PSYCHIATRY DISCREDITED BY A VETERAN BRITISH PSYCHIATRIST WHO IS NOT ANTI-PSYCHIATRY
by Benjamin Merhav

Below is an article which was emailed to me today by Dr. Bob Johnson, MD,a British veteran consultant psychiatrist. Here are his professional details as he emailed me today, and following that his email message and his article.

"Dr Bob Johnson

Consultant Psychiatrist,

Suite 106, Rivington House, 82 Great Eastern Street, London EC2A 3JF.

07976 228 444 –for messages

http://twitter.com/BobTrustConsent VIDEO at http://tinyurl.com/PDvid

e-mail DrBob@TruthTrustConsent.com www.DrBobJohnson.org

GMC speciality register for psychiatry reg. num. 0400150

formerly Head of Therapy, Ashworth Maximum Security Hospital, Liverpool

formerly Consultant Psychiatrist, Special Unit, C-Wing, Parkhurst Prison, Isle of Wight.

MRCPsych (Member of Royal College of Psychiatrists),

MRCGP (Member of Royal College of General Practitioners).

Diploma in Psychotherapy Neurology & Psychiatry (Psychiatric Inst New York),

MA (Psychol), PhD(med computing), MBCS, DPM, MRCS.

Author Emotional Health ISBN 0-9551985-0-X

Author Unsafe at any dose ISBN 0-9551985-1-8

Hi Ben

I append below an article which will appear in the UK Prisoners Newspaper, Inside Time, on 28 October. I've asked people to write to the President of the Royal College of Psychiatrist, as you can see, with three pertinent questions. Perhaps your contacts might like to do the same?

Hope you like it.

thanx
Bob
=========

Why Today’s Psychiatric Diagnoses Will Never Work

DIAGNOSIS – the highest activity to which a human can aspire, the pinnacle of ineffable skill, a vital and delicate bastion against a chaotic and dastardly cosmos. Oh yeah? Ask around 80% of prisoners, and perhaps a billion others if this applies to psychiatric diagnoses, and your answer would be a raspberry, or worse. And you know what? Despite 20 years as a fully qualified Consultant Psychiatrist – I agree. No wonder I’ve been ejected from seven Consultant Psychiatric posts, the first by Michael Howard, the last by Tony Blair and Jack Straw – I must be doing something right.

Let’s take a closer look at what diagnosis does, or should do – starting with a non-medical crisis. Your sister is getting married – you're the best man/bridesmaid, you're late, you jump in the car. And it won’t start. You know that cars need petrol, so you overfill the tank. Nothing happens. What’s wrong? It’s not a fuel problem, it’s a flat battery. Your diagnosis is wrong. Flooding the car with petrol is precisely the worst thing to do – treat the real cause of the disease, or you’ll make things worse – guaranteed.

Suppose you get the car going, and you’re rattling along, when suddenly there’s a fearsome grinding sound – what to do? Well the one thing you don’t do, is turn the radio up so loud you can’t hear the noise – this is called ‘symptom-suppression’ and it’s the lowest form of medical practice. If you don’t (or can’t) work out where the noise is coming from, then your journey is likely to be incomplete, if not fatal. The term for working this out is ‘diagnosis’ – and the more accurate the diagnosis, the more effective the treatment. And the key to any realistic diagnosis is uncovering its causative factors.

So that’s what diagnosing is really all about – looking for the root causes of the problem and tackling them first, before you do anything else. But bear in mind that in real life, we live in a multi-threaded universe, so there is never just one cause for any single event whatsoever – there is always a cloud of causes, which is why doctors use the cumbersome term ‘aetiology’, never causation. The key skill is prioritising these multiple causes, and that only comes with practice.

Say you’re afflicted with severe abdominal pain. You call the doctor, who takes a careful history, and prods you about. Next you see the surgeon. But suppose the surgeon then says “I’m not interested in causative factors, I’m going to open you up anyway”. You don’t need a medical degree to see that this is disastrous. Without a diagnosis, anything can happen, and usually does.

Wait for it – but this is precisely what psychiatry has now been saying for 31 years. Hard to believe, I know, but there it is in black and white. The 1980 edition of the psychiatric bible, the DSM-III, instructs all go-ahead psychiatrists to refrain from asking any questions as to where the symptoms come from. What a disaster. If you want chapter and verse, try page xxi of DSM-IV-TR, and you’ll see the Alice-in-Wonderland claim that the “major advance” in psychiatry is being “neutral with respect to theories of aetiology”. In other words, take no interest in any causative factors that underlie the clinical problem in front of you. This strangulates clinical medicine at birth, kisses goodbye to all hope of prevention or cure in mental health, leaving instead, oodles of psychiatric symptoms, resulting, inevitably, in three decades of rudderless psychiatry. (Any psychiatrist reading this, might consider reverting to DSM-I, 1952, a tenth the size and 100 times more real.)

What next? Well, two things – firstly, if you believe, as I do that children are impressionable, this gives a vital clue as to where today’s anti-social or lunatic symptoms are coming from. If you ask enough people as I have done, you find that childhood fears become self-perpetuating when they’re too terrifying to be thought-through – the sufferer can’t even tell themselves the real trauma that is dominating their emotional life, let alone the doctor. By persuading them to do just that, a cure becomes available for every psychiatric disorder in the book, given enough time, resources and consent – from bi-polar to BPD, psychosis to self-harm, Personality Disorder to ‘psychopathy’ – that’s a 100% cure because you’ve eradicated the root.

Secondly, you could write to the Royal College of Psychiatrists – “Dear President, Please stop being ‘neutral’ to causative factors. Please stop insisting on ‘symptom-suppression’. Why not try looking at childhood fears?” Send this short letter to Inside Time [GB – SO30 4XJ] who will forward it on, copies to the Editors of the Lancet and the British Medical journal. Perhaps if there are enough of you, you’ll have more success going through the tradesman’s entrance, than I have had, trying to go through the front door.