it's not a medical disease. it never was.

The idea that it's a "brain disease" is a hypothesis that stems from the fact that pills that change brain chemistry were used as a remedy and that somehow worked (at least in the beginning), so, the way science works, the hypothesis was born, "if chemistry change helps, then brain chemistry might be the cause." No. Psychiatry has known since the 90s that this is false. postmortems consistently reveal no change in brain chemistry EXCEPT if you took the pills for all your life; antidepressants wreck the brain. Who didnt take them has no difference in brain chemistry.

The article quotes Robert Whitaker, who is famous for this: he looked at all the studies they did since the 80s to figure out what is going on, with some expectable results: yes, antidepressants are indeed extremely addictive; no, it doesn't perform better than sugar pills; and the corporate studies all only study the first few weeks, which they do on purpose, because you're basically getting drugged, and in the first few weeks, this leads to a high. After that, it fades, the side effects kick in, most people feel worse than before, and doctors mask this by rotating between the many different mixtrures on the market.

What's more important, and which you get from people like Paula Caplan, Joanna Moncreiff and Kirk and Kutchins, the entire disease catalog and the psychiatric profession are political through and through.

Firstly, ALL the psychiatric disease categories are legal in form, which is to say, they have 0 physical evidence, only a checklist of "things people do" (thus, legal in form; this is how criminal law works, and the DSM works the same way). They rely exclusively on psychiatrists making checkmarks. Is he tired? check. Does he lack drive? check. Is he saying pessimistic things about life? check. This is why, until today, two psychiatrists will give you three different diagnoses. There's a basket of studies on this, They can't agree on diagnoses because all they do is fill out checklists.

Secondly, the checklists weirdly correspond to what contemporary society expects. There's a famous experiment where they put (fake, paid) "patients" in front of real psychistrists to get them to diagnose them. In the first instance, they voiced doubts about themselves: I'm worthless, I won't amount to anything, nobody wants me (quite uderstandable feelings in today's societies; it does make lots of people feel this way.) Half of the "doctors" said yes, they need treatment. In the second round, they had them say pessimistic things about the social order. "The state and industry are all made up of crooks. They're all cheating us." Now, 2/3 of "doctors" were sure something's wring with them. In the final roud, they had the "patients" say these things about the profession of psychiatry. "Psychiatry is fake; it's another instrment of repression" (which is 100% the result sociological studies about psychiatry arrive at!)... now almost 100% declared them in need of treatment.

If you go looking, there's an absolute mountain of studies debunking psychiatry. It's BS.