[troutman]

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/...ne/#more-23900

Although there is a ways to go, however, psychiatry in 2012 is much better than psychiatry, say, 50 or 75 years ago. It wasn’t so long ago that, popularized by Walter Freeman, thousands of “ice pick lobotomies” were performed for all manner of indications, few of which had what we would consider to be compelling scientific support to back them up. Over the last half-century, better psychiatric drugs to treat different conditions have been developed, leading to their widespread use for a number of indications.

There are, of course, legitimate criticisms of psychiatry to be made, but that’s not what quacks are interested in. Their hatred of psychiatry is particularly pure, to the point where they look for any excuse to attack psychiatric medications. Indeed, there is even a phenomenon known as “mental illness denial,” which denies that mental illnesses even exist and, therefore, that psychiatry can possibly be a legitimate branch of medical science. Again, Scientologists are the most prominent proponents of mental illness denial, but such “thought” (if you can call it that) permeates many areas of “alternative medicine.”