The cult of psychiatry explained

How is psychiatry like a cult ?

Ted Patrick, one of the pioneers of deprogramming, used a confrontational method:

"When you deprogram people, you force them to think...But I keep them off balance and this forces them to begin questioning, to open their minds. When the mind gets to a certain point, they can see through all the lies that they've been programmed to believe. They realize that they've been duped and they come out of it. Their minds start working again."

From wiki - deprogramming.

Now Check out this paper :

Several assumptions guide the examination of this question:

1. Psychiatry is part of a larger system, the psychopharmaceutical-industrial complex (PPIC), which is primarily driven by capitalism.

2. Power dynamics are inherent in the doctor-consumer relationship.

3. The many subsystems of the PPIC are motivated by good intentions, but their behavior and its consequences may not reflect the goodness of those intentions.

4. Under certain conditions consumers can adopt explanations for their diagnoses that make them impervious to other explanations in ways similar to cult indoctrination.

In using these assumptions to answer the question, I will describe the PPIC, the parallel between the PPIC and cult-like phenomena, and how cult susceptibility factors mirror characteristics of psychiatric consumers. I conclude this paper with suggestions on how to reconstruct the loss of self that is a product of the PPIC.

THE PSYCHOPHARMACEUTICAL-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX >>>>

Source and the rest of it:

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/The+loss+of+client+agency+into+the+psychopharmaceutical--industrial...-a0209535636

I very much enjoyed reading this post, but I add a caution regarding the motive for psychiatrists to commit "taboo", or deviate from the conventional wisdom that disorders are "illnesses" instead of disorders, and that strictly coping is how to tolerate the stresses in life. My caution is that doctors have a strong incentive not to take risks with patients for fear of losing their practice, and this fear is not without some warrant.

I agree that there are "cult" like features of the psychiatric community, but calling them a cult is probably not entirely accurate. I would call them members of an industry, where the service is to treat symptoms - not to deal with causes. You bring up a great idea about how our "programming" tells us that psychiatry treats the cause, which we find out later, sometimes painfully, to be a deception. I like htat you added the part about learning how to truly think. Most people never do.

Speaking of thinking, I think that a close parallel may be seen in the drug companies even though they have a very different motive compared to psychiatry, which is mostly to make as much bank as possible. I give them credit for producing valuable medications, so this is not a black-and-white issue here. Without meds, I don't know how I would have functioned for years until I figured this disorder out.