Psychiatry condemned for over-reaching

Science and its associated intellectual pursuits have long been of interest to me because of the certainty that practitioners claim and the public mostly accept about “discoveries”.  Previous posts here and here have highlighted the dangers of unchallenged acceptance of what that may turn out to be an honest misreading of evidence, perhaps a limited account of the facts, even outrageous self-promotion.  The point is, investigate all that is in the natural world, try to find ways to cure diseases of the body and the mind, but recognise the breadth and depth of the human person.

Anthony Daniels, who writes as Theodore
Dalrymple. Photo Source: Wikipedia

This time my attention turns to the medical science of psychiatry. A new book has generated pathways to information about trends in this form of health care, and these are worth taking to explore how confident we can be at the pronouncements of those prominent in the field. The book is Admirable Evasions: How psychology undermines morality, by British journalist, doctor and psychiatrist, Anthony Daniels, who writes under the name Theodore Dalrymple. The title alludes to Edmund’s lament in King Lear: “ . . . an admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star.” The theme of the book is that psychiatry responds to, in fact fosters, the belief whereby people “find it easy to blame their actions on material forces in the way earlier generations blamed them on astrological forces”.
In other words, dissatisfaction with any manner of things in our life, the melancholy which may come upon us in the midst of a fruitful life, are forms of the unhappiness known through the ages, and should be faced up to as part of the demands of being a responsible person with a moral dimension. That unhappiness should not be labelled as depression, and its relief not sought on a psychiatrist's couch or by consuming drugs under the assumption that a faulty brain or its chemicals are the cause.
Condemnation - not too harsh a term -  of the present day practice of psychiatry arises, too, in an article in the New York Review of Books,  which sympathetically reports  that the authors of books under review offer “powerful indictments of the way psychiatry is now practiced. They document the ‘frenzy’ of diagnosis, the overuse of drugs with sometimes devastating side effects, and widespread conflicts of interest.” On top of that is that the benefits of the “best practice” treatment through the prescribing of psychoactive drugs, cannot be proved to be greater than the harm produced in the person seeking help.
Just as Freud has been shown to be wrong, as have behaviourists of the ilk of B F Skinner, Dalrymple vents his “own frustration with the intellectual over-reach and ‘damn lies’ told by the world of psychology”. His main point is that great literature has more to say about the suffering of the human mind and heart and soul than does the study of the brain, worthwhile though that is.  The reviewer stresses this point:

In searching the works of Shakespeare, Auden, Burgess, Blake and others, for signs of condition and predilection that psychology now calls its own, [Dalrymple] argues that the knowledge of melancholy or a dysmorphia of character can be no more informed by it than our great literary canon. Does Dr Johnson’s Rasselas,  he asks, not capture the ‘tragic dimension of human existence’ more so than modern neuroscience? 

To which the reviewer responds emphatically: “Quite!’, adding, “I have learned more about myself from Larkin, Orwell, Burke and Virgil for the simple reason that they promote self-examination, as opposed to self-obsession. A claim that psychology, our author agrees, can’t make for itself.”