The second article in a series, this case study demonstrates how psychiatric diagnoses and treatment can ignore social, environmental, and personal history factors that likely caused a person’s mental disorders. We examined the life of a woman who endured physical assault and rape by her father, a series of unsatisfactory romantic relationships, marriage to a man who repeatedly brutalized their children and her, the deaths of two children, and the burden of caring for eight surviving offspring. This woman occasionally exhibited symptoms of depression and emotional outbursts that led to her psychiatric hospitalization, psychotropic drugging, and ECT. Hospitalization and psychiatric drugs provided no relief, while ECT brought on memory impairment, difficulty concentrating, and bizarre persecutory beliefs. This case study revealed how psychiatric diagnosis and treatment can be irrelevant, ineffective, and harmful, while concealing institutional failures and helping to perpetuate social problems.

The introduction of antipsychotics in 1954 is widely considered central to the depopulation of US state mental hospitals. Using US Census data and time-series analysis to estimate the impact of chlorpromazine and policy change on state mental hospital population changes, this study found that the post-1954 depopulation was associated with important demographic changes in age and diagnosis. From 1954 to 1961, the resident count of patients diagnosed with “schizophrenia” in state mental hospitals did not significantly decline but rather significantly declined between 1961 and 1966. Additionally, depopulation between 1954 and 1961 occurred among patients below age 55 but between 1961 and 1966 occurred among patients aged 55 and over. This depopulation of the elderly occurred across diagnoses and coincided with policy changes, which allowed for federal medical assistance for the aged. The conclusion of this study is that policy change and economic incentives had a greater impact on deinstitutionalization than the advent of antipsychotics.

This article documents the murder, by psychiatrists, of a quarter of a million patients, mostly diagnosed as “schizophrenic,” in Europe during the second world war; and the sterilization of hundreds of thousands more internationally, including in the USA and Scandinavia. These sterilizations and murders were justified by biological psychiatry’s unsubstantiated hypothesis that the conditions involved are genetically determined. Gas chambers in the six psychiatric hospitals involved, in Germany, were subsequently dismantled and moved, along with the psychiatrists and their staff, to help establish some of the Holocaust’s concentration camps, in Poland. The avoidance of these facts and their profound implications, by the profession of psychiatry, internationally, over subsequent decades, is discussed. An inspirational trauma-focussed alternative to the pessimistic, unscientific ideology of biological psychiatry, involving psychiatrists 60 years later, is presented.

Two publications by Merzon and colleagues at the Journal of Attention Disorders (JAD) suggest that ADHD increases risks for COVID-19 infections (2020) and severe outcomes (2021). Adherence to stimulant treatments was recommended to attenuate the pandemic spread (2020). The conclusions of these timely studies attracted considerable attention, probably because of their wide-scope implications for the public health, but how valid are they? Furthering an earlier critique published in this journal (Ophir & Shir-Raz, 2020), the current article outlines seven severe gaps in these publications, including: Inconsistencies in definitions and rates of ADHD; inadequate definition for treated individuals; omissions of crucial information; unsuitable analyses; and unmet declarations regarding conflicts of interests and data-availability. In fact, the latter, which constitutes a repeated avoidance from data-sharing (to this day, July 10, 2022), seems to have led the editor-in-chief of JAD to propose the write-up of the current article (which he then judged, after the peer-review process, as: “worthy of publication,” but also that JAD is “not the best placement” for its publication—despite its specific focus on several JAD articles). To complete the picture regarding this burning public-health issue, this article also provides a glimpse into the problematic happenings that took place behind the scenes, which included a personal defamation and various stalling tactics, along with an elaborated response that was sent to the reviewers and the editor-in-chief of JAD in real time (Appendix). Together, the revealed discrepancies and problematic ethical conducts, suggest that the speculation regarding links between a neurodevelopmental diagnosis (ADHD) and a respiratory virus (COVID-19) has not been subjected to adequate scientific inquiry. On the contrary, the lack of transparency, the observed gaps, and the existing, extensive literature on stimulant-related cardiovascular risks, including the recently published guidelines for starting ADHD medications by one of the authors of the 2021 study, raise concerns regarding the potentially dangerous implications of stimulant use during an active pandemic.

Sociohistorical analysis of four words commonly used in the language of Western mental health, Indigenousintelligencedisorder, and depression reveal a “Domination Code” masking past and present professional complicity of the U.S. and global mental health system in the oppression of Indigenous peoples. A historicity is offered of concepts of inferior Indigenous intelligence and current pseudoscientific ideologies within Western biological psychiatry dominating WHO’s mhGAP (Mental Health Gap Action Programme) exported to these communities. mhGAP’s cultural hegemony is achieved through Western mental health ideologies that decontextualize, depoliticize, minimize, and marginalize the lived experience of cultural oppression on health and wellbeing. This program appears to violate the spirit of Article 23 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous people.

Stimulant medications (e.g., Ritalin) are considered a relatively safe first-line treatment for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), the most common neuropsychiatric diagnosis among children. This study explores the prevalence of side-effects and risks of stimulants, as perceived by 218 Israeli young adults with ADHD who used stimulants. Participants completed questionnaires that addressed representative side-effects (eight side-effects copied from the patient leaflet of Ritalin, as approved by the Israel Ministry of Health, and five additional side-effects), medication dependence, and substance use. Results indicated that almost all side-effects were extremely common – significantly and substantially more than the leaflet’s estimates. “Mood changes such as depression” for example, were observed among 66%, compared with the reported “1 in 10,000 users.” Suicidal thoughts, which are mentioned as “side-effect that occurred with other medications that contain same ingredient,” were observed among 3.2%. Side-effects not mentioned in the leaflet, such as “zombie-like sensation” (72.5%) and “alterations in sense-of-self” (39.4%), were also very common. Most participants tried quitting the medications (some even resisted taking them as children), mainly to disengage from their medication dependence and cease their adverse-effects, however many struggled coping without the medications and experienced withdrawal reactions, such as decreased mood or motivation as well as increased stress and anxiety. Notably, stimulant use frequency significantly correlated with alcohol and drug use. Although the observational nature of the study limits its generalizability, its findings suggest that the safety profile of stimulants requires further consideration, especially today with the large increase in diagnoses and medication use among millions of children.

Electroconvulsive therapy, also known as shock therapy and electroshock, is a psychiatric treatment that sends electricity into the brain of the patient with the purpose of inducing a seizure in that patient’s brain. A brief overview of relevant literature introduces an autobiographical narrative account of what it is to experience shock therapy. The author, a woman who had been given a diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder to explain her natural and expected responses to trauma and adversity, concludes with a critically reflective commentary on ECT.