The Cure Conundrum
We often say that psychiatry produces no cures, and for good reason. There is a lot of history behind the concept of “cure;” we’d like to touch on a small piece of that.
The psychiatric industry itself admits it has no capacity to cure.
“We do not know the causes [of any mental illness]. We don’t have the methods of ‘curing’ these illnesses yet.” [Dr. Rex Cowdry, psychiatrist and director of National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), 1995]
“The time when psychiatrists considered that they could cure the mentally ill is gone. In the future the mentally ill have to learn to live with their illness.” [Norman Satorius, president of the World Psychiatric Association in 1994]
“What’s a cure?…it’s just that it’s a term that we don’t use in the medical [psychiatric] profession.” [Dr. Joseph Johnson, California psychiatrist during court deposition, 2003]
We generally take cure to mean the elimination of some unwanted condition with some effective treatment. The primary purpose of any mental health treatment must be the therapeutic care and treatment of individuals who are suffering emotional disturbance. The only effective measure of this treatment must be “patients recovering and being sent, sane, back into society as productive individuals.” This, we would call a cure.
Interestingly enough, elements in this society have systematically tried to downplay or eliminate the concept of cure, especially in the area of mental health. Consider the following quote:
“In the early 1900s, years of exaggerated claims finally caught up with the rest of the patent medicine industry. Inspired by muckrakers like Samuel Hopkins Adams, the official medical community embraced his expose called The Great American Fraud and began their battle against the nostrum-peddling industry. The public demanded appropriate labeling for patent medicines. But the newspaper lobby, supported by the advertising dollars from an $80 million patent medicine industry, kept national legislation tied up for months. Finally, the Pure Food and Drug Act was adopted in June of 1906 with regulations forcing the sellers who made patent medicine to disclose contents and give quantities of ingredients such as alcohol, morphine, opium, cocaine and heroin. Six years later, the government passed an amendment forbidding the use of the word ‘cure’ on a bottle.” [page 141, Pure Sea Glass, Richard H. LaMotte, Sea Glass Publishing, 2004]
[A nostrum is a medicine, especially one that is not considered effective, prepared by an unqualified person; from Latin meaning our, used in the sense ‘(something) of our own making’.]
While it is illegal for such FDA-regulated products to make cure claims, there are in fact many non-drug and non-psychiatric alternatives which may prove effective in handling traumatic conditions. The trick is in finding out what is really wrong and fixing that. Or at the very least, using a broad-spectrum, many-pronged approach aimed to handle a wide variety of possible conditions. In any case, the point is to use a treatment that does not itself cause further harm, such as is the case with psychiatric drugs and other “treatments” promoted by the psychiatric mental health industry.
Click here for more information about alternatives to fraudulent and abusive psychiatric treatments.