Nurses for Human Rights

An article by psychiatrist Dr. David Kaiser in the Psychiatric Times gives us a glimpse of the chasm that continues to widen between biological psychiatry and more humanistic psychiatry. It’s one thing for those of us outside the profession of psychiatry and psychology to point our fingers and say “something’s wrong”, but it can not be said clearer than from inside the family. There is plenty to debate in this field of endeavor since it’s so subjective to the observer and to date medical science has not been able to find it’s holy grail of evidence that aberrative mental states or inappropriate emotional distress comes from a physical source exclusive to the brain. We, in nursing or any other health field, do not have to answer the question of “what’s it coming from” to chose a therapeutic intervention that doesn’t harm temporarily or permanently the sufferers while we look for a conclusive, acceptable and workable answer. Here is one of the many quotes I’d like to bring to nurses in the psychiatric field to think with while they treat their patients:

“I am constantly amazed by how many patients who come to see me believe or want to believe that their difficulties are biologic and can be relieved by a pill. This is despite the fact that modern psychiatry has yet to convincingly prove the genetic/biologic cause of any single mental illness. However, this does not stop psychiatry from making essentially unproven claims that depression, bipolar illness, anxiety disorders, alcoholism and a host of other disorders are in fact primarily biologic and probably genetic in origin, and that it is only a matter of time until all this is proven. This kind of faith in science and progress is staggering, not to mention naive and perhaps delusional. ”

This organization, Nurses for Human Rights, is dedicated to changing the idea that treatment of patients in mental health requires chemical restraints, electroshock, deprivation in institutions, forced drugging or forced shock treatments, etc. Let’s follow the motto of our predecessors of “First, Do No Harm”. We are ingenious enough to come up with a better solution, even if it means to abandon the current model. But we first have to break from the mental chains of a false doctrine, that mental illness is biological. It both leads to more calamity for nurses and their patients and denies the possibility that man has a spiritual nature, that the mind is more that a brain and nerve network, and that mankind is limited to only being the effect of chemical reactions and wholly at the mercy of the environment. I don’t agree with that viewpoint, and never will.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 8th, 2008 at 8:28 am and is filed under Issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.