There are no cures in modern Psychiatry. They wouldn't know a cure if it stood up and slapped them in the face.

While we are pointing to posts from Furious Seasons, here is a snippet from one post that points to one of the major flaws in that dysfunctional branch of medicine, psychiatry. That being ...

There are no cures in modern Psychiatry. In fact, they wouldn't know a cure if it stood up and slapped them in the face.

No one is ever pronounced cured. Once you get to this point, you are just a few baby steps from opening the door to an Alice in Wonderland fairy tale world where the "science" itself is found to be more and more fraudulent, what with their stew of pills, and their quicky and highly profitable diagnoses. And you wonder at the ethical problems people sidestep when they discover this, and then choose to ignore it.

To be fair, this is a radicalizing moment. But then you need to decide what is at stake.

Speaking of psychiatrists, I saw mine yesterday as I do every two months or so. Despite being off-meds at his urging, I continue to see him just to be on the safe side. But I'm beginning to wonder how safe that side is. You see, I've had almost two years of not just being subsyndromal, but of being virtually non-syndromal and the last five months of that has been without the aid of medications of any kind and so I had to ask him if I even passed muster as someone with bipolar disorder anymore. His answer discouraged me.

"Once diagnosed, never undiagnosed. But once diagnosed, not always symptomatic."

We talked about this and my original diagnosis in 1989--that was eight psychiatrists ago--and how I think I never was anything more serious than perhaps a bipolar 2, but I was diagnosed in the days before bipolar 2 existed. We talked about bipolar disorder as a personality disorder and how that may be far more applicable to someone like me than the big old ugly diagnosis of bipolar disorder 1, manic-depressive and mentally ill.

It became clear to me after a few minutes that there was no budging my doctor on his view of once-diagnosed, always-diagnosed.

So I told him something.

"What's the point of treatment and going through years of agony and finally getting vastly better only to be told that there is no goal line I can possibly cross that will lead to me being undiagnosed?"

He didn't have an answer for me. Our appointment was over. But my concerns are not.

How is it that I can go along with the rules of the mental illness paradigm for almost 20 years and actually meet almost every conceivable endpoint of recovery and still be told I have the disorder? That doesn't strike me as fair, logical or particularly humane. In fact, I am feeling rather screwed over by this whole process that has consumed my entire adult life.

What if we, as a culture, told that to cancer patients? Would there be a movement of cancer survivors? Or would their be hoards of former cancer patients huddled in the corner, well but still diagnosed? You know the answer: we'd never stand for that.

I think it's high time we started examining what personality issues psychiatrists might have--and if you know anything about the history of the DSM, you know they have loads of issues of their own--and began a push to stop this nonsense of labeling people for life. Oh wait, there's already a movement like that.

Is it any wonder it's had little success given that even fairly humane docs such as mine buy into the Dx'd for life nonsense and that there's a $250 billion industry very interested in keeping people like me sick for life even when I am more well than most normal people I can think of?