Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:03 Welcome to the doctors week show where I show you how bad States of mind, difficult life issues. Aren't pathological, but rather signs of personal growth trying to happen. All right, let's get into it. Hey folks, thank you so much for tuning in today. I've got a super juicy topic to dive into it, to you. It's something I'm really passionate about because it affects so many of us in so many ways. But before jumping in, I want to warn you that this isn't for the faint of heart. I've got my sword out and I'm ready to cut through to the center. If you're okay with taking psychiatric medications, you may not want to listen to this episode. Also never stop taking meds without doctor supervision and therapeutic support. Okay, ready? Let's go. I'm going to identify and discuss a core problem in psychiatry and psychology. And in the next episode, I'm going to tell you a really interesting case story, which illustrates how to fix it to begin.
Speaker 0 00:01:18 I want to address two issues with critiquing mental health practice. The first is that it's a highly sensitive topic. The awful stigma around mental health issues has people on guard against being put down and marginalized and rightfully so. Therefore from the outset, let me say, I'm a champion of the fact that every human being has a life process to deal with and problems are a natural part of it. In fact, we need problems without them. Our potential would go to sleep. However, we need to be careful not to misinterpret critiques of the system as indications of stigmatizing, those suffering to the contrary. The only way to make progress is to identify and challenge faulty methods. The second has to do with language modern linguistics tells us that our words don't just reflect reality. They create it. They do so by describing experiences from a particular viewpoint, mental health terminology creates the ways in which we view and respond to people's painful States of mind.
Speaker 0 00:02:33 Therefore, we have to be aware of the implications of the words we use terms like mental illness, disorder, diagnosis, et cetera. Remember these words, denote specific viewpoints on people's problems, not the experience of pain and suffering itself. In other words, challenging the idea that bad States of mind are illnesses, questions, the interpretation labeling of these problems, not the reality of their existence. I want to tell you about me and the mad Hatter's for 10 years, I lived in Zurich, Switzerland, where I worked as a psychologist in a psychiatric clinic. I also had a private practice. I worked one on one with some of the most extreme cases in the population. I also conducted and continue to do research on mental illness. Do you know the origin of the idea that bad States of mind are illnesses like medical diseases? For example, is it a scientific concept or just a general common way to think about human problems?
Speaker 0 00:03:40 The answer may surprise you from millennia. Humans attributed deep mystery to physical elements. The idea that abnormal signs and symptoms could indicate a variety of underlying diseases was the conclusion arrived at only after a century of rigorous scientific research involving thousands of peer reviewed studies, no one just spontaneously thought to himself. I'll bet chest pain can be a sign of a heart attack or acid reflux or a muscle or bone problem or a lung condition or a stomach problem. Each of these diseases contains its own highly specific parameters in contrast the notion that depression, anxiety, and so on our illnesses didn't arise from scientific research, but rather from a desire to make psychology, more like medicine instead of scientific evidence, leading researchers to the conclusion that bad States of mind are diseases. The idea originated from the common everyday assumption we make. When we see someone who feels messed up or acts weird and think, Oh, there's something wrong with him.
Speaker 0 00:05:00 He's disturbed or she's sick. Everything about mental health practice diagnosis, prognosis treatment, et cetera, is built on this core assumption. The only problem is there's never been a single scientific study, providing evidence for it to make a medical diagnosis. A doctor uses research data to differentiate the many possible reasons for one signs and symptoms and arise at a specific disease entity. In contrast, there's no research demonstrating that mental emotional pain can be differentiated into distinct psychological entities. No studies showing that a specific group of symptoms and underlying processes can be clearly distinguished from all other symptoms and processes and from no symptoms and processes without research data to distinguish between underlying causes, we can't identify diseases, psychiatry and psychologies use of the word illness. As in mental illness, derives directly from the common lay meaning of the word, not the scientific meaning. Nevertheless, groups of symptoms are labeled in a way that makes them sound like diseases. Even though there's no underlying research data before the 18 hundreds, when germs were discovered to cause sickness medicine did the same thing, it classified symptoms into clusters and gave them disease names without any idea of what was causing them.
Speaker 1 00:06:42 The psychiatry psychologists
Speaker 0 00:06:44 Diagnostic manual, despite its scientific sounding jargon is a dictionary of symptoms with no objective measures associated with them. A diagnosis of clinical depression is like a diagnosis of chest pain, a symptom without any underlying principles or processes. Let me repeat that. So it sinks in a diagnosis of clinical depression is analogous to a diagnosis of chest pain or headache, chest pain and headache aren't diseases, they're symptoms, and could indicate a wide range of underlying problems, but psychiatry and psychology give disease names to symptoms. As soon as the public hears these words, they assume these are diseases on par with medical illnesses. And since there's an organized nomenclature published in an official manual, people think it must be based on science, but it's not the entire psych diagnostic system is based on pseudoscientific methods that give practitioners a certain degree of consistency in diagnosis, but offer no evidence of validity. So why has the public bought into the fraudulent claim that a messed up mind indicates a disease precisely because it appeals to our shared common sense feeling that abnormal behavior and experiences are wrong, that they're pathological and therefore should be treated as diseases. But remember the whole reason science exists is to transcend the limitations of common sense ways of perceiving the world without science. We'd still believe the sun goes around the earth. The earth is flat and infectious diseases are,
Speaker 1 00:08:36 Was by bad air.
Speaker 0 00:08:39 So while it may make intuitive sense to think that depression, anxiety, phobias, et cetera, are illnesses, there's simply no science to back it up. Furthermore, there still aren't any studies confirming the hypothesis that mental health problems are caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain despite psychiatry and the pharmaceutical is a billion dollar ad campaigns aimed at selling the public on the chemical imbalance idea. Causation has never actually been demonstrated psychiatric medication. Doesn't target a specific brain disorder, but rather induces a generalized altered state that creates a buffer by simply taking one's attention away from one symptoms, identifying and targeting a specific brain disorder would require a medical exam, which isn't done in psychiatric diagnosis. It's all done through a questionnaire, the diagnostic manual known as D S M diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders, which by the way, has no statistics in it uses language.
Speaker 0 00:09:54 That's precise enough to sound scientific, but vague enough so that you can't really pin it down. It uses words like excessive, for example, crying, sleep, weight fluctuation, or repeatedly, for example, going over thoughts or overly, for example, reflective in place of hard science who can say what excessive is excessive, according to what or who the terms are, anything but scientific since there's no scientific foundation upon which the diseases are based each new edition of the manual freely changes and redefines the disease criteria. In addition, the diagnoses use arbitrary timeframes, for example, two weeks of feeling depressed as the threshold for receiving a diagnosis of clinical depression. I've always been curious as to what mysterious event happens on the 15th day. You follow me on day 13 and 14. You're totally fine, but suddenly on day 15, you've got a disease psychology wants to be seen as a respectable field on par with medicine and psychiatry wants to be taken as seriously as the other medical specialties.
Speaker 0 00:11:17 They both seek to accomplish this by borrowing medicine's concept of disease entities. However, unlike in medicine, mental illnesses, aren't identified through research, but rather through consensus amongst a group of so called experts who feel that a certain cluster of symptoms belong together as one disease, even though they have no idea of how or why think about it. A group of professionals sits around a conference table deciding which disease categories and names should be used to classify your States of mind. The conclusions are arrived at according to what they think and feel not according to any hard research data. Then each disease gets given an insurance code that has to be used by the therapist. If she doesn't use one of these diagnostic labels, she doesn't get paid. Mental health diagnosis is an imitation of medical diagnosis, but without the science, imagine if medicine used a dictionary of symptoms that had no underlying research foundation and was created by a small group of self-proclaimed experts, think on being unscientific or unreasonable.
Speaker 0 00:12:37 Well guess what? Thomas incell, the director of the national Institute of mental health until 2015, a neuroscientist and psychiatrist said the exact same thing about the newest diagnostic manual. In fact, just two weeks before the manual was due to appear the Institute, which is the world's largest funding agency for research into mental health, withdrew its support for it. It was a humiliating blow to the American psychiatric association. Insel said the agency would no longer fund research projects that rely exclusively on criteria from the manual. He said, and I have a quote here. The weakness of the manual is its lack of validity. Unlike our definitions of ischemic, heart disease, lymphoma, and AIDS, the DSM diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure end quote. What I've discovered is that what people call mental illness is actually a meaningful and purposeful process.
Speaker 0 00:13:47 That's trying to force the individual to change and grow is trying to wake him or her up to something new, a new way of thinking, feeling perceiving, behaving, being a new consciousness, a really bad state of mind takes the ground out from under you. It disorients you. It makes you doubt everything including yourself. It turns your life upside down. And this is its purpose. It's trying to tear down the system that is you in order to catalyze your transformation, your messed up mind is your calling. And it's meant to be processed, not suppressed or simply managed years of clinical work taught me that every problem, no matter how crazy and severe is logical, meaningful and purposeful, rather than being a disease to diagnose and treat it's an expression of personal growth and change desperately trying to happen. The worst, the state of mind, the stronger and more urgent, the process needing to come to awareness.
Speaker 0 00:14:58 Now this isn't just a theory I've come up with or a philosophical viewpoint I identify with, but rather a conclusion I arrived at after empirical observation and experience with thousands of clients. The problem is that the mental health field has failed to develop its own model relying. Instead on the medical model, as a template medicine, views, signs and symptoms as pathologies to get rid of this is an appropriate and effective paradigm for addressing a lot of physical elements because it's grounded in quantitative science, you can measure what's going on and you can compare it to standards. But when you try to apply this model to mental or emotional issues, you run into a major obstacle. Our States of mind are intangible fluid experiences of meaning with none of the quantitative parameters used in medicine. The result is a well meaning mental health profession that uses a completely non-scientific classification of diseases to the uneducated public.
Speaker 0 00:16:07 It looks, sounds, and feels like real science, but it's simply not take for example, the common diagnosis of bipolar disorder. This diagnosis is associated with mood swings from deeply depressive to manic highs. The depressed phase includes symptoms such as low energy, low motivation and loss of interest in daily activities. And the manic episodes include symptoms like high energy reduced need for sleep. And in some cases, loss of touch with everyday reality in the U S alone, there are 3 million cases diagnosed per year. The conventional wisdom about this illness is that it lasts your whole lifetime, which means you'll always need medication, talk therapy and systems for managing your symptoms. If you examine these criteria a bit closer, however you enter into murky waters, low energy and low motivation. How low what's the threshold we're feeling tired and unmotivated becomes a disease who, and what determines this similarly high energy and reduced need for sleep.
Speaker 0 00:17:26 How high can you go before you have the disease? There's simply no quantitative criteria. Now lots of touch with reality is a bit more of a complex notion that I'll hack into in the next episode, when I give you a case example that illustrates how to work with these powerful mood swings. The idea of bipolar disorder is that some people too much fluctuation in their high and low moods, but again, how much is too much. And how do we know when someone has arrived at this level? Even if there was a way to measure mood fluctuations, how would we know what level constitutes a disease? And here's where it really goes off the rails. If these vague criteria are arrived at, by consensus within a group of psychologists, instead of by scientific research, wouldn't that mean that diagnostic elements could be manipulated to alter the frequency of the diagnosis.
Speaker 0 00:18:28 If there are no hard parameters to adhere to couldn't, these folks arbitrarily decide who's sick simply by changing the rules. The answer is yes. In the 1990s, the authors of the DSM decided to lower the threshold for the manic side of the bipolar equation. They said, you don't need to go crazy ecstatic high. You just need to get into a nice state of mind where you feel really good. The technical term is called hypomania. Well guess what happened? Diagnoses skyrocketed everyone in his sister suddenly had bipolar disorder because you no longer needed to flip out to get the diagnosis. All you needed to do was go back and forth between feeling depressed and being happy. People didn't change nor did the incidence of the condition. Only the diagnostic criteria changed. So in effect, the diagnostic manual created an epidemic. I wanted to get a broader understanding of this.
Speaker 0 00:19:36 So I researched what else was happening in psychiatry at the time. And what I found shocked me, the change to the disease criteria occurred at the exact same time that anti psychotic drugs were being rebranded as mood stabilizers, the treatment of choice for bipolar disorder. When I dug into this further, I discovered a pattern, new diagnostic criteria and even brand new diseases often appear in the manual at exactly the same time that new psychiatric drugs, which treat those diseases are brought to market coincidence. I don't think so. Flash forward to today, and everyone seems to have bipolar disorder. More people don't have the condition. It's just easier to get the diagnosis. Oh, I forgot to mention this. A hundred percent of the manuals authors have financial investments in the pharmaceutical industry in Switzerland. I had a lot of clients who have been diagnosed with bipolar disorder by their psychiatrists.
Speaker 0 00:20:43 One of them I'll call her. Clara was a 22 year old student at the university of Zurich. She told me she'd received her diagnosis and medication a few months earlier, but hated the side effects of the drugs, which is a common issue. In the next episode, I'm going to tell you how she totally transformed her crazy severe mood swings. And it wasn't through meds. It was through consciously processing what she was experiencing instead of suppressing it. I don't know if you can tell, but this stuff gets me fired up by research has led me to understand how entire fields can be governed by false ideas. And oftentimes these things are driven by power politics and money, not by true understanding and honest intentions. Sometimes I talk about these things like in today's episode and other times I write songs and make videos tomorrow, Friday, September 4th, 2020, I'm releasing a new song and video called, can you feel this love? It speaks to that, which we need in order to heal and grow not only within ourselves, but as a world community as well. Episode one has a sneak preview of the song. Next week on Friday, September 11th, 2020, I'm going to release a demo version of the song. And a lyric video was just me on keyboards and vocals. And my friend James Bianco on vocal harmonies. You'll be able to watch the video on my YouTube channel and stream the song on Spotify or wherever you listen to the music. Here's a sneak preview of that demo version.
Speaker 2 00:22:51 <inaudible>
Speaker 0 00:23:43 See you next time and stay aware. You can follow me on social media at doctors' wig, and you can sign up on the mailing list at doctors' wake.com, where you'll receive discounts on private coaching events and merchandise starting in 2021 weekly personal growth tips and lots more be well.
