Schizophrenia: Innovations in Diagnosis and Treatment

Rating:
Summary: Only the trauma model can destroy psychiatry!
Review: I am an author that writes in Spanish and specializes in child abuse and the "model of trauma" of mental disorders, an expression coined by psychiatrist Colin Ross. The importance of doctor Ross' new book on schizophrenia can be understood in the following personal anecdotes.

About a year ago an article authored by me was rejected for publication in "Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry" (EHPP), originally created by psychiatrist Peter Breggin: the only scholarly journal I know that specializes in debunking biological psychiatry. I made a formal complaint to Breggin himself, one of the leading professional activists against criminal psychiatry in the last decades. His wife replied stating simply that he does not work there any more (though he is still the director emeritus of the institute that publishes EHPP).

The reason for the rejection of my article was simple: the new editor's aversion of my view that abusive parents can drive their children mad. I found it very hard to believe that the old views on child abuse and psychosis advanced by psychiatrists Theodore Lidz, Ronald Laing and Silvano Arieti could not find a place in the journal that Breggin created. But the fact is that his antipsychiatry journal even ignores the views of the authors that publish on the same subject in the 21st century: John Modrow, Alice Miller and, more technically, Colin Ross.

I also presented my complaint to David Cohen, a former editor of EHPP and co-author with Breggin of the stupendous book "Your drug may be your problem: how and why to stop taking psychiatric medications". The editor wrote back to Cohen saying that he "did not reject Tort's paper because of bias against trauma", and Cohen believed him. But if the journal EHPP is not biased against the trauma model of mental disorders, why on Earth didn't the editors publish an obituary, or even better a tribute, to Theodore Lidz? Lidz was the foremost specialist in the trauma model of "schizophrenia" in America in the 1940s, 50's, 60's and 70's, and he died in 2001. Even when Breggin and Cohen were editors of EHPP I did not find a single article dealing with Lidz's work or Ross's trauma model of mental disorders in their journal.

Though the editors of EHPP hate psychiatry, my article "Why psychiatry is a false science" was rejected because they are too coward to admit the fact that abusive parents are causing psychoses. Focusing on the current editor, for example, in his communication to me he stated that the trauma model is "faith based rather than based on evidence", and that the model "has long lost credibility with the scientific community as have all the older analytic theories that blame poor mother".

The editor of the only American journal that criticizes psychiatry is terribly wrong!

Those who believe that parents are innocent of the mental condition of their child are advised to study Alice Miller, John Modrow and Colin Ross' books, such as "Schizophrenia: an innovative approach to diagnosis and treatment". Ross is also coeditor of the expensive book "Pseudoscience in biological psychiatry" (for a Popperian attack on biopsych see the English section of my own web page www.antipsiquiatria.org, that includes the very article that EHPP rejected).

It is a pity that even Tom Szasz himself, the granddaddy of the anti-psychiatric movement, still refuses to see that the only way to destroy psychiatry is through the trauma model. Incredible as it may seem, Szasz and the journal that Breggin created share something with the so-called National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI). NAMI is an Orwellian pro-psychiatry association that approves lobotomy and abhors the view that parents are to be blamed for the madness of their adolescent child.

The view that parents must be spared at all costs is the single major force that gives psychiatry its power in our society. I can only hope that Colin Ross' "Schizophrenia" is taken seriously among professionals, and that it will contribute to a revolution in the mental health field. Unlike his colleagues that also debunk psychiatry Ross is not an intellectual coward!