Skip to content
Citizens Commission on Human Rights, CCHR Africa
  • Home
  • About
  • Videos
  • Truth about PsychiatryExpand
    • Quick Facts about Psychiatry
    • Publications
  • Side EffectsExpand
    • Side Effects of ADHD DrugsExpand
      • Adderall
      • Concerta
      • Metadate
      • Provigil
      • Ritalin
      • Vyvanse
    • Side Effects of Antidepressants
    • Side Effects of Antipsychotic Drugs
    • Side Effects of Anti-anxiety Drugs
  • Alternatives
  • Take ActionExpand
    • Abuse Report Form
    • Warning
    • Petition
    • Join Us
  • Contact
SUPPORT US
Citizens Commission on Human Rights, CCHR Africa

Quick Facts about Psychiatry

Home / Quick Facts about Psychiatry

While posing as “authorities” on the mind and mental health, psychiatry has no scientific basis for any of its treatments or methods. Presented herein is specific evidence debunking several of the main claims and methods of this pseudo-science.

Psychiatric disorders are not medical diseases. There are no lab tests, brain scans, X-rays or chemical imbalance tests that can verify any mental disorder is a physical condition.  This is not to say that people do not get depressed, or that people can’t experience emotional or mental duress, but psychiatry has repackaged these emotions and behaviors as “disease” in order to sell drugs. This is a brilliant marketing campaign, but it is not science. 

“…modern psychiatry has yet to convincingly prove the genetic/biologic cause of any single mental illness…Patients [have] been diagnosed with ‘chemical imbalances’ despite the fact that no test exists to support such a claim, and…there is no real conception of what a correct chemical balance would look like.” —Dr. David Kaiser, psychiatrist

“There’s no biological imbalance. When people come to me and they say, ‘I have a biochemical imbalance,’ I say, ‘Show me your lab tests.’ There are no lab tests. So what’s the biochemical imbalance?” —Dr. Ron Leifer, psychiatrist

“All psychiatrists have in common that when they are caught on camera or on microphone, they cower and admit that there are no such things as chemical imbalances/diseases, or examinations or tests for them. What they do in practice, lying in every instance, abrogating [revoking] the informed consent right of every patient and poisoning them in the name of ‘treatment’ is nothing short of criminal.” —Dr. Fred Baughman Jr., Pediatric Neurologist

“Psychiatry makes unproven claims that depression, bipolar illness, anxiety, alcoholism and a host of other disorders are in fact primarily biologic and probably genetic in origin…This kind of faith in science and progress is staggering, not to mention naïve and perhaps delusional.” —Dr. David Kaiser, psychiatrist

While “there has been no shortage of alleged biochemical explanations for psychiatric conditions…not one has been proven. Quite the contrary. In every instance where such an imbalance was thought to have been found, it was later proven false.” —Dr. Joseph Glenmullen, Harvard Medical School psychiatrist

“The theories are held on to not only because there is nothing else to take their place, but also because they are useful in promoting drug treatment.” —Dr. Elliott Valenstein Ph.D., author of Blaming the Brain

“There is no blood or other biological test to ascertain the presence or absence of a mental illness, as there is for most bodily diseases. If such a test were developed…then the condition would cease to be a mental illness and would be classified, instead, as a symptom of a bodily disease.” —Dr. Thomas Szasz, Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry, New York University Medical School, Syracuse

“I believe, until the public and psychiatry itself see that DSM labels are not only useless as medical ‘diagnoses’ but also have the potential to do great harm—particularly when they are used as means to deny individual freedoms, or as weapons by psychiatrists acting as hired guns for the legal system.” —Dr. Sydney Walker III, psychiatrist

“No biochemical, neurological, or genetic markers have been found for Attention Deficit Disorder, Oppositional Defiant Disorder, Depression, Schizophrenia, anxiety, compulsive alcohol and drug abuse, overeating, gambling or any other so-called mental illness, disease, or disorder.” —Bruce Levine, Ph.D., psychologist and author of Commonsense Rebellion

“Unlike medical diagnoses that convey a probable cause, appropriate treatment and likely prognosis, the disorders listed in DSM-IV are terms arrived at through peer consensus.” —Tana Dineen Ph.D., Canadian psychologist

Psychiatry’s diagnostic criteria are literally voted into existence and inserted into the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM).  What is voted in is a system of classification of symptoms that is drastically different from, and foreign to, anything in medicine. None of the diagnoses are supported by objective evidence of physical disease, illness or science.

“There are no objective tests in psychiatry, no X-ray, laboratory, or exam finding that says definitively that someone does or does not have a mental disorder.”
—Allen Frances, Former DSM-IV Task Force Chairman

“DSM-IV is the fabrication upon which psychiatry seeks acceptance by medicine in general. Insiders know it is more a political than scientific document…DSM-IV has become a bible and a money making bestseller—its major failings notwithstanding.”
—Loren Mosher, M.D., Clinical Professor of Psychiatry

“The way things get into the DSM is not based on blood test or brain scan or physical findings. It’s based on descriptions of behavior. And that’s what the whole psychiatry system is.” —Dr. Colin Ross, psychiatrist

“We can manufacture enough diagnostic labels of normal variability of mood and thought that we can continually supply medication to you…But when it comes to manufacturing disease, nobody does it like psychiatry.” —Dr. Stefan Kruszewski, Harvard trained Pennsylvania psychiatrist, 2004

“In short, the whole business of creating psychiatric categories of ‘disease,’ formalizing them with consensus, and subsequently ascribing diagnostic codes to them, which in turn leads to their use for insurance billing, is nothing but an extended racket furnishing psychiatry a pseudo-scientific aura. The perpetrators are, of course, feeding at the public trough.” —Dr. Thomas Dorman, internist and member of the Royal College of Physicians of the UK, Fellow, Royal College of Physicians of Canada

In 1963, the United States’ National Institute of Mental Health implemented community mental health programmes. By 1994, the program had spent £30.5 billion and was clearly a failure—with associated clinics becoming little more than legalised drug pushers for the homeless.

“We do not know the causes [of any mental illness]. We don’t have the methods of ‘curing’ these illnesses yet.” —Dr. Rex Cowdry, psychiatrist and director of National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), 1995

“The time when psychiatrists considered that they could cure the mentally ill is gone. In the future the mentally ill have to learn to live with their illness.” —Norman Satorius, president of the World Psychiatric Association in 1994

“What’s a cure?…it’s just that it’s a term that we don’t use in the medical [psychiatric] profession.” —Dr. Joseph Johnson, California psychiatrist during court deposition, 2003

Psychiatrists were surveyed about their “fantasies” about their practice. Their Number 1 fantasy was: 1: “…I will be able to ‘cure’ the patient.” The Number 2 fantasy was: “The patient wants to know what his or her problem is.” —Dr. Sander Berger, associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Michigan State University, Psychiatric Times, 1998

Psychiatrists claim that brain scans now show brain changes that “prove” mental disorders, such as schizophrenia and depression, are brain based. There is no scientific evidence to prove this: it remains what the “fine print” in the studies tell you: “suggests,” “may” and “it is hoped.”

“It is well established that the drugs used to treat a mental disorder, for example, may induce long-lasting biochemical and even structural changes [including in the brain], which in the past were claimed to be the cause of the disorder, but may actually be an effect of the treatment.” —Dr.  Elliot Valenstein, biopsychologist, author, Blaming the Brain

“Psychiatry’s claim that mental illnesses are brain diseases is “a claim supposedly based on recent discoveries in neuroscience, made possible by [brain] imaging techniques for diagnosis and pharmacological agents for treatment. This is not true.” —Dr. Thomas Szasz, Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry, New York University Medical School, Syracuse

“There are increasing concerns among the clinical community that…neuroscientific developments [do] not reveal anything about the nature of psychiatric disorders….” —Dr. David Healy, psychiatrist, director of the North Wales Department of Psychological Medicine

Psychiatrists can’t predict what adverse side effects you might experience because not one of them knows how their drugs work.

Psychotropic drugs are increasingly being exposed as chemical toxins with the power to kill. Psychiatrists claim their drugs save lives, but according to their own studies, psychotropic drugs can double the risk of suicide. And long-term use has been proven to create a lifetime of physical and mental damage, a fact ignored by psychiatrists.

Common and well-documented side effects of psychiatric drugs include mania, psychosis, hallucinations, depersonalization, suicidal ideation, heart attack, stroke and sudden death.

Not only that, but The US Food and Drug Administration admits that probably one to ten percent of all the adverse drug effects are actually reported by patients or physicians.

No claim for a gene for a psychiatric condition has stood the test of time, in spite of popular misinformation.” —Dr. Joseph Glenmullen, Harvard Medical School psychiatrist

“….modern psychiatry has yet to convincingly prove the genetic/biological cause of any single mental illness.” —David Kaiser, psychiatrist

“In fourty years, ‘biological’ psychiatry has yet to validate a single psychiatric condition/diagnosis as an abnormality/disease, or as anything ‘neurological,’ ‘biological,’ ‘chemically-imbalanced’ or ‘genetic.’” —Dr. Fred Baughman Jr., child neurologist, Fellow of the American Academy of Neurology

This content includes information obtained from the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR), used here for educational purposes.

  • Instagram
  • Facebook

Join our cause:

SUPPORT US

Report Abuses Today:

WRITE MY REPORT →
  • Home
  • About
  • Videos
  • Truth about Psychiatry
  • Side Effects
  • Alternatives
  • Take Action
  • Contact

© 2026 Citizens Commission on Human Rights for Africa | Privacy Policy • Terms of Use • Legal Notice

Need to make changes to your subscription? Click here

  • Instagram
  • Facebook
  • Donate
Scroll to top
  • Home
  • About
  • Videos
  • Truth about Psychiatry
    • Quick Facts about Psychiatry
    • Publications
  • Side Effects
    • Side Effects of ADHD Drugs
      • Adderall
      • Concerta
      • Metadate
      • Provigil
      • Ritalin
      • Vyvanse
    • Side Effects of Antidepressants
    • Side Effects of Antipsychotic Drugs
    • Side Effects of Anti-anxiety Drugs
  • Alternatives
  • Take Action
    • Abuse Report Form
    • Warning
    • Petition
    • Join Us
  • Contact