition of normal, and help people with mental illness cope with the symptoms instead of trying to fix it or root it out because if there’s a genetic component, that’s just not possible. It’s very hurtful to not be treated like a person with a disease, but rather a problem to be analyzed and solved.

hi

thank you for this video. Very well researched and formulated. I just wish people in politics would make a change in the USA. Hearing, that the availability of guns isn't the problem, is infuriating.

mental health help can be super helpful to some and in some situations, but it’s not a one size fits all. a lot of the time you go to a therapist and they say “you are depressed, which means there is something wrong with YOU, here take these pills that i get a kickback from” where the depression might be a perfectly reasonable reaction to the shitty reality of our current world. we don’t look at a caged mountain lion pacing back and forth and say there’s something wrong with them, we understand they’re stressed from being in a cage. freedom, understanding, empathy, goes a long way for us. and if we’re treated like a caged animal, we gonna act like a caged animal.

The scientific understanding of mental health, mental illnesses, personality disorders, PTSD and CPTSD, and neurodivergence have come a long way in my lifetime. That understanding has come from research in multiple scientific and academic fields, with different disciplines approaching the subject from different angles. Psychiatry is one of those disciplines, but there's also psychology, neurology, pharmacology, and sociology that all contribute to advancing our knowledge of both causes and treatments. It's an ever evolving field, and a fairly young one relative to other sciences. Anti-psychiatry people, who are almost always anti-psychology and anti-pharmacology as well, will always try to paint the field as monolithic, then try to tar it with references to it's primitive, sometimes barbaric, and largely ineffective origins. They always appeal to emotion, by throwing out some plausible sounding (and possibly true) negative anecdotes, followed by a history lesson about all the evils ever done in the name of mental health care. Once the tactics become clear, it's easy to spot the people motivated more by ideology than concern for the wellbeing of people struggling with these things. This comment section, naturally, has more than a few of them.

Because the majority of meds only work for a select few. The rest of them are causing more harm than good and doctors refuse to be truthful about the severe consequences of meds and treatments that can leave patients permanently damaged and suffering and theres no accountability for them or the pharmaceutical companies!! Its not about helping or healing it’s about money.

Check out the *_MAD Pride_* movement.

I was of the position to reject medication about 20 years ago. Now I think medication is important, and should be presented as an option. Therapy is important, crucial, in improving quality of life. I believe we also need to reform the way we see medication. 25 years ago or so, my mother medicated me without my consent by lying to me, and rejected the antidepressants after they made me feel too numb and uninterested in what I enjoyed. However, after years, I started to take them again through the proper channels, it helped a lot.

anti-psych vs *_critical-psych_* ?

Thank you for making this video. My dog is an ESA, she’s super friendly and has never caused destruction of any sort. I know how many people abuse this system with fake certificates or who don’t actually have debilitating behavioral issues like I do. If it were not for my dog being my companion, I would not be here. I went from being out of bed for little more than 4 hours a day and starving myself to working a full time job and going back to college because she kept me afloat and provided some form of companionship when there was no other option. Without her, I’d be gone. I’m scared to talk to landlords about her when they have a no pet policy and I am looking to rent their units.

When it comes to medication, I am split in opinions. Medication can help people, but it could cause lots of harm. If there were better methods used to figure out which drugs to proscribe then the current situation, of try something until something works then I would not be so hesitant. Hate that you could try a proscription and maybe it might help with anxiety, but it may just knock you out cold. It could also make someone suicidal, which is a terrible side effect. Especially hate how medical institutions force medicating, because it has caused a few relatives sever health effects. One had to get new kidneys and other had heart complications. One so traumatized by the experience that they would not take medication, but they continue being at risk to harming themselves or others. The other one lacks all motivation and so spacey because of the medication. Also hate how medicine is seen as a cure for everything. Many do not try other methods such as therapy, diet, exercise, mindfulness and habits. Know a few who would not do therapy but will constantly take medication and more medication to deal with side effects. Also hate how behaviors are shunned by society and they want to fix those people, but never want to change their perspective. I also do not like the idea of being dependent on medication to function. I just want to take medication until state it supposed to be at, and then slowly back off until I can function normally without medication. I seen medication work for people, however I see it can really hurt people too, and I hate that too.

I love psychiatry man I’ve had an overall good experience with mental health treatment even if that experience wasn’t perfect. I think our mental health system is in need of improvement but overall I think the psychiatrist who care always shine through the ones who are just there for a check even if it’s hard to tell sometimes because of how overworked a lot of psychiatrist are right now.

I've been taking two types of anti depressents for several years now, and I recently got diagnosed with ADHD and have started taking methylphenidate recently to help with that. I think medication is super important for people who need them. It takes time, and experimentation to find the right kind and dosage, and the results can be underwhelming sometimes. Feeling shitty and uninspired instead of suicidal and anxious. An improvement, but hardly a "cure." What's helped most is me finding an organization called The Fountain House where I can go daily and work on all the different projects we do here, like producing our own magazine where I do alot of illustrations, and a place I can talk to people. But without medication it becomes too exhausting to attend regularly and I often stayed in bed most of the week, so I need both to get better and to live a life outside of my bed and small apartment. Medication are like glasses, not a quick fix for one's problems, but a tool to help you read things a bit more clearly. And I don't hear people talking about taking away glasses for people with bad eyesight.

I've got a small nitpick about using the word "committing" suicide, ( 25:04 ) since people who die by, or succumbs to suicide, are seldom in a clear sense of mind and can be described as making a decision. They died because of suicidal ideation. Sort of how you can't say someone ”commits" cancer, or "takes” their life by dying from covid. But you're not a demon for using a common phrase. Just keep it in mind.

Corporate music here gave me mental problems 😅

Grew up hating medication of any kind and thought that a more holistic approach was the way to go. Over the years I’ve definitely become more accepting of medication as a tool and aid to mediate the healing process with talk therapy. I realized that humans (especially some of us) aren’t innately happy and emotionally stable beings and that modern medicine strives to rid humans of these evolutionary faults.

@Thomas Szasz. I mean, the same Argument could be made for fatty liver. It is a normal human reaction to imbibing too much food or alcohol. Yet the damage/pathology is very real and needs to be dealt with.

I have never taken psych medication that didn't make everything worse, so I go the natural way. I know people for whom they DO work, however, so it is fine that they exist. Nobody should suffer more than necessary. I think it shouldn't be "Throw chemistry at the person and then forget." though. It should be a part of a concept that ideally weans the person off some day (not with chronic stuff like schizophrenia or bipolars, etc, but when ever possible)

I have mixed thoughts and feelings on this video. Firstly, no, severe mental illness absolutely plays a factor into mass shootings. Major depression, suicidal thoughts, and antisocial personality disorder almost play a role with mass shooters. However, "mental illness" is a major umbrella term to describe anything from anxiety to psychosis. Someone who has social anxiety isn't the same as someone who hears a voice tell them to kill someone - even though both would be considered mentally ill. Instead of trying , That being said though, radicalization online is a major contributor, but may also be a sign of a bigger problem - loneliness. Many of these individuals feel no connection or social network, and so edgy far-right memes and jokes will gladly accept these individuals.

... What to do when government agencies therapists gaslight patients

A big reason why I consider myself “anti-psychiatry” is related to where I live. The DSM and other psychiatric studies/diagnostics exist here for (some degree) the use of insurance companies. The involvement of insurance firms as a voice in a patient’s care, as NON MEDICAL PROFESSIONALS, is absurd. Having to cater to someone other than the patient is criminal! I think deeming treatment as “medically unnecessary“ without a medical degree constitutes as practicing medicine without a license, which is a felony. I want to be very clear though, I support the use of psychiatry if it helps people, and it does. However, I look at how it is practiced, and I cannot be sure of many methods. I myself had mixed experiences that have left me with a severe allergy to SSRIs/SNRIs/NDRIs and similar drugs. Before this though, I had a good run with Lexapro that was cut short. Thank you for putting out this video and continuing the conversation.

CBT was fine, but an extremely temporary fix for me. Medication changed my life, 1000% for the better. I lived with unmedicated ADHD for 33 years and I hope to never live another. I hope I'm in the old folks' home being given my Vyvanse with all my other meds. My doctor said "some people are on this lifelong" and I said "promise?" ADHD meds enabled me to go to college and hold down two jobs I would never have dreamed of before. (Worth mentioning that ADHD isn't a mental illness, it's a developmental disorder. But medicating it definitely falls into psychiatry.)

It is so nonsensical to think that mental health can be neglected by the government. These people are part of communities and families, that all bear the burden. When one person is suffering this creates an atmosphere of cold, confused discomfort. It cannot be shrugged off.

Emotional Support Animals are a no to me. Everyone has some sort of Emotional Problem even if it’s mild. I told a relative that has one you need to get up off your lazy rear to a Therapist or Psychiatrist to deal with your crap. I never allow his emotional support animal in my home. In fact I told him leave it home or don’t come to my house.

This sounds stupid to me. It looks like it just disrupts the thought pasterns like mindfulness.

It's disingenuous to say that IQ isn't an important measure of intelligence. If you have an IQ of 110, you are going to find subjects like physics, math, etc., very challenging.

When I told a therapist that I was sexually abused by my cousin- he said well at least it wasn’t your father or brother… My former therapist would say”we are like twins- but I am the healthy one and you are not” “Are you sure you know the difference between empathy and cognitive understanding?” There have been too many to list- I fucking have a real issue with therapists- the manipulation and damage that is regularly visited upon the most vulnerable is sick to me- and I agree with the anti- psychiatry movement seeing the power that these medical professionals wield is coercive and dangerous- there is not enough oversight in the field- and people are being damaged.

From the Plural community, a lot of us (with and without DID) do actually describe ourselves as multiple people! We also don't all have a core. And final integration is iffy at best, it often doesn't work and can be very harmful to push on people, please do not say that the primary treatment for DID is final integration into one self

Yes- pls do a video on punitive psychiatry.

First response: I grew up with a father who did academic research and developed specific programs about education, particularly in the topic of integrating mentally disabled people in "regular" schools as well as "regular" societal practices. Already as a kid I was surrounded by psychologists in their non-professional roles. I really admire the degree of observation skills that come with the job. I believe that different views on the broad topic of (mostly) human psychology have an enormous influence on the results of individual practices. With that I mean that one practitioner has left me feel completely objectified, or broken open, while the other has been a comforting ear and a supportive father figure. Having little experience with psychological treatments myself, I mostly observe the people. And I find that some of them have reached very far in the spectrum of authentic relating and mentoring (for a western academy and colonial discipline like "science"). Of course next to this I can't ignore all those psychologists that have used means of torture and manipulation to further the ability of a few to exercise control over many. But I also suspect that most of these researchers do very little one on one consultation, so we should be safe?? :P :) Thanks for raising the question Maika (do I spell this right?)

For me my over all views on therapy and psychiatry is positive to an extent. Sometimes I feel people go to therapy when they really don't need it or have bad therapists. But over all I feel like they are needed and necessary aspects to treat problems that are causing you distress. I think that most people either have had a bad experience with doctors that were either bad or not right for them. Or they don't know exactly what to tell the doctors and therapists and end up focusing on the wrong issues or aspects that are not bothering them. Idk just my experience. Now time to watch the rest of the video.

It seems to me that EMDR has stumbled upon something effective, but what's effective and what's just "magic" is totally unclear. It's like some old wise-woman doing some spellcasting and simultaneously acting as a sort of talk therapist, some of it was presumably helpful but people just tossed stuff at a wall to see what stuck (and one of the major jobs of psychotherapy research has been sorting out what's actually effective).

I have physical disabilities and the government treatment schema I am under continues pushing psychotherapeutic treatments on me because of a disgustingly poorly done study with blatant conflict of interest and absurd definitions of success. The effective treatments I have gotten come from neurologists, rheumatologists and other doctors of medicine.

The problem is it's hard to find a Dr that isn't focused on the profit driven system. Some Drs don't have a choice, as many work for corporations that put pressure on them. Because of this, things get misunderstood sometimes. The same happens with chronic illness like BP and diabetes. Patients don't really want to change their diets and exercise, so a pill is the only thing that will help them. The problem with psych meds is nobody knows if the pill is the cause of side effects or the disease. This is dangerous. DR Robert Sapolsky advises meds should be a last resort. Unfortunately it's the first line of defense. Fear of being sued for not doing enough gets saved by doing something ( prescribing meds). The whole system is a mess.

I am with the anti-psychology movement, personally. I have escaped the trauma cult.