Examining psychiatry

Re “Psychiatry’s sick compulsion: turning weaknesses into disease,” Current, Jan. 1

Using terms for a mental disorder, Irwin Savodnik accuses our medical discipline of “turning ordinary human frailty into disease.” The delusions and hallucinations of schizophrenia; the hopelessness, helplessness and worthlessness often leading to suicide among those with depression; the paralyzing anxiety suffered by those with phobias and post-traumatic stress disorder are not “ordinary human frailty,” unless you consider a heart attack “ordinary human frailty” as well.

Psychiatrists do not invent mental illness; we describe and treat it. The number of categories has grown to describe specific disorders that are relatively independent of one another.

Describing serious mental illnesses does not eliminate personal responsibility.

Real people suffer with real and treatable mental disorders, and they are looking for help, not absolution from responsibility.

DAVID SPIEGEL MD

President

American College of Psychiatrists

Berkeley

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It is about time somebody exposed psychiatric labeling for the arbitrary rather than scientific process that it is. It’s about time that somebody inside the psychiatric profession took public responsibility for the way its rhetoric helps people get out of taking responsibility. I would like to see more psychiatrists live up to their title, which translates as “soul healer.” That will never happen except through increased skepticism about the way their profession currently operates.

NINA WOUK

Menlo Park, Calif.

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Isn’t it unethical to portray this article as research when the writer is also the owner of a firm that offers advice to companies looking to dispute and control workers compensation claims?

Savodnik writes: “The last thing the United States needs is more self-indulgent, pseudo-insightful, overly self-conscious babble about people who can’t help themselves. Better, as Voltaire would put it, to cultivate our gardens and be accountable for who and what we are.”

An honest, forthright, moral man would have let us know about his conflict up front.

ED BAIR

Charlton, Mass.