Psychiatry: no better than the snake oil charlatans of the Old West, or maybe worse?

Let’s stop pretending. The mental health system isn’t broken—it’s working exactly as it was designed: to medicalize suffering, profit off people in pain, and reduce complex human experiences into pill-sized solutions.

For decades, psychiatrists pushed the idea that mental illness is caused by a “chemical imbalance”—a neat, marketable theory that turned antidepressants into billion-dollar products. That story was never supported by solid scientific evidence. Now it’s been debunked. The serotonin theory of depression? False. The idea that we can locate emotional pain in a single molecule? Nonsense.

And yet psychiatrists still sit in offices, diagnosing people in 15 minutes and writing prescriptions like they’re vending machines for the soul. They knew better—and they did it anyway.

How do you explain that? How do you justify telling millions of people their brains are defective when there was never any biological test to prove it? That’s not medicine. That’s marketing. That’s fraud.

And when patients say they don’t feel better? When they gain weight, lose sex drive, and

get stuck on meds they can’t quit? They’re told the illness is just “chronic.” They need more drugs. Different drugs. Forever.

This isn’t care. It’s control.

Psychiatry has become a priesthood of false prophets—men and women in white coats, armed with DSM checklists and a script pad, doling out pills like modern-day salvation while ignoring the societal rot underneath. Trauma, poverty, racism, disconnection—these aren’t “chemical imbalances.” They’re human responses to a broken world.

Are all psychiatrists charlatans? Maybe not every single one. But the profession, as a system, has utterly lost its credibility. The trust is gone. And until there’s a full accounting of the damage done, it deserves every ounce of scrutiny, rage, and rejection it gets.

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References

1. Moncrieff, J., Cooper, R. E., Stockmann, T., Amendola, S., Hengartner, M. P., & Horowitz, M. A. (2022). The serotonin theory of depression: a systematic umbrella review of the evidence. Molecular Psychiatry. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41380-022-01661-0

2. Carlat, D. (2010). Unhinged: The Trouble with Psychiatry – A Doctor’s Revelations about a Profession in Crisis. Free Press.

3. Davies, J., & Read, J. (2019). A systematic review into the incidence, severity and duration of antidepressant withdrawal effects: Are guidelines evidence-based? Addictive Behaviors, 97, 111–121. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.addbeh.2018.08.027

4. Richtel, M. (2022, April 23). A top mental health expert’s surprising confession. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/23/health/thomas-insel-mental-health.html