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Apparently psychiatry is composed of some of the worst kind of prostitutes. Any time there is a trial where mental condition is in question there is no problem finding experts who will, for a large fee, take either side.

That kind of whoredom is not limited to psychiatry. M.D.s, lawyers et al practice it too - some, not all.

Money talks and B.S. walks.

Thomas Szasz . . . a name I haven't heard for many years, but one I will never forget.

I was a freshman at Cal. State Fullerton in 1968. I took an upper level psychology course because it fit my schedule. Most students were Soph. or Junior psych majors. They fawned on the professor and I found the whole thing ludicrous because I was a "know nothing Freshman." I was still questioning. The prof didn't like me or my skepticism.

During a long term paper, I naturally chose to attack the professor's pet ideas. I found this guy Szasz on my own in the literature in the library. He expressed well what I only felt about the fraud of the psuedo-science of psychiatry.

My cites to Szasz in my paper made my prof go absolutely nuts! He demanded to know "who told" me about Szasz, like it was some big secret that I could not have discovered on my own! (I guess he wasn't used to students doing their own research.) The louder he became, the more convinced I was that Szasz was on to something. I rebelled on my final too, and took one of the few C's in my college career. I was proud of it because an "A" was just a butt-kiss away, but I earned my "C" instead!

Regardless of how posterity remembers Szasz, he will always have a spot in my heart.

Oldplayer

As a matter of perspective, we must all remember having been founded barely more than 100 years ago, psychiatry is comparable to medicine like bleeding with leaches is to heart transplants.

These guys have a long way to go. And in the sense that they have few objective benchmarks to follow, psychiatry is hampered by the fact we are all fallible humans with a personal stake in the "scientific" outcomes.

Just look at homosexuality. Up until the late sixties this was seen (rightly or not) as a mental illness. Then it was suddenly declared normal (rightly or not) when there was no empirical evidence one way or the other. No matter how you feel about this issue, if you are intellectually honest, you have to admit this was driven by politics and not by science.

The biggest problem with psychiatry is that the doctor has no objective way of knowing if he is not as sick as his patient. Many are. Suicide rates among mental health professionals far exceed the general population.