On the Ignorance of Psychiatry and the Ignorance of Critics

Stigma does not derive from ignorance or lack of knowledge, but rather from the conception of mental illness as the sign of the idle, a personality incapable of achieving the ideal: producing for oneself and the economy.20

The challenge of trying to perceive, and experience, unconventional realities from the patient’s perspective is the heart of psychiatry, working through the distortions of both observer and observed. But inevitably the true innermost voices of the departed and the silenced, the suffering and the lost, remain private.

It goes without saying that all mental illnesses are neurologically instantiated, but this says nothing about their causation. If it is true, for instance, that depression is constituted by low serotonin levels, what still needs to be explained is why particular individuals have low levels of serotonin. This requires a social and political explanat

Dr Breggin summarises his own approach to depression in Toxic Psychiatry, in which he states that, “Despite all of this biopsychiatric propaganda ...depression is a readily understandable expression of human despair that is frequently responsive to psychosocial help.”