The announcement comes directly after a poll the APA conducted, which revealed that faith leaders are trusted and held in high regard by their parishioners, with nearly three in five saying their go-to person for mental health issues is their priest, rabbi or imam.
According to APA medical director Marketa Wills, “Many of us rely on our faith communities for support in times of mental and emotional difficulty, whether we are struggling ourselves or we are supporting a loved one with a mental health condition.”
In other words, if you ask Wills, APA’s outreach to faith leaders is all in the interest of “mental health.”
But let’s dig a little deeper. If we do, we’ll find that the APA’s “partnership” with the faith community isn’t born of benevolence, but desperation.
Why? Because the public at large detests psychiatry. According to a Gallup survey, the public’s trust in psychiatrists rides at a dismal 38 percent, beating out bankers by one percentage point and politicians and car salesmen by a few more. The website Psychiatry Online announced the news with the headline: “Public Has Trust Issues With Psychiatrists, Survey Finds.”
Psychiatrists have worked long and hard to earn that distrust. At least 10 percent of psychiatrists and psychologists worldwide admit to sexually abusing their patients. Psychiatrists and psychologists also have the highest drug, divorce and suicide rates among those who profess to belong to the healing arts.
Psychiatry is the quack “cure” that worsens the disease.
The word psychiatry derives from “doctoring of the soul”—from psyche, which means soul or spirit and iatros, which means doctor. But the so-called science of the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness has proven time and again not to be as advertised.
Sciences progress, evolve and improve with the passage of time and the gathering of research. Medicine has emerged from the wasteland of bloodletting leeches to the precision of laser surgery and has seen diseases fall by the wayside, while others—heart disease, cancer, diabetes—have seen survival rates go up. Biology has deepened our understanding of genetics, where we come from and what we’re made of. Astronomy has stretched our universe beyond the bounds of imagination.
Only psychiatry has failed to join the parade.
With America approaching “peak therapy”—mental health services increased by 40 percent between 2019 and 2022—one in eight Americans taking antidepressants and one in five receiving some sort of “mental health care,” you’d think that by now ours would be a country of rainbows and unicorns, an Eden of joyous mentally fit happy campers if psychiatry delivered what it’s been promising since the day it opened its first skull and declared there was no soul inside.
But suicides have skyrocketed by 30 percent this century. And after that same 2019 to 2022 period of maximum psychiatric saturation, three times as many of us say we’re depressed, one out of every two dozen or so of us have been diagnosed with some scary-sounding, cooked-up “mental disorder,” and just 31 percent of us now describe our mental health as “excellent”—down from 43 percent one generation ago. Time headlined a 2023 article: “America Has Reached Peak Therapy. Why Is Our Mental Health Getting Worse?”
The answer? Because psychiatry is the quack “cure” that worsens the disease.
The APA did the math: We only make people worse + we’re in the same sleazy tent as politicians and car salesmen = full-on dumpster fire for the psychiatric industry. And it must be addressed now, lest the damning statistics show once and for all that Citizens Commission on Human Rights has nailed it all these years: Psychiatry and its related practices—psychology, psychoanalysis, et al.—comprise a bogus for-profit racket bent on harming and exploiting our most vulnerable. Since 1965, 1.1 million people have died in psychiatric hospitals—more than twice as many as all the soldiers killed in all of America’s wars since 1775.
The APA saw the storm warnings and responded swiftly.
Their marketing mavens looked at the dreadful poll figures, reached deep into their coffers and came up with a solution: We’ll pretend to be good buddies with religion!
“Traditional moral codes … fail to meet the pressing needs of today and tomorrow.”
—John Dewey, psychologist
The APA included a telling question in its survey: It asked how many parishioners would “seek mental health care if a leader in their religious community recommended it.” To that question, the yesses were emphatic at 68 percent.
The APA’s conclusion: “When a faith leader supports and encourages conversations around mental health, it makes a difference to that community and as psychiatrists we welcome that approach.”
You bet they do! Quick! Convene the experts! Summon the press! Let’s call it a “Mental Health & Faith Community Partnership”! It’ll be beautiful! Yes! Religion will be the APA’s salvation!
That’s why the APA is falling over itself trying to get in on the selfie with religion.
Religion works. Psychiatry does not, and psychiatry knows it. The decent thing, the honorable thing, would be for psychiatrists to pack up, go home and earn an honest living. Instead, they chose to hitch their soul-sucking wagon to religion’s star.
Religion, stay a breath before grasping psychiatry’s proffered hand. Psychiatry is not your friend. The pseudoscience is just using you, and once it’s had its way with you, will drop you like a hot potato, just as it’s done to its other victims.
In fact, psychiatry hates you and wants you dead.
I don’t speak idly. Here’s what your alleged “friends” say about you behind your back:
Sigmund Freud: “[Religion is] the enemy” and “the greater the number of men to whom the treasures of knowledge become accessible, the more widespread is the falling away from religious belief.”
John Dewey, psychologist: “Traditional theism, especially faith in the prayer-hearing God … is an unproved and outmoded faith. Traditional moral codes … fail to meet the pressing needs of today and tomorrow.”
John Rawling Rees, psychiatrist, World Federation of Mental Health co-founder: “We have made a useful attack upon a number of professions. The two easiest of them naturally are the teaching profession and the church.”
William Sargent, psychiatrist: “Jesus Christ might simply have returned to his carpentry following the use of modern [psychiatric] treatments.”
G. Brock Chisholm, psychiatrist, World Federation of Mental Health president: “To achieve world government, it is necessary to remove from the minds of men their individualism, loyalty to family traditions, national patriotism and religious dogmas.”
Heard enough?
What, in heaven’s name, does a soulless profit-making scam have to do with faith?
As the Creed of the Church of Scientology states, “The study of the mind and the healing of mentally caused ills should not be alienated from religion or condoned in nonreligious fields.”
You, the faith leaders, are the true “doctors of the soul.”
Keep your practice open and hang your shingle proudly.
The world needs you.
