Antipsychiatry studies get scholarship
Profession put under skeptic’s microscope
As Bonnie Burstow sees it, there’s no such thing as mental “illness,” no evidence that psychological problems stem from physical imbalances in the brain, and even l ess that treatments like anti- psychotic drugs actually help people.
But PhD students who follow the University of Toronto professor’s radical i deas have a tough time winning financial support: arguing that mental health care as we know it should be abolished can be a hard sell.
So Burstow has put up $ 50,000 of her own money and convinced U of T to back a striking new scholarship — for studies in “antipsychiatry.”
The university defends the grant as an embodiment of academic freedom, but the controversial initiative is raising questions about just how far that freedom should extend.
Burstow says her grant gives new legitimacy to a burgeoning field, and notes that many of the donors — who so far have matched her commitment with another $ 12,000 — are “survivors” of psychiatric treatment or their parents.
“When they send it and they say, ‘I wish I could send more, but you’re saving the lives of those not yet born,’ you know that donation meant a lot to them,” she said.
“A quite large number are parents of kids who have been hurt by psychiatry and want to see this line of research encouraged.”
Critics, however, worry the university i s endorsing an anti- scientific, antiintellectual exercise — a false attempt at “balance” that could i nadvertently convince some patients to eschew treatment and put their lives at risk.
Indeed, the scholarship has won support from an organization founded by the Church of Scientology, zealous foes of psychiatry.
“This is a case where academic freedom should be quashed,” Edward Shorter, a U of T professor and expert in the history of psychiatry, states bluntly. “People will read this and think ‘ Well, maybe mother doesn’t need that psychiatrist after all, it’s just a lot of bunkum.’ And then the first thing you know, someone has committed suicide.”
Dr. Joel Paris, a McGill University psychiatris t who does not hesitate to criticize elements of his own specialty, said he was “ashamed” the Toronto institution would endorse a scholarship dismissing the whole field.
While there is much unknown about psychiatry and problems with how it is sometimes practised, the scientific foundation of mental illness and its treatment is undeniable, he said.
“We don’t have an antineurology scholarship or an anti- hepatology scholarship. Psychiatry is the only specialty that has people trying to abolish it,” said Paris. “This doesn’t make sense.”
But a spokesman for the university ’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education ( OISE), home to Burstow and the scholarship, said the project flows from the right of academics to freely research even unpopular ideas.
And all disciplines should be open to critical analysis, said Charles Pascal, an applied psychology professor at OISE. He cited widespread concerns, for instance, about over- medication of conditions like ADHD.
“The best of us live in a grey zone,” he said. “The best of us do not say blackand-white things about how good any profession is.”
And yet Burstow herself, who has a doctorate in educational theory with a minor in psychology, does not subscribe to a grey area on the topic. She denies the antipsychiatry label implies any pre- conceived notions or that non- scientists are unqualified to study the area — because it’s already well- established mental illness does not exist.
“Psychiatry’s tenets and claims do not stand up to scrutiny. We do not have to begin by trying to prove that,” said Burstow. “I am saying these are not diseases … There is not a single proof of a single chemical imbalance of a single socalled mental illness.”
Shorter and Paris said such statements are simply “absurd,” that thousands of scientific studies — now incorporating sophisticated imaging of the brain — bolster the idea that biology is behind many psychological conditions and that various treatments do, in fact, work.
While controversy in the past often centred around involuntary commitment of psychiatric patients — epitomized by the Ken Kesey novel and 1975 movie, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest — the vast majority of treatment today is voluntary, and institutionalization is relatively rare, said Paris.
Even electro- convulsive therapy, portrayed by Kesey as almost an instrument of torture, has won support recently, with research suggesting new, safer versions of the technology can help severely depressed patients who are unresponsive to other therapy.
PSYCHIATRY IS THE ONLY SPECIALTY THAT HAS PEOPLE TRYING TO ABOLISH IT.