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However, his (seeming) delight in practicing, researching and writing books about psychiatry make me question where his loyalties truly lie; to me he seems a tad too comfortable working within psychiatry’s medical model paradigm. But status can seduce the best of us.

Psychiatric survivors (imo) are the only ones truly qualified to know what the hell they’re talking about in matters regarding ‘mental health’.

The world doesn’t need yet another psychiatrist to ‘lead the way’ as half-baked efforts at reform are just more of the same.

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As someone in a surgical specialty, I like fixing things. I find surgery far more cut and dry than medicine. Even so, it’s often a balancing act between what we’d like to “fix” and what the patients feels is actually pathological, in the sense that it’s affecting their quality of life. Does the patient want treatment? What can they live with? What do they not want, whatever happens? I really don’t think psychiatry is unique in that sense. I’ve been on antidepressants for 7 years and go back and forth to the psychiatrist. I don’t think you could convince me that I don’t have depression. This “sadness” may be a perfectly normal reaction to working in an overstretched hospital and watching patients die. Nevertheless, I believe it becomes pathological once one reaches the point of not managing.

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Medical doctors should get out of the drug-pushing business for psychological problems.

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During my recovery (with yoga, Buddhist meditation, studying history and philosphy, self-help-groups, and learning to systematize my self-help approach with the Copeland’s Center’s Wellness Recovery Action Plan) I more and more understood that the cause of my bad mental health was the psychotherapist’s and medical doctor’s worldviews in general and the image my “loved ones” had of my person from that point of view that were dominating our family’s dynamic.

After I managed to break away from them and began to understand fully what had really happened to me – a kind of iatrogenic harm from growing up in this family of doctor’s – I was more and more sure that something had been going on in their training that had made them into this kind of “disorder-instilling” harmful people but the training itself remained a black box for me. So thank you to share some of your insights, Milutin, into how this thinking and behaviours are trained into the medical students – by textbooks (and in the years of the practical training in residency I suppose).

One critique: The way you talk about patients, Milutin, and plan to teach patients I find condescending and it reminds me of the way that my mother and other psychiatrists have talked down to me and tried to explain things to me.

Please understand that “the patients” are a very heterogenous group of people coming from very different educations, professional backgrounds, and over all life experiences. Many of them – from their many years of struggling with mental health issues and not finding safe and effective support within the medical system – have even become thinkers in their own right on medical questions.

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