“Your Psychiatrist Doesn’t Tell You Everything”

Javier Carreño, psychiatrist at Hospital Povisa de Vigo, and Kepa Matilla, clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst at Hospital Río Hortega, Valladolid, are authors of the book Things that your psychiatrist never told you (Xoroi Ediciones).

They expose with an enormous wealth of clinical studies and tests how current psychiatry, in the name of a supposed “science”, instead of healing has multiplied mental illnesses.

Not everything is solved with a pill

Javier Carreño and Kepa Matilla, in their book Things that your psychiatrist never told you, denounce the harm of addressing any symptom of human suffering with a pill. These professionals see every day the ravages of this psychiatry whose bible is the DSM-V of dubious scientific validity and refuse to accept this reduction of human suffering in a psychiatric fashion.

What is our psychiatrist not telling us?

It is not that your psychiatrist is hiding something from you or that he is a bad person, he does not tell you because he does not know. The problem is that today’s psychiatry bases its practices on a science that has feet of clay and pales when compared to other sciences, because measuring sadness is never the same as measuring blood glucose.

We are facing a great epistemic difficulty in evaluating how subjective it is that psychiatry authentically constitutes; but meanwhile, psychiatric practices, making an apology for biologism, forget the human, which is always beyond biology.

More humanity is lacking …

Our book tries to recover this humanity lost in psychiatry because the cure of psychic suffering has to go through addressing the human; however, current psychiatry has reduced discomfort to a pill.

Human discomfort has been reduced to a disease and in that reduction the pill has replaced the healing power of the patient-psychiatrist relationship, the healing power of transference and listening.

In their book they jeopardize the validity of the DSM as a diagnostic tool.

The psychiatrist Robert Spitzer initiated the revision of the DSM-II, and its result, the DSM-III was sold as the quintessence of science and as the fruit of scientific research. But with the passage of time it was seen that it was not supported by any investigation, but was the result of an agreement between professionals who had met in a room and had voted.

When they had finished defining masochistic disorder, Spitzer’s wife, who was there, nudged her husband: “Honey, I meet all the symptoms.” To which he replied: “Well, we will remove two or three …”.

Is that so? Can anyone meet all the symptoms?

Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, a lot of classifications of mental illness have been carried out in psychiatry, all of them supposedly very scientific, although each one has replaced the previous one. New mental illnesses have also been invented, causing them to multiply. One can randomly open the DSM-V, point out a disorder, and find that they may be meeting all of the defining criteria.

The terrible thing is that the more psychiatry advances, the more mental illnesses there are.

And when a person enters any psychiatric service, they leave with a diagnosis and treatment. It would be necessary to question why this is so. Professionals live with the pressure to diagnose and the obligation to treat, which for children is even sadder.

How does TDHA in children?

In the Netherlands, almost 32.4% of the child population is diagnosed with ADHD; in the United States, diagnoses have increased by 53% in the last ten years and in Spain the ADHD stands at around 5%. It is interesting to note that in countries such as France, where it is forbidden to medicate children from the beginning, it is barely diagnosed and the percentage stands at 0.5% of the child population.

How is it explained? Is it that French boys and girls have different genetics?

The ADHA increased from the year 1980 after the appearance of DSM-III when its prevalence was 0.2%.

We believe that the TDHA does not exist.

That does not mean that today there are no boys and girls who cannot concentrate, the question is: Isn’t this a subsidiary of our culture, which forces them to live in the city, where they go out for half an hour, they have an agenda full of activities all directed, all for their good, and all the gifts they want to make them behave …? Isn’t this your answer to such demands? That does not mean that they are brain damaged or have biological dysfunction. In fact, they’ve been trying to find this dysfunction for years and it doesn’t exist. If they are demanding a lot of things from a child and also to be happy, what do you expect?

We create sick …

The Nordic countries have children playing until they are 10 years old and that is what makes sense because they are children, not efficiency machines. For us, mental illnesses do not exist in nature, but are a human invention that can sometimes be useful and at other times it is very harmful. Perhaps if we could understand the TDHA from another place, our response when addressing it would be much more appropriate.

Some studies show that children who take amphetamines are adults more likely to use cocaine; and those who do it for a long time may have a maturational delay, a decrease in weight and height, sudden death and heart problems.

If it is not a biological issue, then what causes a mental disorder?

You have an internal discomfort, whatever it is, because of your history, because certain things have happened to you and you present a symptom such as, for example, a phobia, depression, a state of anxiety … That is a diagnosis, but it important is what is behind that symptom: human discomfort.

Existential distress creeps into all symptoms from depression to fibromyalgia.

All are responses to the lightness of being. To really help the person, it is necessary to try to understand what they are suffering from and for psychiatry to ask the patient again the Hippocratic questions: What is wrong with you? Since when? How is it happening to you? What do you feel? How do I change?

Get to know the cause …

Yes, addressing the etiology of the symptom because that gives rise to the patient being able to elaborate a discourse of what he feels framed in his life. The history of the patient is more important than the label of the diagnosis, something that is now just the other way around:

“Where you have a symptom, I give you a pill to remove it without trying to understand what created it.”

Human culture always produces vital discomfort and anguish, which is beneath any symptoms.

And what symptoms does our culture produce most frequently?

Anguish and depression, symptoms that are always closely related. But in our society depression is better seen. If I have anguish and develop a phobia I seem silly, but if I say: “I am sad” society allows it because we are within the discourse of efficacy and the contemporary way out of it is to say: “I can not. I withdraw from the world ”. However, if you tell a person from Zimbabwe that you have not gone to work because you are sad, they will tell you: “But if it is better to go to work, then you will be happy …”.

And what do they say to their patients with depression or anxiety?

It depends on each person. We ask them the Hippocratic questions and you tell some of them that they have to go back to work; You have to take others by the hand and accompany them to bed and be with them; and others, who must stop because what happens to them is that they have gone around and that is why they have broken.

It always depends on each person.