A German couple, the Erfurts, were worried about the elder of their two sons; a rare congenital disease made him moody and quarrelsome. But when they took the 9-year-old to a psychiatrist for help, the real trouble started.

After therapy sessions that upset the boy, the psychiatrist badgered the parents into committing their son to a children’s psychiatric ward. Released three months later, the boy returned home angry and distant. Seeing their son’s condition obviously worse, the Erfurts refused any further “treatment”.

Then the unthinkable happened—every parent’s worst nightmare. The two boys disappeared from school. Several frantic calls later, the Erfurts discovered that agents from the Youth Welfare Office had removed their sons because its psychiatric board had declared Mrs. Erfurt mentally ill. By refusing further treatment for her son, the psychiatrists concluded that she was trying to keep her children ill, a disorder they called “Münchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy.”

A more than two-year legal battle ensued. Finally the boys, who had been drugged and brutalised in the interim, were released back into the care of their parents. Of smallconsolation, the diagnosis had since been discredited.

Psychiatry purports to be the sole arbitrator on the subject of mental health and “diseases” of the mind. The facts, as the Erfurts found out, demonstrate otherwise.

Psychiatrists deal exclusively in mental “disorders”, not proven diseases. In medicine, strict criteria exist for calling a condition a disease. In the absence of a known cause or physiology, a group of symptoms seen in different patients is called a “disorder” or “syndrome”. Harvard Medical School’s Joseph Glenmullen, M.D., said that in psychiatry, “all of its diagnoses are merely syndromes (or disorders)...not diseases”.

Medically, mental “illness” does not exist and no physical test exists to diagnose or confirm it.

But then, psychiatrists freely admit they can’t help anyone. As the president of the World Psychiatric Association, 1994, Norman Sartorius, said, “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”.

So, you might ask, if psychiatry doesn’t cure “mental illness”, what does it do? The answer to that question is the reason the Citizens Commission on Human Rights exists.