Is Psychiatry Dishonest? And if so, is it a noble lie?

Is Psychiatry Dishonest? And if so, is it a noble lie?

When I think of psychiatry, my first thoughts are unkind. I think of mildly sad people on antidepressants. I think of upper-middle-class parents putting their kids on Ritalin as soon as they flunk math, or misremember the lyrics to Dave Matthews songs. Pills seem so overabundant in our country that it’s possible to forget there are Americans who really and desperately need a pharmacological fix for an illness of the mind.
Early in The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry, Gary Greenberg describes one such American, a patient who locks himself in a hotel room and gibbers into the phone that his family has sucked out his bones. People like this look to psychiatry for salvation, and so, Greenberg argues, we must save the profession from overreach and corruption.

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