Something to Ponder
Mood:  sharp

Psychiatry and Its Critics

There is something about Psychiatry that attracts the most vehement protests. No other branch of medicine sees such vilification heaped on it.

And yet, those who are in the system know they are doing the best thing possible for their patients/clients. And it is the one system that is most open in discussing what needs to be improved about it. While most other systems of medicine would dismiss most protests with a shrug, psychiatry is one branch that considers ethical issues, sometimes almost to the point of becoming paralysed for action.

Every psychiatrist knows the benefits of ECT in selected patients. Every psychiatrist knows how psychopharmacology has revolutionised patient care. The grateful patient who has been saved from suicide, who has got rid of his delusions/ anxieties/phobias to lead a productive life is so very well known in psychiatric practice. The whole problem is patients who get well do not talk. They go on with leading their lives, and often want to hide their psychiatric history for fear of stigma.

It’s a rare instance that a man would speak as eloquently about his psychosis and how he got rid of it, as he would about his recent bypass, or appendectomy, or whatever.

It’s not that treatment failures do not occur in other branches. But they are accepted as part of the process. No one wants them. But no one dies a thousand deaths over them. However, in psychiatry, its opponents trumpet every treatment failure so loud as to scare so many more who would greatly benefit by it.

What do we do? Nothing, maybe. Or go on doing one’s bit to the best of one’s ability. And think of the grateful faces of those helped. And wait for saner counsel to prevail in the less charitably disposed.

Maybe it is also time for those who have been helped by psychiatry to speak up.


Ajai
21 May 2006