Don Weitz
Voices From the Past: Don Weitz , Part 1, Toronto, November 1994
Voices From the Past: Don Weitz , Part 2, Toronto, November 1994
The Mad Movement Today: Don Weitz, 2013
20 REASONS TO ABOLISH PSYCHIATRY*
1. Psychiatrists cause death, of not only the body but the mind and spirit.
2. Psychiatrists frequently violate the Hippocratic Oath.
3. Psychiatrists disempower their patients and deceive the public.
4. Psychiatry is not a medical science. It has no diagnostic tests or testable hypotheses, let alone cures.
5. Psychiatrists cannot predict violence yet promote the “dangerous mental patient” myth/stereotype.
6. Psychiatrists have caused an epidemic of brain damage by promoting neuroleptics, antidepressants, electroshock, and psychosurgery.
7. Psychiatrists manufacture “mental disorders” in their witch-hunting manual, the DSM. Such “disorders” are simply moral judgments of dissident ways of coping and alternative ways of interpreting/being in the world.
8. Psychiatrists pathologize legitimate existential crises as “symptoms” of ” illness.”
9. Psychiatrists have no evidence for their claim that “mental disorders” are caused by “biochemical imbalances” and “genetic predispositions.”
10. Psychiatrists falsely claim that neurotoxins (“medications”), electroshock, and other behaviour modification procedures are “safe, effective and lifesaving”. The exact opposite is tragically true.
11. Psychiatrists routinely violate the principle of informed consent by failing to tell patients about the disabling effects of neuroleptics: memory loss, tardive dyskinesia, tardive psychosis, parkinsonism, dementia.
12. Psychiatrists frequently fail to inform patients about non-medical therapeutic alternatives such as survivor-controlled crisis centres, advocacy groups, diet, holistic medicine, and affordable housing.
13. Psychiatrists are sexist in stereotyping women as “over-emotional”, blaming women whenever for their own problems, and even sexually assaulting them.
14. Psychiatrists once considered homosexuality a “mental illness” and have used electroshock on lesbians to coerce them into adopting heteronormative lifestyles.
15. Psychiatrists are ageist in prescribing drugs and electroshock to disproportionately large numbers of elderly people.
16. Psychiatrists are racist in disproportionately incarcerating, drugging, and labeling people of colour.
17. Psychiatrists routinely violate civil rights by imprisoning people without a trial and subjecting them to physical, electrical, and chemical tortures.
18. Psychiatrists masterminded the murder of hundreds of thousands during the Nazi Holocaust (the “T-4 euthanasia” program) – historical facts still missing in psychiatric textbooks today.
19. Psychiatrists have administered mind-control experiments throughout North America since the 1950s.
20. Psychiatry is a form of social control, not treatment. It is a direct threat to democracy, human rights and life.
* This is an edited version of a statement that first appeared in “What DifferEnCe Does IT Make?” The Journey of a Soul Survivor (Wendy Funk, Wild Flower Publishing, 1998, pp.159-161).