Cloaked in the garb of the medical profession, psychiatry is a field that professes humanitarian motives and complete authority over “mental health”. This pretence has, for decades, filled the psychiatric industry’s coffers with lucrative government appropriations and given it no small measure of societal power.

But what does psychiatry actually do?

It is common knowledge that it warehouses the “insane”, “treats” people by shocking them with electricity, confines them in padded cells and straitjackets, and doles out mind-altering drugs without end.

But the question is best answered by a negative: what psychiatry doesn’t do is cure anything. While medicine addresses actual diseases, psychiatry addresses only observed symptoms—which they refer to as “disorders”. Psychiatrists have never been able to identify the causes of any mental disorder, just as they have failed to prove the existence of any “mental disease”.

“There is no blood or other biological test to ascertain the presence or absence of a mental illness, as there is for most bodily diseases”, said Dr Thomas Szasz,renowned author and CCHR co-founder. Dr Roman Chorny of St. Petersburg concurs: “No single gene has been found to be responsible for any specific mental disorder.... There is no laboratory test or abnormality in brain tissue that can identify the mental illness”.

The failure of psychiatry as a profession lies in its basic premise — that man is a soulless animal. Denying the existence of a “soul”, psychiatry proclaimed that all mental and emotional problems were merely physical — subject only to physically damaging handlings.

By the early 20th century, its theories proven unworkable, psychiatry had long since given up the pretence of helping anyone. But desperate to justify their existence and appropriations, psychiatrists resorted to a succession of vicious assaults on the brain to show their “mastery” over insanity. In reality, these “treatments” were expressly designed to “lower the intellect”, reducing the patient to a quiet, damaged shell. Such treatment certainly quieted the asylums, with their patients suffering from varying degrees of brain damage.

As Nobel-prize winning author Ernest Hemingway complained, after receiving 21 electroshocks at the Mayo psychiatric clinic: “What is the sense of ruining my head and erasing my memory, which is my capital, and putting me out of business? It was a brilliant cure but we lost the patient”. Before the month was out Hemingway was dead, a suicide.

Sadly, little has changed. Psychiatry’s “treatments” still leave patients debilitated, brain damaged, addicted — or dead.