It's a cliche but like cliches it's true: the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. And "good intentions" are even worse when the possessor is blind and arrogant. The word for that is "hubris." Hubris applies even to doctors. After all, there does exist the saying, "What is the difference between God and a doctor?" "God doesn't think he is a doctor."
I am not a fan of doctors, especially the type who is caught in AMA groupthink. I am especially not a fan of those who treat "mental illness."
Even in the recent past the treatments were horrendous. They still are today, for that matter.
Think lobotomies. Not so long as they considered a panacea for all mental illnesses. Walter Freeman, who created lobotomies and only died in 1972, lobotomized thousands of people. About 3400, actually.
He refined it to using an icepick through the eye socket, tapped in with a hammer.
His procedure did no good whatsoever. Many of his patients died of cerebral hemorrages. Some he operated on two and three times. So why did people allow it? Because they trusted him as a doctor?
Then there was Ewan Camerson, who used electroshock treatment (ECT). He used it to annihiliate peoples' personalities and then tried to install a new one using recorded messages played through earphones.
Some of his patients forgot their own names. One forever got lost in his house, looking for his mother who had died decades ago.
Both Freeman and Cameron should have spent their lives in prison, but did not.
Things are better today...maybe.
Let's take psychiatric drugs. The SSRIs are associated with increases in murder/suicide, and the literature warns about it. The soldiers coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan having been killing their spouses and themselves, and all of them have been stuffed to the gills with anti-depressants.
Most of the school shooters have been on anti-depressants. The women who have engaged in bizarre murders of their children -- such as Susan Smith, who rolled a car with her kids into in a lake -- were on anti-depressants.
In the past murder/suicide was overwhelmingly a male thing, but now with these anti-depressants women have achieved par with men.
These days no patient would allow any doctor to lobotomize them or annihiliate their personalities with ECT. But tens of millions of people seem to have no problem with chemical lobotomies.
I recently had a retired doctor tell me that he told his patients to stay away from doctors. "You know when you need to see one," he told me. "Otherwise, stay away from them."
I know a woman from college. She was bright, funny and a ditzy flirt. She was diagnosed as bipolar at 25 and put on a cocktail of psychiatric medications. After 25 years she shows signs of paranoia and delusion, and stilll suffers from anxiety and depression. Her memory is shot.
How exactly have any of these psychiatric drugs helped her or anyone else?
This use of psychiatric drugs will change, once there are enough murder and suicides -- and lawsuits. Then they will go into the garbage heap of history,