In the last 30 years the field of psychiatry has undergone a major paradigm shift. Where we were once taught to look for the root causes of our suffering in the psychodynamics of our childhood, we are now encouraged to look to our genes, or perhaps our neurotransmitters.
Friedberg was a French major at Yale, graduated from the University of Rochester medical school in 1971, and completed a residency in neurology at the University of Oregon in 1978. He was certified by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology in 1980 and has been in practice as a neurologist in Berkeley, California, for more than a decade. He was one of the first doctors to protest the use of electroshock, and his 1976 book Shock Treatment Is Not Good for Your Brain documented shock therapy’s destructive effects.
The key point is that “mental illnesses” are still nothing but hypotheses–and giving medical treatments for hypothetical illnesses is quackery. Giving Haldol for schizophrenia is like giving digitalis for heartbreak. There is still no reliable scientific test for any mental illness, because there’s nothing to measure. And science is measurement. Of course most biopsychiatrists will tell you that dependable tests are just around the corner.
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In 1900, after we learned about germs and infectious diseases, many doctors thought insanity was caused by infection. A doctor in New Jersey performed 250 operations to cure insanity by removing “focal infection.” He took out teeth, tonsils, uterine cervices, seminal vesicles, and God knows what else. In an issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry published in 1922, he reported a 30 percent death rate from these operations, but said that the survivors had “marvelous results.”
Some psychiatrists still subscribe to the dopamine theory of schizophrenia, a theory that derives from the success of neurologists at understanding and treating Parkinson’s disease. Parkinson’s is a neurologic condition with clear physical markers that are visible on examination. Patients have a distinctive gait, a three-per-second tremor, a blank stare, and a consistent blink every time you tap the bridge of the nose. Nine out of ten neurologists will agree about the diagnosis based upon these signs. And at autopsy ten out of ten pathologists will agree. You know it’s Parkinson’s when the substantia nigra, a part of the brain stem, is visibly depigmented, or when you grind up the brain and find too little of the chemical dopamine. When dopamine is provided in the form of medication, the condition improves.
The study reported 80 percent relief without personality deterioration. The authors also reviewed 350 other capsulotomies–350 “new, improved” lobotomies. That’s really frightening.
JF: My standards are those of good science. If someone proves scientifically that there’s a brain disease called schizophrenia or manic depression, I’ll accept it as I would any other discovery–brain diseases are my specialty. But no one has.
