best evidence techniques? I fear the dissolution of NICE will make the
situation worse rather than better. Doctors are as dogmatic as priests.
I remember speaking to a doctor about the meta-analyses which show
antidepressants to be as effective as a sugar pill which a patient
thinks is an antidepressant. He said that was bollocks because he'd seen
them work...
I suspect that as new scientific methods are developed things like CBT,
antipsychotics and other treatments may all be shown to be considerably
less effective than once thought. I think whole new paradigms of thought
will quickly show that mental health is just social control. Making
normal what is different rather than treating illness.
The question of human suffering still exists of course. It seems
evidence-based methods are ignored when looking at treatments because
most things fail the test of good evidence.
What's the test of good evidence? Lots of high quality trials. All data
published, even when it doesn't support the researcher's bias. Bias
eliminated wherever possible - I mean triple blind studies. More
sophisticated measures and measurement of human suffering - and this
doesn't mean more biological techniques (I fear unhappy people being
told their not unhappy because their serotonin levels are within the
normal range). Fucking huge sample sizes. Decent long term follow up
such that studies - more longitudinal studies. Most of all there needs
to be ethical consideration of what's being done. The medical profession
can't be trusted. They used the chemical cosh to treat old people with
dementia because society didn't want to deal with old people's symptoms.
They do the same thing to kids.
Proper evidence tecdhniques are the first and last bastion against the
evils and attrocities which have been committed by doctors in the name
of treating supposed illness. It seems there is no other law to stop
them killing people unnecessarily. When I explianed to a senior police
offer that the Royal College of Psychiatry had admitted that 1,800
people every year had been killed unnecessarily he was shocked but
explained at best this could be considered manslaughter (and, of course,
a profession can't be jailed). When I explained that doctors are now
measured on how few of these drugs they use rather than their use in the
community banned I think he could see my point that the medical
profession is becoming akin to murder. They treat behaviour with
alternatives to straitjackets, alternatives which they now know kill.
The straitjacket is safer but the inhumanity is more obvious.
I don't know how the evidence paradigm needs to change to shift the role
of psychiatry away from murdering people to treating society but this is
the most essential shift needed in mental healthcare. It is needed now
but it will take a century to develop. The dogma is so strong that they
are treating genuine illnesses rather than enforcing norms of behaviour
developed post-Industrial Age to make machine-like people for the
factories and offices and call centres.
It seems every generation there is a call for evidence in mental health,
for the use of real science in a field that uses false science to
support what it does. I know in a century I will be right. People will
ask how people in our time could have allowed the things that are done
to the mentally ill. I feel no joy or smugness in being right, not when
this means a century more of oppression, incaceration and death of
fellow human beings. All in the name of healthcare.
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