Have you been putting your trust in the mental health industry to fix your problems, yet you feel like you have been stuck in place, unable to move forward, ever since you got entangled with this industry? You are not alone.

Upon successfully creating a veneer of scientific backing and garnering years of media and social promotion, this industry amassed a public perception of trustworthiness. And so, even when years of clinical adherence yield no improvement, numerous clients still put their faith in mental health professionals, trusting that these “experts” will eventually provide a breakthrough. By mental health professionals, I mean any psych provider that has any real measure of authority, such as the license to diagnose, prescribe medication, or commit a patient. This includes psychiatrists, psychologists, Master’s level social workers, licensed professional counselors, and psychiatric nurse practitioners.

A point of frustration for me when I was working in psych was witnessing the docility and complacency of multiple patients in addressing their own mental health. Generally, clients did not seem to want to put any effort into figuring out their problems but rather they seemed okay with relying on the opinions of the professionals – even when years passed and nothing changed. And yes, I intentionally used the word “opinions,” because a lot of what goes into psych theories is opinion-based rather than science-based.

The question is: are the professional opinions of these mental health workers of much merit? From my experience working in mental health and my research into the field, I generally beg to differ. Here are some unfortunate realities of the mental health industry.

Assigning a med is like “throwing darts at a board to see what will stick.”

That quote comes from a psychiatric nurse practitioner who was a former colleague of mine. Psychiatric providers are not carefully measuring the levels of your neurotransmitters and then assigned a psych drug based the readings. It is really mostly trial and error. If you have used psych services for some time, you probably already know this. One, nobody ever measured the levels of neurotransmitters in your brains – not that a test even exists to do so (accurately) on a live person. Two, if you went through two or more med changes to find one that worked, then it should be easy to guess why that happened.

Medical tests are largely ignored.

If you think psych professionals will give your body a complete medical checkup, think again. In fact, they normally won’t administer even one medical test. The reason for this is that there are no medical tests for psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia, bipolar, depression, anxiety, and so forth. That said, medical conditions that can cause mental health disruptions do exist, and one would think that they would at least attempt to rule out actual biological causes of mental illness before resorting to a standard psychiatric diagnosis. Some exceptional psych providers do use medical tests, but it is unfortunately not the norm.

Different psych providers may give you a different diagnosis.

If you have been to multiple psych providers, this likely already happened to you. There are a variety of reasons this could happen. Sometimes, a psych provider may give the wrong diagnosis for insurance purposes. That is to say, if there are a lot of patients with borderline personality disorder on the caseload, insurance costs could go up, because borderline personality is considered a high risk diagnosis. Therefore, some psych providers may choose to label a number of borderline patients as “bipolar” instead.

Another reason a client may be given an incorrect diagnosis is in order to provide access to perks he or she may not be qualified for with the correct diagnosis. I learned that this happens from a former colleague.

And then, there is also the matter of incompetence on the part of a number of psych providers. Such may not follow the guidelines of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, and they may also fail to dig sufficiently into their clients’ histories to get a good overall picture. The problem is, if you yourself do not have at least a working knowledge of psychiatric diagnoses, it is hard if not impossible to spot an incompetent provider when you come across one. However, I can give you a quick tip on a way to do so. If you have a history of doing drugs (that preceded your psychiatric symptoms) and have disclosed this to your psych provider, yet he or she goes ahead and diagnoses you with schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, or bipolar disorder, then the likelihood that you have an incompetent psych provider on your hands is close to a 100%.

The success rate is low.

“Curing” is not really in the vocabulary of the mental health field. “Managing” is the preferred word. Psychiatric drugs do not cure anyone; they are mere crutches. Before one might argue that psychology has the answer, well… no. Psychotherapy techniques have been found to help mental health at a rate of only 15%.

Many providers will lie to you.

They will tell you that you have a chemical imbalance that needs to be fixed or a defective brain. What they won’t tell you is there is no evidence for this widespread assertion which many have bought, hook, line, and sinker. They will also tell you that you need lifelong treatment or management of symptoms for your condition and that you can never be cured. A lot of people have found this is false.

A random mental health professional could have worse mental health than you.

This is not a joke. I have worked with multiple psych professionals, including a psych nurse who thought she was allergic to light, a psychologist with eye-bulging levels of anxiety, and a psych provider who used to drink and drive.

The old adage that people with a history of psychological problems go into psych to try to fix themselves has truth to it. It was certainly true of me, as I initially got interested in this field after coming down with a bad case of OCD. Years later, I discovered a better way.

Lack of clinical successes can lead to callousness

When I was working on a prison psych team, I noticed the great frustration multiple psych workers (both from psychiatry and psychotherapy) had toward their patients. Going back to the low success rate I discussed above… what I believe is happening is that when some psych professionals continue to see client after client fail to improve, they may or may not make the connection that their fields of study have not equipped them to truly heal people. Instead, I believe what happens is that they project the failure right back onto the patient. The suffering patient is reduced to a noncompliant child, the psychotherapist or psychiatric provider to a long-suffering parent.

The patients of such providers might find themselves dismissed, treated coldly or rudely, not listened to or otherwise mistreated by the very people they expected to be there for them and to know how to fix their problems. When you’re feeling vulnerable, this is not the kind of treatment you expect to receive.

Their services have the potential to take your life from meh to nightmare

Philip S. was a successful surgeon who sought psychiatric help when he came down with situational depression after the double whammy of being wrongfully sued by another surgeon and going through some family stressors. Once he landed in the hands of psychiatry, they began pumping him with psych drugs. At first, he was given antidepressants and then (bizarrely) antipsychotics, leaving him “drugged and beside [himself] with confusion and anger about the way [he] was being treated.”

Interestingly, Philip makes this point: “The psychiatrists seemed to enjoy the role reversal with a previously highly successful surgeon as a patient. Psychiatrists hate successful conventional doctors, especially surgeons who make so much indisputable difference. They were particularly aggressive with me because of my position.” It is unclear if he came to this conclusion at the beginning of his experience with psychiatry, during it, or afterward.

Psychiatry insisted that Philip undergo electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) He wisely declined. Unfortunately, psychiatry had managed to steer his wife and son to their side, and so there was extra pressure on him from within his family to submit to psychiatry’s antics.

Philip ended up on forced medication and eventually went inpatient. (Let’s keep in mind that, at the beginning, he was merely suffering from situational depression.)

The second time Philip was hospitalized, he developed renal colic and came close to becoming septic because the psych staff wouldn’t take his word that he knew what was happening. They merely offered him the generic equivalents of Valium and Tylenol. Fortunately, he was able to call the urology department for help. He notes, “No wonder the death rate in psychiatric hospitals is alarmingly high.”

Pressure continued to be heaped on Philip to submit to ECT treatments. Though he continued to refuse, eventually they forced him to undergo ECT anyway. He underwent this barbaric procedure for many weeks. Though he complained he was losing memories of his past, it took a tribunal to end the “treatment.” Of note, he had never been informed that memory loss is a side effect of ECT.

Philip later had a heart attack that was likely due to the his time on antipsychotics. During another hospitalization, he was tormented with cold showers. Because his muscles were weakened from lack of use, he was moved with straps, causing lasting harm to his body. Then, in a final insult, his diagnosis was changed to dementia and he was placed on a “Deprivation of Liberty” order.

Philip eventually quit all psych drugs. Regaining his cognitive abilities, he was able to pass a test of cognition with a 90% score. However, the memory loss from the ECT lingers.

Again, keep in mind that all this started when Philip, a competent surgeon, merely sought some help when he felt depressed after being sued and dealing with some family stressors. His is not the only story of psychiatry actively harming people and taking their lives from bad to worse.

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