# A critical look at psychiatry

This article by Dan Polansky takes a critical look at psychiatry. That a critical look is needed is suggested by the psychiatry's portrayal in popular culture (e.g. in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, 1974, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, 1975) as well as the well documented history of gross abuse of patients, including insulin shock therapy and lobotomy. The selection of material into this article is largely idiosyncratic; one inspiration are Peter C. Gøtzsche's books. This material is not written by a professional writer; one can perhaps benefit better from the books and further reading listed at the bottom of this article.
Key questions include the following:
* Is there anything valid about the psychiatric diagnoses?
* Is Diagnostic Statistical Manual (DSM) a result of application of the scientific method in discovery of real-world phenomena and entities?
* Is the language used to describe the symptoms of psychiatric patients a language of science? (One can recall Wittgenstein's idea to regulate language use in such a way as to make it hard to make meaningless philosophical statements.)
* Is the apparent gross violation of human rights in coercive drugging of psychiatric patients well justified?
* Is incanceration of people who have not committed a crime and are not suspected from having committed a crime well justified?
* Are psychiatrists and psychiatric nurses generally well-meaning, kind, competent and honest people?
* More generally, in case of doubt, are humans to be trusted, given their history of various kinds of misconduct?

## Critical characterization

A critical chracterization of psychiatry could be this:
* A field whose ethical and epistemic ineptitude and lack of compassion were demonstrated by its long-term support and administration of lobotomy and insulin shock therapy.

## Psychiatry as a medical field

Whether psychiatry is a medical field is debatable. There does not seem to be anything medical about the diagnostic method. What does look medical are the interventions, whether lobotomy or drugging. See also Is psychiatry a medical field?.

## Making themselves look medical

One complaint found in the literature is this: the key objective of psychiatrists is to look medical. To do so, they must use medical interventions, whether surgical or using drugs, since there is nothing medical about their diagnostic method. The key objective of the intervention is not to help patients but rather to help the psychiatrist look professional, medical and respectable.
The contention is plausible enough. The notion that a group of people systematically shows benevolence toward others is not impossible in principle, but is no more likely in general than the notion that the group is, for the most part, maximizing their own egoistic (self-centered) interests, such as power (domination), social status, wealth (supplied in part from big pharma), etc.
There is nothing rational about blindly assuming good faith. Given what we have seen in insulin shock therapy and lobotomy, it seems much more rational to avoid evidence-free assumptions, maintain an open mind, and investigate the possibility that things are astray.

## Attraction of sadistic personality types

One contention is that psychiatry attracts sadistic personality types. A prospective sadist, in order to meet his or her psychological needs, does well to find a profession where his or her tendencies find appropriate release. Most professions offer little opportunity of sadistic release. It should not be too hard for a prospective sadist to find out that psychiatry is a good field to enter: one can use mechanical restraints against patients, one can force drugs on patients against their will and observe them lose their ability to speak or walk or the like, one can psychologically harass them, and the patients have hardly any recourse given they are less likely to be taken seriously and that the patients usually do not have any means of objectively proving that bad things happened to them.
It seems hard to figure out another profession with so much potential for satisfaction of pathological sadistic needs.

## Psychiatry as one analytical unit

We may analyze psychiatry as one unit/entity or we may slice it into different phases, say pre-1950 psychiatry and post-1950 psychiatry. (It is to be clarified whether 1950 is the best year for slicing.)
The pre-1950 psychiatry is a field of unequivocal horror. The post-1950 psychiatry (post-lobotomy and post-insulin shock) perhaps less so. But did the nature of the practitioners change? Did they become different kind of people, with different epistemic and ethical compentence? If so, how? In case of doubt, one may refuse to split psychiatry into phases, and instead make the conclusion--admittedly possibly too simplistic one--that psychiatry is bad.
One attitude is to treat psychiatry as if it was one person. One could say: the person of psychiatry has shown unequivocally great epistemic, ethical and ontological deficiency. It should therefore lose the license to practice. We are not buying into any "we have changed" and "we did not know any better". No, you have not changed, you are the same humans with too many bad tendencies.
A limitation: the year 1950 is a guess from memory. A proper procedure is to determine when lobotomy and insulin shocks ceased to be used and determine the boundary year based on that.

## Diagnostic Statistical Manual

According to some sources [which?], DSM is recommended against by some organizations. According to critics, DSM is not a result of science but rather of voting by commitee, which is no way to obtain scientifically valid results.
If DSM was valid, one should be able to obtain it by setting up two ot three independent committees and letting them come up with a classification scheme independently. In so far as the result would be based on (and thereby synchronized by) reality, the two independent committees should be able to arrive either at substantially same results or at least results that show some kind of reality-based correspondence. Such has not been done; instead, as long as DSM is used and distributed as a kind of Bible across the world, the result is the opposite of independence.

## Dubious diagnoses

Dubious diagnostic units/entities once in use include the following:
* Homosexuality as a disorder, to be managed with drug intervention.
* Drapetomania, a label for black slaves "irrationally" wanting to escape slavery.

## Brain disorder

Multiple respected organizations describe schizophrenia as a brain disorder, for instance Johns Hopkins Medicine. Critics charge this has never been demonstrated after decades of research. Conceptualizing schizophrenia as a brain disorder leads to an apparent solution: medication. Some liken psychiatric medication to insulin for diabetes, whereas critics charge this is completely wrong.
Some sources also describe bipolar disorder as a brain disroder, e.g. Ontario Shores Centre for Mental Health Sciences.
It is not clear what contrast is supposed to be drawn between mental illness and brain disorder. Under physicalism, mind is an aspect of the brain, and thus, if there is something wrong with the mind, the thing is wrong with the brain. Nonetheless, one can consider a computer metaphor: software is in the hardware of the computer, but when software is wrong, it does not mean the hardware is wrong. The language of brain disorder seems to suggest there is something wrong with the hardware rather than software. If, by contrast, we would think there is something wrong with the software, e.g. beliefs and methods of validation and verification of putative knowledge, one could be inclined to try verbal interventions (cognitive therapy) and see whether one could get rid of some delusions that way.

## Mental illness

Psychiatry uses the term "mental illness". This term implies that there is something like illness of the mind, a direct analogy of, say, an illness of the liver.
Szasz objects to this term, stating it is a mere metaphor, an inept one at that. If the analogy to the illness of the liver would be valid, it would be an illness of the relevant organ, which is the brain. He states that this leads to medicalization of the phenomenon, that is, a phenomenon that is not medical (and does not respond or responds poorly to medical treatment) is turned into an allegedly medical one.
The medicalization complaint seems plausible enough. Surely, if there is a mental illness bearing an analogy to, say, an illness of the liver, one would use a medical intervention, e.g. drugs or surgery. By contrast, if there is a problem with the mind (problem, not illness), one would expect to get good results with mental interventions, e.g. cognitive therapy. Sure enough, cognitive therapy may fail. From the point of view of an atheist, it seems unlikely that mere cognitive therapy would get most people rid of the psychotic disorder (since delusion-featuring) known as religion.
The term "mental disorder" is perhaps more immune to this kind of criticism.
It is quite possible that there is something like a mental symptomatology that is caused by a somatic disorder. But the somatic disorder does not need to be one of the brain; it may be e.g. one of the endocrine system.
See also Is there such a thing as mental illness?
Further reading:
* Mental illness, wikipedia.org
* The myth of mental illness: 50 years later by Thomas Szasz, 2 January 2018

## Chemical imbalance

Some sources indicate that schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are caused by chemical imbalances. Critics charge this has never been demonstrated.

## Nefarious intervention history

The nefarious history of psychiatric intervention is covered in the following sections on lobotomy, insulin shock therapy and other historical misconduct.

## Lobotomy

The multiple decade long practice of lobotomy is a scandal of incompetence, malice or both. The lobotomist Walter Freeman killed many people, but it seems he was not even charged (he killed more people than many mass shooters/murderers). The case shows not only gross epistemic and ethical deficiency of psychiatry but also of its aiders and abetters, who awarded Nobel Prize for lobotomy to António Egas Moniz. The excuse of "we did not know any better" cannot be taken seriously. Either these people failed to realize that they know much less than they think and that given the absence of proper knowledge, the requirement "do no harm" would force them to avoid interventions for the fear of adverse outcomes. Or they did realize as much, but they proceeded anyway, since their objectives were primarily egoistically hedonic, seeking dominance, fame, recognition and money more than patient well-being.
Further reading:
* Lobotomy, wikipedia.org
* Walter Jackson Freeman II, wikipedia.org

## Insulin shock therapy

Insulin shock therapy is damned in Jones 2000. The practice resulted from epistemic and ethical failure, not of a single individual or a small group but of a relatively large network of individuals, nearly all of whom were, to use Popper's phrase, intellectually bankrupt, mutually reassuring themselves that they knew what they were doing and that it was based on "science" (as if the mere utterance of the word "science" would magically turn unfounded speculations into solid knowledge). That this could happen in 20th century, one of aircraft, submarines, modern physics and nuclear energy, beggars belief, perhaps until one recalls that this was also the century of Hitler's gas chambers and industrial extermination of Jews, and the century of the British state drugging Alan Turing for the allegged disorder of homosexuality, which is estimated to have greatly contributed to his death.
Further reading:
* Insulin shock therapy, wikipedia.org

## Other historical misconduct

Historical misconduct other than lobotomy and insuline shocks:
* Removal of teeth and tonsils and then, stomachs, spleens, colons and uteruses.
* Injection of horse serum to produce meningitis.
* Administering barbiturates to put patients into deep sleep.
* Injection of metrazol to produce seizure.
* Administering electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) in an unhelpful way.

## Coercive treatment

On strict reading, the term coercive treatment (or forced treatment) can be contrasted to involuntary treatment: involuntary treatment could involve treatment of someone who is unconscious.
Coercive treatment with psychoactive drugs or electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is arguably a gross violation of human rights. If there is something that is a liberal subject's own, it is the body. An intervention into that body against express will to the contrary is a gross violation. It is also in a way an attack on person or personality; the substances used are psychoactive and affect personality. If, for instance, the patient had a tendency to fight for his or her rights, the tendency is going to be quite suppressed after administration of major tranquilizers known as "antipsychotics". In ECT, there is a risk of memory loss; it is as if someone hacked into a computer and erased some files.
There are organizations campaigning against coercive treatment.
World Health Organization (WHO) took a stance against coercive treatment; a link is yet to be provided.
See also Should coercive treatment be made illegal?.
Further reading:
* Forced treatment in psychiatry is a crime against humanity by Peter C. Gøtzsche, 30 Jan 2025

## Community treatment orders

In some countries, patients can be ordered by courts to take drugs in an outpatient (outside of the hospital) setting. This practice seems especially widespread in the U.S. And yet, the lifespan expectation shortening associated with schizophrenia is 28.5 years in the U.S., so much more than in many other countries, as per Life expectancy in schizophrenia (but: it is not clear that studies/methodologies in different countries are fully comparable).
These orders seem to be especially devious, compared to coercive inpatient medication, given their likely length.
Links:
* Outpatient commitment, wikipedia.org

## Electroconvulsive therapy

Currently delegated to further reading.
Further reading:
* Should we stop using electroconvulsive therapy? by John Read et al., 2019
* Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT) Testimony by Daniel B. Fisher, MD, PhD, 2011, power2u.org

## Polypharmacy

The literature reports that psychiatric patients are often given multiple psychoactive drugs. It is unclear how the prescribing psychiatrists can possibly know the effects, given that there are no or scant clinical trials for drug combinations.

## Antipsychiatry movement

The concept of antipsychiatry movement focuses on people disagreeing rather than points of disagreement and criticism. A use of this concept is not a valid response to address complaints and objections. It seem at least in part to be the logical fallacy of ad hominem (you are anti psychitry, therefore what you are saying is wrong). Under this construction, any criticism of psychiatry is automatically wrong for its being criticism of psychiatry [really? any?]. That psychiatry is good becomes a tautology rather than a proposition to investigate and scrutinize.
Be it as it may, there does not seem to be e.g. any anti-heart-surgery movement. One explanation could be that the psychiatric patients are so deranged that they do not realize they were in fact helped by the well-meaning and competent psychiatrists. That does not explain the existence of too many competent naysayers who are not psychiatric patients.

## Big pharma

Bad Pharma is a 2012/2013 book by Ben Goldacre. It documents widespread misconduct of large drug companies, including their cherry picking of studies to publish (keeping the unfavorable ones to themselves), failure to report adverse events of drugs, corrupting doctors, ghost writing, etc.
A book looking specifically at psychoactive medication and the role of big pharma in its excessive use is Deadly Psychiatry and Organised Denial by Peter C. Gøtzsche.
The notion that something is very wrong in the field of psychoactive medication and big pharma is supported by the number of related large settlements by the big pharma, as per Wikipedia: List of largest pharmaceutical settlements.
The companies caught in misconduct are as follows, per Wikipedia: List of largest pharmaceutical settlements (see also Is psychiatry evil?):
* GlaxoSmithKline
* Johnson & Johnso
* Abbott Laboratories
* Eli Lilly
* AstraZeneca
* Bristol-Myers Squibb
As a general and somewhat less reliable analysis, it is naive to think that the capitalist profit motive automatically leads to best patient outcomes. Under the conditions of rational profit maximization as the sole or primary objective, it is the profit that is maximized and nothing else. A solution is not to abolish the profit motive but rather to subject it to appropriate state regulation. Whether the solution is going to work well is open to doubt: just like commercial corporations, the state is a corporate entity and it may end up being "in bed" with the commercial corporate entities.

## First do no harm

A key maxim in medicine is this: first do no harm (primum non nocere). One would think that, under this principle, one would be unable to force a drug with known adverse effects on the patient against the patient's will since the requirement is not "act to help" but rather "do no harm". There is no symmetry between a positive action (drugging) and a negative action (non-drugging). It would be worthwhile to find out how psychiatrists explain that they are in fact abiding by the duty to do no harm when administering drugs against the patient's will, if they in fact do explain it.
Somewhat related is the trolley problem. If a type of psychiatric intervention, say, helps 9 people and harms 1 person, the trolley logic says one is not allowed to sacrifice the 1 person harmed to save/help 9 people. Therefore, there would be a strong bias toward non-intervention in case of any doubt. One would have to clarify whether this is a misapplication of the trolley problem.
Links:
* Primum non nocere, wikipedia.org
* Trolley problem, wikipedia.org

## Psychiatrists lying in court

Gottstein 2001 states (along the lines also stated in Gottstein 2006 below): 'Dr. Torrey also quotes Psychiatrist Paul Applebaum as saying when "confronted with psychotic persons who might well benefit from treatment, and who would certainly suffer without it, mental health professionals and judges alike were reluctant to comply with the law," noting that in "'the dominance of the commonsense model,' the laws are sometimes simply disregarded.'
As per Gottstein 2006: 'The Introduction mentions that Forced "Treatment" proceedings are essentially a sham. This is well known to those involved. Psychiatrists, with the full understanding and tacit permission of the trial judges, regularly lie in court$^{71}$ to obtain involuntary commitment and forced medication orders:"
As regards the above, note 71 states: "This is perjury, a crime".
Gottstein goes on to quote E. Fuller Torrey: "It would probably be difficult to find any American Psychiatrist working with the mentally ill who has not, at a minimum, exaggerated the dangerousness of a mentally ill person's behavior to obtain a judicial order for commitment.$^{73}$"
As regards the above, note 73 states: "Torrey, E. Fuller. 1997. Out of the Shadows: Confronting America's Mental Illness Crisis. New York: John Wiley and Sons. 152."
As per Wayne Ramsay: 'For example, in my essay Suicide: A Civil Right, I quote Paul G. Quinnett, Ph.D., a psychol­ogist, in his book about suicide saying "doctors like myself will stand up in court and say something to the effect that, by reason of a mental illness, you are a danger to yourself and need treatment" even when they do not believe the person so accused actually has a mental illness.'
Similar point is made in Gøtzsche 2015, sourced from James Gottstein.

## Families lying or exaggerating

Wayne Ramsay quotes Dr. Torrey as follows: "Families also exaggerate their family member's symptoms to get the person committed to a hospital. In a 1989 study of 83 families in Philadelphia, 18 percent said they had lied or exaggerated to officials in order to get a relative committed. ... In fact a number of local officials with the Alliance for the Mentally Ill (AMI), a nationwide support group for families, say they privately counsel families to lie, if necessary, to get acutely ill relatives hospitalized. . . . They say they were attacked when they weren't, they say their children tried to kill themselves when they didn't... Thus, ignoring the law, exaggerating symptoms, and outright lying to get care for those who need it are important reasons the mental illness system is not even worse than it is."

## Psychiatrists lying in medical records

It is not clear how the patient should ever be able to prove that psychiatrists are lying in medical records, when they say e.g. that the patient was aggressive (when he was not), that he engaged in paranoid speech (when he was not), etc. In the court of law, it would be a word of nominal experts and professionals against an allegedly psychotic person suffering from delusions, hallucinations and other problems leading to harmed contact with reality.

## Comparison to organized religion

A comparison of psychiatry to organized religion is useful. That is not to say that psychiatry is like organized religion in all salient regards.
What could be candidate salient regards? The following ones come to mind:
* Organized religion is very rich and powerful.
* Organized religion spreads blatant falsities/implausibilities.
* The system of falsities to spread is meticuously centrally maintained (not true for all organized religions).
* The followers of organized religion accept or profess to accept the blatant falsities as true.
* Some organized religions are cruel. One can recall the Inquisition. Some religions are reported to have engaged in human sacrifice.
* Organized religion maintains apparent consensus by harsh treatment of heretics, people who disagree with the dogma.
No firm conclusion can be drawn from the above. But one thing is worth noting: humans are very gullible and humans are very willing to organize to deceive others and cause grave harm to others. And they can continue doing so over long periods of time. This is the background against which allegations against psychiatry are to be evaluated as at least plausible.
A relevant quote from Gøtzsche 2024 is relevant: "We [I and Klaus] met and started a fruitful research collaboration. But it had repercussions for Klaus. He was discouraged from collaborating with my research group and was warned that it would have consequences for his career. I told him that this was like religious fanatism. Jehovah’s Witnesses and Scientology treat defectors the same way, which was unheard of in an academic context but showed us a lot about where psychiatry is."
It was Thomas Szasz who compared psychiatry to the Inquisition in his book The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement.
Links:
* Dr. Thomas Szasz discusses his book "The Manufacture of Madness", youtube.com

## Comparison to astrology

It seems to do little or no good arguing with astrologers that their field produces zero true knowledge. They are not convinced. It is non-astrologers, e.g. physicists and statisticians, who are able to demonstrate no correlation between heavenly phenomena and, say, the sex of the emperor's child.
Astrologers are sometimes rather sophisticated. Their methods sometimes involve science-resembling deterministic transformations of heavenly data (geometric ones), acting as an empirically seeded pseudorandom generator.
This analogy is probably fairly weak. Nonetheless, it points to the observation that unscientific fields often need field-external input to render the judgment of being unscientific. One can also recall the allegedly scientific character of Marx' economics and his historical prophecies, for which too many intelligent people fell, with enormous practical consequences.

## Ghostwriting

According to Gøtzsche 2024, Nemeroff and Schatzberg published a psychiatry textbook ghostwritten by GlaxoSmithKline (GSK).
Study 329 is a famous case of ghostwriting in relation a to a psychiatric drug, Paxil/paroxetine. See also Wikipedia: Study 329.
As per Collier 2009: '“Somewhere between 50% and 100% of articles on drugs that appear in journals are ghostwritten,” says Dr. David Healy, a psychiatrist at the University of Cardiff in Wales, United Kingdom, and a critic of the drug industry’s influence on physicians’ drug prescribing habits.'
Further reading:
* Medical ghostwriter, wikipedia.org
* Ghostwriting by Jonathan Leo and Jeffrey R. Lacasse, April 2014, researchgate.net
* Medical Ghostwriting: When an "Author" Is Not Necessarily an "Author" by Jonathan Leo, 2019, madinamerica.com
* Why Does Academic Medicine Allow Ghostwriting? by Jonathan Leo, Jeffrey R. Lacasse and Andrea N. Cimino, 2011

## Rosenhan experiment

Currently delegated to further reading.
Further reading:
* Rosenhan experiment, wikipedia.org

## Robert Pirsig

Robert Pirsig criticized psychiatry in his 1974 novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. He tells us that in order to get out of the psychiatric hospital, he had to learn how to tell the psychiatrists what they wanted to hear. Perhaps hyperbolically, the narrator tells his son Chris that he was not really insane. He speculates that his breakdown could have been something like a mystic experience, better handled by, say, a Zen master than a psychiatrist. Some of these things are better taken with a grain of salt. Nonetheless, the idea that holders of unchecked power proceed according to the slogan "we will not let you free until you confess" is plausible enough. One only has to recall e.g. Czech religious reformer Jan Huss (and other heretics), who failed to recant and was executed as a result. Pirsig uses the phrase "culture of one" to refer to someone whose peculiar beliefs are not part of any culture except his own.

## Dorrit Christensen

Dorrit Christensen is the author of the book Dear Luise recounting the troubles of her daughter in the Danish psychiatric hospital system. The troubles resulted in her daughter's death.
Links:
* “All for the Best of the Patient” by Dorrit Cato Christensen, 2016, madinamerica.com

## Thomas Szasz

Thomas Szasz was a vocal critic of psychiatry. He has many good points but his claim that there is no such thing as mental illness is debatable; see also section Mental illness.
Further reading:
* Thomas Szasz, wikipedia.org
* The Lying Truths of Psychiatry by Thomas S. Szasz, 1979, cdn.mises.org
* Thomas Szasz: rebel with a questionable cause by Williams and Caplan, 20 October 2012
* The myth of mental illness: 50 years later by Thomas Szasz, 2 January 2018

## Peter C. Gøtzsche

Peter C. Gøtzsche is a vocal critic of psychiatry. He is a co-founder of Cochrane Collaboration, with skills in internal medicine and medical statistics.
Gøtzsche was expelled from the Cochrane Collaboration in 2018. He explained what happened in his 2019 book Death of a whistleblower and Cochrane’s moral collapse and a related YouTube video. Several board members stepped down in protest.
Gøtzsche has multiple books relating to psychiatry freely available online:
* Critical psychiatry textbook by Peter C. Gøtzsche, 2022
* Is psychiatry a crime against humanity? by Peter C. Gøtzsche, 2024
* Psicofármacos que matan y denegación organizada by Peter C. Gøtzsche, 2022 -- a Spanish translation of Deadly Psychiatry and Organised Denial
Further reading:
* Peter C. Gøtzsche, wikipedia.org
* scientificfreedom.dk
* Peter C. Gøtzsche, MD, madinamerica.com

## Scientology

The church (or possibly cult) of Scientology takes anti-psychiatry stances. This opens the door to a cheap smear in which people critical of psychiatry are claimed to be like the followers of Scientology.
Scientology founded The Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR), together with Thomas Szasz, an organization advocating against psychiatry. Some of the videos made available online by CCHR arguably give a fear-mongering impression. That does not rule out that CCHR did some decent work in advancing patient rights and preventing or reducing abuses.
Tom Cruise is a notable member of Scientology who took a well publicized anti-psychiatry stance. In 2005 (or thereabout), he stated that 'psychiatry is a “quack” field and [...] that postpartum depression cannot be treated pharmacologically'
Links:
* Scientology, wikipedia.org
* Citizens Commission on Human Rights, wikipedia.org

## Treatment Advocacy Center

Treatment Advocacy Center (TAC) is a U.S. organization "founded in 1998 by Dr. E. Fuller Torrey." The organization advocates for changing laws to make it easier to psychiatrically incancerate people with serious mental illness, to "help" them.
Links:
* Treatment Advocacy Center, wikipedia.org
* tac.org

## NAMI

To be done.

## Books critical of psychiatry

Selected books critical of psychiatry:
* The Myth of Mental Illness by Thomas Szasz, 1974; see also many other books at Wikipedia: Thomas Szasz.
* Talking Back to Prozac by Peter Breggin, 1994; see also many other books at Wikipedia: Peter Breggin.
* Mad In America by Robert Whitaker, 2001; see also other books at Wikipedia: Robert Whitaker (author)
* Let Them Eat Prozac by David Healy, 2004; see also other books at Wikipedia: David Healy (psychiatrist)
* The Myth of the Chemical Cure by Joanna Moncrieff, 2008; see also other books at Wikipedia: Joanna Moncrieff
* Dear Luise by Dorrit Cato Christensen, 2012
* The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry by Gary Greenberg, 2013
* Cracked: Why Psychiatry is Doing More Harm Than Good by James Davies, 2014
* Deadly Psychiatry and Organised Denial by Peter C. Gøtzsche, 2015; see also other books at Wikipedia: Peter C. Gøtzsche.
* Is psychiatry a crime against humanity? by Peter C. Gøtzsche, 2024 -- available online, extensively inline referenced
* The Zyprexa Papers by James Gottstein, 2020; see also other publications at Wikipedia: James Gottstein.
There are many more books by the same authors, and these can be found listed in their Wikipedia articles. Listing them all here would perhaps make the list unpractically long. One could perhaps obtain a comprehensive list by querrying Wikidata, but the books would need to be all entered there for this to work.

## Organizations critical of psychiatry

Organizations critical of psychiatry include the following:
* madinamerica.com, run by Robert Whitaker, U.S.
* Law Project for Psychiatric Rights, psychrights.org
* The Council for Evidence-based Psychiatry, cepuk.org, U.K.
* Institute for Scientific Freedom, scientificfreedom.dk (Peter C. Gøtzsche)
* Citizens Commission on Human Rights, CCHR (linked to Scientology and Szasz)
* Critical Psychiatry Network, U.K.