THE HIDDEN HORRORS OF PSYCHIATRY

This website is dedicated to the book The Hidden Horrors of Psychiatry. Published in 2022, this 448-page book, perhaps the definitive work on psychiatry, addresses several essential and shocking issues related to psychiatry. These are little exposed or altogether unknown. Anyone involved with mental health care—and certainly social workers such as (general) practitioners, psychologists, nurses, social workers as well as psychiatrists themselves—should be well aware of this. And because of the far-reaching impact, members of parliament, legislators, judges, lawyers, forensic doctors, police officers, employers, teachers, and parents should also be familiar with this data.

The scientific foundation of common medical treatments is massively flawed. Only very few interventions (treatments) have a hard and irrefutable rationale. Of only 11% there exists unequivocal and conclusive scientific evidence for their efficacy (see the book Deadly Lies: How Doctors and Patients Are Deceived by C.F. van der Horst).

When it comes to the treatments of psychiatrists, the situation is even sadder. Did you know that their effectiveness and safety have never been demonstrated? No one has been able to validate psychiatric diagnoses and practices, whether psychotherapy, the use of psychopharmaceuticals or electroshock, with hard and irrefutable evidence. Any scientific validation is missing. The results in real-world situations, then, bear this out. The data and statistics in The Hidden Horrors of Psychiatry show only too clearly the impact of psychiatric diagnoses and treatments on children and adults, families, businesses (many are employees, after all), society, and the national budget.

Whereas in most countries, such as France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) is the valid official classification, psychiatrists worldwide may also use the DSM as a guideline. Originating from the US, the DSM is psychiatry’s diagnostic book and has had a significant influence on the ICD. Did you know that none of the (many) diagnoses described in it have an indisputable if at all scientific basis? Almost without exception, they rely on assumptions and arbitrariness and the subjective interpretation of the psychiatrist. The Hidden Horrors of Psychiatry describes in detail how this diagnostic manual developed. You will be amazed at what happened in the development of DSM-III (1980). This was a true ‘Putsch’ that changed psychiatry forever. If the consequences weren’t so terrible, it could be a farcical story in the vein of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale of the emperor’s clothes. Like the fairy tale, it is about using authority to manipulate people’s thinking, with no one daring to question anything.

The use of the DSM has implications not only for health care providers such as psychiatrists, physicians and psychologists but certainly for patients as well. And because children, too, are increasingly being slapped with a psychiatric label from the DSM, parents and teachers are being deceived by it as well.

Not only do the diagnoses set a stigma that is difficult to get rid of, but they also ensure that adults and children are exposed to potentially very dangerous psychiatric treatments. And by psychiatry’s model, these are often life sentences.

What you discover about human rights in The Hidden Horrors of Psychiatry will undoubtedly bewilder you. Practices such as the various shock therapies and brain surgeries (lobotomies) probably will turn your stomach. If you have a very strong stomach, you will see such an operation in progress here (absolutely not for children). Since its inception, psychiatry as a profession has been marked by a lack of integrity and human rights violations. The enumeration of abuses involving sometimes unsuspecting subjects (including children) is extensive and shocking. And they took place not only where you might expect them, such as in Nazi Germany, the old Soviet Union, or South Africa, but also in the US and Europe. In 2013, for example, a United Nations report described serious human rights violations within psychiatry.

In the 1950s, psychiatry entered into an alliance with the pharmaceutical industry. The introduction of certain antidepressants in the 1980s, called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), intensified this collaboration. There is ample documentation that the pharmaceutical industry routinely lies and cheats and puts profits before people. It doesn’t shy away from falsifying ‘scientific’ studies. Medications are therefore presented as safer and more effective than they truly are.