Tom Paine, Christianity, and Modern Psychiatry

http://www.counterpunch.org/2019/06/14/tom-paine-christianity-and-modern-psychiatry/
Date Written:  2019-06-14
Publisher:  CounterPunch
Year Published:  2019
Resource Type:  Article
Cx Number:  CX23686

Much of modern psychiatry is based on unscientific theories even many practitioners of its find problematic. Since Thomas Paine knew Dr. Benjamin Rush (1746-1813), considered the "father of American psychiatry," this article draws parallels between Paine's criticisms of religion with those of psychiatry today.

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

As maddening as Christianity was for Paine, unlike psychiatry, Christianity didn't pour salt into Paine's wounds by pretending to embrace his beloved science. It is quite possible that Paine would be even more appalled by today's psychiatrists who claim the authority of science but who, in reality, have debased it. Paine's rebuke of clergy -- "to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe" -- perfectly fits psychiatrists with regard to both their Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (commonly known as the DSM), and their doctrine that has the greatest effect on treatment, the "chemical-imbalance theory of mental illness...."

Many mental health professionals have long recognized the lack of scientific validity of the DSM, and its pseudoscience has at times become so obvious so as to be a public embarrassment for psychiatry. Prior to 1973, owing clearly to prejudice and not science, homosexuality was a DSM mental illness. Since what enters and exits the DSM has nothing to do with science (the actual criteria for DSM “illness” being what behaviors make an APA committee uncomfortable enough), homosexuality could only be eliminated as a DSM illness by political activism, which occurred in the early 1970s; and homosexuality was omitted from the 1980 DSM-III.

In that same DSM-III, however, again owning to prejudice and not science, a new mental illness for kids was invented by psychiatry: "oppositional defiant disorder" (ODD), the so-called symptoms including "often argues with authority figures" and "often actively defies or refuses to comply with requests from authority figures or with rules." ODD is categorized as a "disruptive disorder," and today disruptive-disordered kids are being increasingly medicated.