Month: January 2014

Paul McHugh is former chair of psychiatry and now University Professor at Johns Hopkins.
Here he talks about Psychiatry and some psych misadventures in junk science.
http://www.albany.edu/~scifraud/data/sci_fraud_3152.html
A little tease from this essay in The American Scholar.
He faults the antipsychiatry psychiatrists, (Tom Szasz and R. D. Laing included) for the
suspicions raised. The psychiatric results of these doubters was to deny needy patients! Patients
became “psychiatrically oppressed.” It became fashionable to ignore the needs of patients and to
focus on psychiatric practice. This was a gross oversimplification. It is not true that
schizophrenics are living their own “life style.” McHugh sees them as “needing care.” Psychiatry
is not a mendacious institution but a loving and caring one. It should promote a sympathetic
understanding of patients. That’s where the emphasis should be: on patients.
He then goes on to examine three major faults of “trendy psychiatry”: the mentally ill homeless,
sex change surgery and, most recently, MPD, the result of childhood sexual abuse.