Are You Schizophrenic?

The May, 2017 Scientific American magazine has a lengthy article on schizophrenia, bemoaning the lack of scientific progress trying to find out what it is and how to treat it. The article says, “Gene studies were supposed to reveal the disorder’s roots. That didn’t happen.”

Most people consider that psychiatry’s main function is to treat patients with severe, even life–threatening mental conditions. The most pronounced is that condition first called dementia praecox by German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin in the late 1800’s, and labeled “schizophrenia” by Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler in 1908.

Robert Whitaker, author of Mad in America, says the patients that Kraepelin diagnosed with dementia praecox were actually suffering from a virus, encephalitis lethargica (brain inflammation causing lethargy) which was unknown to doctors at the time.

Psychiatry never revisited Kraepelin’s material to see that schizophrenia was simply an undiagnosed and untreated physical problem. “Schizophrenia was a concept too vital to the profession’s claim of medical legitimacy. The physical symptoms of the disease were quietly dropped. What remained, as the foremost distinguishing features, were the mental symptoms: hallucinations, delusions, and bizarre thoughts,” says Whitaker. Psychiatrists remain committed to calling “schizophrenia” a mental disease despite, after a century of research, the complete absence of objective proof that it exists as a physical brain abnormality.

Today, psychiatry clings tenaciously to antipsychotics as the treatment for “schizophrenia,” despite their proven risks and studies which show that when patients stop taking these drugs, they improve.

Professor Thomas Szasz stated that “schizophrenia is defined so vaguely that, in actuality, it is a term often applied to almost any kind of behavior of which the speaker disapproves.” Lily Tomlin once said, “Why is it that when we talk to God we’re said to be praying, but when God talks to us we’re schizophrenic?”

The DSM-5 lists nine entries for various forms of this so-called disorder:
— “Schizophrenia”
— “Schizophreniform disorder”
— “Other specified schizophrenia spectrum and other psychotic disorder”
— “Unspecified schizophrenia spectrum and other psychotic disorder”
— “Schizoaffective disorder”
— “Schizoaffective disorder, Bipolar type”
— “Schizoaffective disorder, Depressive type”
— “Schizoid personality disorder”
— “Schizotypal personality disorder”

There is abundant evidence that real physical illness, with real pathology, can seriously affect an individual’s mental state and behavior. Psychiatry completely ignores this weight of scientific evidence, preferring to assign all blame to supposed “chemical imbalances in the brain” or genetic factors that have never been proven to exist, and limits all practice to brutal treatments that have done nothing but permanently damage the brain and the individual.

Since psychiatrists do not really know what schizophrenia is, and cannot predict nor cure the symptoms associated with these diagnoses, they instead have pushed to “pre-treat” people with antipsychotic drugs who might exhibit such symptoms sometime in the future; meanwhile spending untold millions of dollars and years of effort searching for genetic targets to create new drugs — instead of conducting valid clinical tests for known medical issues and treating those. If we include well-known medical issues, infections, hormonal issues, nutritional issues, fevers, environmental pains, and drug reactions, there must be over a hundred ways to go crazy and be diagnosed as schizophrenic — all of these treatable by standard medical protocols.

Click here for more information on schizophrenia and to download booklets on various medical causes for these symptoms.

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