Citizens Commission on Human Rights St. Louis

In 1976 Dr. Thomas Szasz, the co-founder of CCHR, published an article in The British Journal of Psychiatry called “Schizophrenia: The Sacred Symbol of Psychiatry,” in which Szasz argues that there is no such disease as schizophrenia.

Schizophrenia — the most common and most disabling of the so-called mental illnesses — has become the poster disease for psychiatry, the psychiatric symbol of why we need psychiatrists.

However, Szasz recognized that there are no clinical tests for such a “disease,” and that labeling the symptoms was rather psychiatry’s attempt to control deviant behavior rather than to cure disease.

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.”

Psychiatrists today remain committed to labeling “schizophrenia” a mental disease despite, after a century of research, the complete absence of objective proof that it exists as a physical brain abnormality.

The unfortunate aspect of this is that 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.

Psychiatry is Enamored of Symbols

This deserves a more complete examination of the subject of “symbols.” We name, or label, objects and ideas, which in itself is not a bad thing, as long as we realize that the symbol is not the thing itself.

A symbol is something which has mass, meaning and mobility. An example is a body. We label a body with a name which we then use to mean the person; the body moves, carrying its mass and meaning around for others to see and experience.

On top of that, we label it “schizophrenic”, so we have a symbol of a symbol. Now we don’t have to directly confront the painful symptoms; we just label it “a schizophrenic.” We no longer have to cure it, since now we “know” what it is.

Psychiatry insists that one have a label, which is one way to trap and keep a person located. Using and being slaves to symbols is basically a substitute for just knowing. We no longer have to really know what it is, because we “know” it is “a schizophrenic.” So psychiatry has operated on this basis for over a hundred years, never really finding out what schizophrenia is so it can be cured. People just have to live with it, and take psychiatric drugs which are highly profitable and which suppress the symptoms but do not actually fix it.

Psychiatry Uses Other Symbols As Well

The psychiatric or psychological analysis of symbols in dreams has been a fruitless red herring for many centuries. It can certainly be interesting and fun to imagine all the ways dreams could be interpreted; but really, it doesn’t actually lead to cures. Dreams are mostly puns on words and situations.  Thiamine (vitamin B1) has been used successfully at doses of 250 mg/day to treat patients having nightmares. B1 at roughly $20 per bottle beats any anti-anxiety or anti-psychotic drug currently being prescribed for bad dreams, since one of the possible side effects of these drugs is (wait for it…) nightmares!

Now think of the Rorschach Ink Blot Test, originally developed in 1921 by Swiss psychologist Hermann Rorschach as a tool for the diagnosis and labeling of schizophrenia. Over the years several different scoring systems were used, including pure subjective judgment; one present day scoring system wasn’t developed until the 1960s, and another scoring system was published in 2011. There are naturally many critics of these systems, including some court cases calling the results bogus.

Given the fraudulent nature of psychiatric “diagnosis” in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) and the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11), we are calling the Rorschach symbol test a total hoax.

And Speaking of the DSM and the ICD

Of course, the names of so-called mental disorders in the DSM and ICD are the ultimate in misleading symbols. They appear to designate actual mental states, but upon close inspection they are empty of scientific meaning.

With these tomes, psychiatry has taken countless aspects of normal human behavior and reclassified them as a “mental illness” simply by adding the term “disorder” onto them. As the diagnoses completely lack scientific criteria, anyone can be labeled mentally ill, and subjected to dangerous and life threatening “treatments” based solely on opinion.

Though the DSM weighs less than five pounds, its influence pervades all aspects of modern American society: our governments, our courts, our military, our media and our schools.

Using it, psychiatrists can enforce psychiatric drugging, seize your children and even take away your most precious personal freedoms. It is the engine that drives a $330 billion psychiatric industry.

Missouri law explicitly names the DSM as the official reference for mental illnesses. Contact your State Senator and Representative and ask them to remove all references to the DSM from State Law. We should not support symbolism that hits you over the head; a symbol should not be a cymbal.