How the institution of medicine covers up the inevitable harms of its unsafe therapeutic toolbox.
One of the key reasons I focused on this topic on this topic was because psychological torture many individuals go through throughout the psychiatric process is horrific.
This is because the psychiatric medications create a wide variety of neurological and psychiatric side effects, but when a patient complains about them, the doctor will often tell the patient those side effects are due to the patient’s pre-existing mental illness rather than being a commonly recognized side effect of the drugs.
Furthermore, since “mentally ill” patients are often deemed to lack the capacity to make their own judgement, whereas psychiatrists are seen as authority figures, I have seen more cases than I can count where everyone (e.g., the patient’s family and the courts [which frequently mandate treatment]) side with the psychiatrist rather than the patient, in turn all insisting those side effects are due to the patient’s mental illness and force the patient to take even more psychiatric drugs.
Note: this gets even more challenging for the patient when they begin to lose their grip on reality from the side effects of the drug and start questioning their own judgement or if they should give up on themselves and just blindly trust the authority figures around them.
Some of the classic ways psychiatry gaslights patients includes:
https://www.midwesterndoctor.com/p/a-primer-on-medical-gaslighting-e11