If you want to find out about psychiatry, you can't do much better than listen to the psychiatrists themselves. They will tell you exactly what they think about the human condition, what can be done about it, and how they believe the sane man (and therefore the ideal society) should function.

Others have come to their senses and know exactly what's going on. Those few who have the courage to speak out against the majority in their profession deserve attention as well. Read on for some eye-opening quotes from those who are supposed to be "protectors" of your mental health.

The mental health establishment has snowed the American people: it launches the most unimaginable brutal psychological and physical assault on human beings in distress, calls this 'medical treatment', and then blames the outcome on 'mental illness'.
—Seth Farber, Ph.D., scholar

Click on the following links to see what the experts have to say:

Do psychiatrists really know anything about the mind?

Psychiatry's Hidden Agenda

Some of the horrors you can expect from psychiatric "treatment"

The pseudo-science called "psychiatry"

The promotion of deviant behavior

Human beings are laboratory rats to be experimented on

Psychiatry's overall political agenda for mind control

Do psychiatrists really know anything about the mind?

Bruce Wiseman, CCHR Spokesman - from the booklet "Psychiatry and the Creation of Senseless Violence"

“Even Ritalin’s manufacturer warns that “frank psychotic episodes can occur” with abusive use. While the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders states that the major complication of Ritalin withdrawal is suicide.”

Dr. David Kaiser, psychiatrist

"Unfortunately what I also see these days are the casualties of this new biological psychiatry (i.e., drug treatment), as patients come to me with many years of past treatment.  Patients have been diagnosed with chemical imbalances despite the fact that no test exists to support such a claim, and that there is no real conception of what a correct chemical balance would look like.  Patients have years of medication which have done nothing except reify* in them an identity as a chronic patient with a bad brain.  This identification as a biologically-impaired patient is one of the most destructive effects of biological psychiatry…At the level of individual patients this means a growing number of overdiagnosed, overmedicated, and disarticulated* people less able to control their own identities and lives.”

*reify = to make (an abstraction) material or concrete
*disarticulated = not able to put one’s thoughts and feelings into words easily

"... modern psychiatry has yet to convincingly prove the genetic/biological cause of any single mental illness ... Patients [have] been diagnosed with 'chemical imbalances' despite the fact that no test exists to support such a claim, and ... there is no real conception of what a correct chemical balance would look like."
—"Commentary Against Biological Psychiatry", Psychiatric Times, December 1996

N. McLaren, MD, Australian psychiatrist, 1999

"The fields of human psychology and psychiatry are ... a mess of competing but fundamentally incompatible theories ... Academic psychiatry has all but lost contact with the population it is supposed to serve ... Criticism is, if not actiely discouraged, then politely but very firmly ignored."

Walter Afield, psychiatrist, 1994

"What's happening in the training of psychiatrists and in the quality of a psychiatrist is that they have become drug pushers. They have ... forgotten how to sit down and talk to patients as to what their problems are." 

Dr. Fred A. Baughman Jr., Pediatric Neurologist - from
"Malpractice and Violation of Informed Consent"

"... in 40 years, 'biological psychiatry' has yet to validate a single psychiatric condition/diagnosis as an abnormality/disease, or as anything 'neurological', 'biological', 'chemically imbalanced', or 'genetic'."

Ron Leifer, psychiatrist, quoted in Beverly Eakman's book,
"Cloning of the American Mind", 1997

"Everyone is neurotic. I have no trouble giving out diagnoses. In my office I only see abnormal people. Out of my office, I see only normal people. It's up to me. It's just a joke. This is what I mean by this fraud, this arrogant fraud ... To make some kind of pretension that this is a scientific statement is ... damaging to the culture."

Dr. Joseph Glenmullen, Clinical Instructor in Psychiatry
Harvard Medical School, 2000

"We do not have proof either of the cause of the physiology for any psychiatric diagnosis ... In the absence of any verifiable diseases, in recent decades, psychopharmacology has not hesitated to construct 'disease models' for psychiatric diagnoses."

Dr. Sydney Walker III, psychiatrist, "The Hyperactivity Hoax"

"Hyperactivity is not a disease. It's a hoax perpetrated by doctors who have no idea what's really wrong with these children."

Frank Sulloway, professor of psychology, quoted in John Horgan's book, "The Undiscovered Mind"

"Freud was wrong in almost every important respect."

R.D. Laing, psychiatrist, "Wisdom, Madness, and Folly", p. 126

"What do you do when you don't know what to do? No wonder there are more suicides among psychiatrists than in any other profession."

"Over the years it [the National Committee for Mental Hygiene] has championed for the promotion of 'mental health' despite the fact that nobody knows what it is or how to do it."

"Many psychiatrists have had, at least to some degree, the unsettling and bewildering feeling that what they have been doing has been largely worthless and that the premises on which they have based their professional lives were partly fraudulent."

Frankwood E. Williams, Director, National Committee for Mental Hygiene,
"Is there a Mental Hygiene", Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 1932, p. 113-20

"The basic question with which psychiatrists and particularly those interested in mental hygiene start is -- What are the causes of mental and nervous disease? This question has been repeatedly raised during the twenty-two years of organized mental hygiene until it has almost become a ritual and like a ritual has led to nothing except repetition -- not even a start."

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Psychiatry's Hidden Agenda

Carl Elliot, Bioethicist, University of Minnesota, 2001

"The way to sell drugs is to sell psychiatric illness."

Johann Christian Reil (who first coined the word "psychiatry"), 1810

"Through strong, painful impressions we capture the patient's attention, accustom him to unconditional obedience, and indelibly imprint in his heart the feeling of necessity. The will of his superior must be such a firm, immutable law for him that he will no more resist it than he would rebel against the elements."

Abraham Myerson, psychiatrist, quoted in Bruce Wiseman's "Psychiatry, the Ultimate Betrayal"

"The reduction of intelligence is an important factor in the curative process ... The fact is that some of the very best cures that one gets are in those individuals whom one reduces almost to amentia [feeblemindedness]."

John Rawlings Rees, psychiatrist, "Strategic Planning for Mental Health",
Mental Health, v.1 no.4, p. 103-6

"If we are to infiltrate the professional and social activities of other people I think we must imitate the Totalitarians and organize some kind of fifth column activity. If better ideas on mental health are to progress and spread we, as the salesmen, must lose our identity ... Let us all, therefore, very secretly be 'fifth columnists'."

William Menninger, President, American Psychiatric Association
"New Directions in American Psychiatry" 1944-1968, p. 79

"Our Committee on Preventive Psychiatry is recommending that we assume citizenship responsibilities for policy forming at whatever level we can -- in the Board of Education, City Council, civic clubs, welfare groups, legislative committees, Congressional hearings ... We can exert an effective influence on the betterment of mental health ..."

Mike Gorman, psychiatric publicist, remarking on National Institute of Mental Health fundraising tactics in Drew, "The Health Syndicate", The Atlantic Monthly, December 1967, P. 76

"[it is] a high class kind of subversion, very high class. We're not second story burglars. We go right in the front door."

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Some of the horrors you can expect from psychiatric "treatment."

Dr. Sydney Walker III, psychiatrist, The Hyperactivity Hoax

"... a child who sees a DSM-oriented doctor is almost assured of a psychiatric label and a prescription, even if the child is perfectly fine. ... This willy-nilly labeling of virtually everyone as mentally ill is a serious danger to healthy children, because virtually all children have enough symptoms to get a DSM label and a drug."

Leo T. Alexander, psychiatrist, "The Suppression of the Clonic Phase in Electrically Induced Convulsions in Man", Journal of Neuropathology and Experimental Neurology, April, 1952, p. 182

"I produced painful, though otherwise fortunately harmless, spinal fractures (2 of them multiple) in 3 patients in fairly rapid succession."

Franz G. Alexander and Sheldon Selesnick, psychiatrists, describing psychosurgery (lobotomy) in The History of Psychiatry: An Evaluation of Psychiatric Thought from Prehistoric Times to the Present, p.285

"an area essential to the human being - his personality - is forever destroyed."

Dr. Sergei Zapoulskalov, psychiatrist  

"Today in Russia, children who have difficulties with studying are not placed into parents' or teachers' hands, but into psychologists' ones. From there they go to psychiatrists who cannot offer anything better than psychotropic drugs. I have ever seen a teenager helped by them, but I know of a great number of incidents where such drugs have led to dependence and depression ..."

David Kaiser, psychiatrist, Against Biological Psychiatry, 1996

"...years of medication ... have done nothing except reify in them an identity as a chronic patient with a bad brain. This identification as a biologically-impaired patient is one of the most destructive effects of biologic psychiatry. At the level of the individual patients this means a growing number of over-diagnosed, overmedicated and disarticulated people less able to define and control their own identities and lives." 

Dr. Bevan Cant, psychiatric registrar, quoted in David Smith, "Patients Hit with Massive Overdoses", 1988

"In emergencies we offer [a major tranquilizer]; if refused, we stand several staff around and re-offer. If again refused, it is 'grab and jab'." 

Dr. Robert Morgan, 1966, quoted in Bruce Wiseman's "Psychiatry, the Ultimate Betrayal"

"..[E]ven one or two ECT treatments risk limbic damage in the brain leading to retarded speed, coordination, handwriting, concentration, attention span, memory, response flexibility, and re-education. On the psychological side, fear of ECT has produced stress ulcers, renal disease, confusion, amnesiac withdrawal, and resistance to re-educative or psychological therapy. The research thus indicated that ECT was a slower-acting lobotomy with the added complications of shock-induced terror." 

Lee Coleman, psychiatrist, "The Case Against ECT", 1977

"The brain for a while, is so injured that the patient is too confused to know or remember what was troubling him ... when the brain begins to recover ... the problems usually return since electricity has done nothing to resolve them."

"The changes one sees when electroshock is administered are completely consistent with any acute brain injury, such as a blow to the head from a hammer. In essence, what happens is that the individual is dazed, confused, and disoriented, and therefore cannot remember or appreciate current problems."

Moira Dolan, internist, quoted in Thomas S. Szasz, "Cruel Compassion", 1994

"The fact remains that electric shock to the brain is a haphazardly applied, brain-damaging procedure."

Thomas Maeder, clinical psychologist, "Wounded Healers",
Atlantic Monthly, January, 1989, p. 38

"...every person who comes into this office who has had an experience with another therapist has some kind of horror story to tell, about some major failing on the therapist's part, including, quite often, sexual abuse, verbal abuse, things that cross the boundary of mere bad technique and come pretty damn close to the criminal." 

Dr. Robert Byck, former professor of psychiatry and pharmacology,
Yale Medical School

"We have given a great deal of cocaine to many individuals..."

Jovan Raskovi, psychiatrist, quoted in "Bosnia: Ending the Religious Genocide, The Crusader, August, 1993

"I made the preparations for this war ... If I hadn't created this emotional strain in the Serbian people, nothing would have happened."

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David Rosenhan, professor of psychology, Stanford University, in "On Being Sane in Insane Places", Science 179 (1973): 250-258

"The facts of the matter are that we have known for a long time that diagnoses are often not useful or reliable, but we have nevertheless continued to use them. We now know that we cannot distinguish insanity from sanity."

Paul Mullen, Professor of Forensic Psychiatry, Australia (1999)

"We are going in there [the brain] with the equivalent of a bulldozer to knock down roads and tear up rail lines and pull down telegraph exchanges. You have to ask, do we know enough to play these kinds of games with other people's brains?"

National Institute of Health Consensus Conference on the Diagnosis and Treatment of ADHD, 1998

"We don't have an independent, valid test for ADHD; there are no data to indicate that ADHD is due to a brain malfunction ... and finally, after years of clinical research and experience with ADHD, our knowledge about the cause or causes of ADHD remains speculative." 

Heinz Lehmann, psychiatrist, "Discussion: A Renaissance of Psychiatric Diagnosis?" American Journal of Psychiatry 125, supplement 10 (1969): 43-46

"Psychiatric diagnosis in many quarters today has deteriorated from being a fine and useful craft into an ill-regulated, superficial, unconvincing, and therefore often useless procedure." 

Dr. Thomas Szasz, psychiatrist, 2000

"There is not one iota of evidence that addiction is a brain disease." 

Loren R. Mosher, M. D., Former Chief of the Center for Studies of Schizophrenia, The National Institute of Mental Health, in his letter of resignation to the APA

"Finally, why must the APA pretend to know more than it does? DSM IV [the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, Edition 4] is the fabrication upon which psychiatry seeks acceptance by medicine in general. Insiders know it is more a political than scientific document. ... It is the way to get paid." 

Dr. Walter Fisher, Assistant Superintendent, Elgin State Hospital,
"Power, Greed, and Stupidity in the Mental Health Racket"  

"The field of mental health is highly subjective, capricious, and dominated by whims, mythologies, and public relations. In many ways it is a pop culture with endless fads but with no real substance."

Barry Nurcombe, Director of child and adolescent psychiatry,
Vanderbilt University

"...the best [psychiatric] diagnoses are provisional and somewhat fictional."

E. Fuller Torrey, psychiatrist, "Nowhere to Go"

"Despite the proliferation of child guidance clinics and their popularity, no evidence was brought forth to suggest that the clinics prevented mental illness."

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The promotion of deviant behavior

Steve Baldwin, clinical psychologist, quoted in Rhonda Siddall,
"Psychiatrists Back Electric Shock for Children", London Observer, 3 July 1994

"ECT on minors is never appropriate ... [it] is a corruption of fundamental human rights."

Dr. Al Parides, Professor of Psychiatry, UCLA from an interview given
on December 17, 1993, quoted in Psychiatry, The Ultimate Betrayal
by Bruce Wiseman

"... psychiatry promotes a certain form of morality that is a deviant morality in regard to many areas including sexual behavior ..."

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Human beings are laboratory rats to be experimented on

Harry Bailey, psychiatrist, justifying experiments on Blacks

"[it was] cheaper to use Niggers than cats because they were everywhere and cheap experimental animals."

World Health Organization report, "Apartheid and Health", 1983

"In no other medical field in South Africa, is the contempt of the person cultivated by racism more concisely portrayed than in psychiatry."

Jovan Raskovic, psychiatrist, Luda Zemlya, 1990

"Serbs by nature possess the qualities of authority with certain aggressive and open elements... Muslims are fixated on the anal phase ... Their character tends to appropriate things, dominate like a boss, value people by their possessions, their money, their social position, etc....[Croats] are fixated on the castration complex ... under perpetual fear of castration, losing something that belongs only to himself."

Dr. P. Henning, psychiatrist, quoted in Peace and Freedom, S.A.
January, 1976, with reference to ECT use in South Africa

"It's simply too expensive, too slow and too risky. Africans appear to be more susceptible to the effects of anaesthetics and because we treat more Africans than Whites, we would have to double our staff if we used anaesthetics."

Benjamin Rush, widely acknowledged as the Father of American Psychiatry, "Medical Inquiries and Observations upon the Diseases of the Mind" (1812)

"However well they [black people] appear to be satisfied with their color, there are many proofs of their preferring that of the white people."

Francis Galton, psychologist quoted in Lenny Lapon's "Mass Murderers in White Coats" (Springfield, Mass., Psychiatric Genocide Research Institute, 1986), p. 75

"The Jews are specialized for a parasitical existence upon other nations. ... The average intellectual standard of the negro [sic] is some two grades below our own."

August Forel, psychiatrist, quoted in Bernhardt Schreiber
(San Francisco, Section 5 Books, 1983), p. 11-12

"Even for their own good the blacks must be treated as what they are, an absolutely subordinate, inferior, lower type of men, incapable themselves of culture. That must once and for all be clearly stated."

Carl C. Bell, M.D., President and CEO of the Community Mental Health Council, Chicago

"I'm certain that racism is embedded in the roots of medicine and psychiatry."

Eugen Fischer, psychiatrist, The Principles of Human Heredity and Racial Hygiene, 1939

"The Jew is such an alien and, therefore, when he wants to insinuate himself, he must be warded off. This is self-defense. In saying this, I do not characterize every Jew as inferior, as Negroes are, and I do not underestimate the greatest enemy with whom we have to fight ..."

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Psychiatry's overall political agenda of mind control

Dr. Jose M. R. Delgado, Director of Neuropsychiatry, Yale University Medical School, U.S. Congressional Record, 1974

"We need a program of psychosurgery for political control of our society. The purpose is physical control of the mind. Everyone who deviates from the given norm can be surgically mutilated ... Man does not have the right to develop his own mind."

G. Brock Chisholm, psychiatrist and co-founder of the World Federation for Mental Health, 1945

"To achieve world government, it is necessary to remove from the minds of men their individualism, loyalty to family traditions, national patriotism, and religious dogmas."

Carlos F. MacDonald, head of the American Medico-Psychological Association (precursor to the American Psychiatric Association) "American Journal of Insanity", July, 1914, quoted in Castel, Castel and Lovell,
The Psychiatric Society, 1982

"That a radical cure of the evils incident to the dependent mentally defective classes would be effected if every feeble-minded person, every imbecile, every habitual criminal, every manifestly weak-minded person, and every confirmed inebriate were sterilized, is a self-evident proposition. By this means we could practically, if not absolutely, arrest, in a decade or two, the reproduction of mentally defective persons, as surely as we could stamp out smallpox absolutely if every person in the world could be vaccinated."

Adolf Hitler, mass murderer (and psychiatric patient), "Mein Kampf", p. 255

"Those who are physically and mentally unhealthy and unworthy must not perpetuate their suffering in the body of their children."

Antonio Guidi, Neuropsychiatrist, Deputy Health Minister, Italy

"Authorizing the sales of [methylphenidate] for children is like physically torturing them ... it is like ECT ... even if it were true that three percent of children need it, I would rather see them treated with alternative methods."

German Society of Psychiatrists (DGPPN), In Memorium, August 1999

"[psychiatrists had been] active in and primarily responsible for the different euthanasia organizations [in Nazi Germany]."

Thomas Szasz, psychiatrist, "Cruel Compassion", 1994

"The young and the old are defenseless against relatives who want to get rid of them by casting them into the role of mental patient, and against psychiatrists whose livelihood depends on defining them as mentally ill."

"The child psychiatrist's authority is altogether beyond the reach of his denominated patients. This elementary fact makes the child psychiatrist one of the most dangerous enemies not only of children, but also of adults who care for the two precious and most vulnerable things in life - children and liberty. Child psychology and child psychiatry cannot be reformed. They must be abolished."

"Today, hundreds of thousands of children are imprisoned in psychiatric hospitals, most of them, even according to psychiatric authorities, unnecessarily."

Sigmund Freud, psychologist, quoted in CCHR, "Psychiatry Manipulating Creativity", 1997

"Meaning is but little with these men [artists], all they care about is line, shape, agreement of contours."

Martin Grotjahn, psychiatrist, quoted in CCHR, "Psychiatry Manipulating Creativity", 1997

"Actors are almost impossible to treat successfully."

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