Bringing Psyche Back to Psychiatry with Paul Minot MD

Exploring the murky historical origins of psychiatry’s “mindless” biomedical treatment model…and its current record of failure.

Psychiatry's history is bipolar--swinging between obsession with the mind, and the brain. We've now had forty-plus years of biological dominance, and pharmacological interventions.  But recent neurophysiological evidence suggests that the brain-mind might be using nucleic acids to execute digital data storage and processing, much like our computers do. If so, then psychiatry's current model could become obsolete, with a resurgence of psychological therapies--including some that we've never imagined. Hey Pharma, looks bad for business!  

A poem inspired by 3 literary influences from my youth: Lewis Carroll, Dr. Seuss, and the PDR.

More Americans than ever before are being diagnosed with psychiatric disorders and treated with psychiatric medications. So wouldn't you expect to see improved mental health? Well, you would be wrong. In June 2018, the Center for Disease Control released a study documenting the grand failure of modern psychiatry--a 30% increase in suicide from 1999 to 2016. Dr. Minot reviews the promises of this biological era of psychiatry, the findings of the study, the response of America's psychiatric leadership--and draws his own conclusions.

The modern biological era of psychiatry began with the 1987 release of Prozac--the first selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, or SSRI. Other popular SSRIs have followed, including Zoloft, Paxil, Celexa, and Lexapro, and they remain the most commonly used class of antidepressants. You might think that they work by "correcting a chemical imbalance," right? Well, no such chemical imbalance has been proven to exist--and nowadays there are psychiatrists on Twitter arguing that psychiatrists never made that claim! Dr. Minot is old enough to remember when they most certainly did--and shares his own hypothesis as to how these drugs might really work....

Do you think that contemporary psychiatric treatments are based on a firm scientific understanding of how the brain-mind operates? Don't be fooled. Psychiatry's scientific grasp of human thought and behavior is woefully sparse, and greatly oversold. But in order to understand the gross deficiencies of psychiatry's knowledge base, you first need to have a clear understanding of how all scientific knowledge is acquired and confirmed. Dr. Minot runs through a brief review of the scientific method, and explains how psychiatry consistently falls short.

Modern psychiatry’s enthusiastic embrace of the current biological model of treatment was triggered by significant advances in brain research in the 1970s and afterwards--and as we all know, the influx of money from the pharmaceutical industry sweetened the pot considerably. But psychiatrists were also driven into this new frontier of technology by our longstanding inferiority complex as a medical specialty--never regarded as "real doctors" by our medical peers, or others, until we had a lot of pills to prescribe. Why are we so insecure? Your answer is here.