Behaviorism and Mental Health

Alternative perspective on psychiatry's so-called mental disorders | PHILIP HICKEY, PH.D.

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About Phil Hickey Ph.D

I am a licensed psychologist, presently retired. I have worked in clinical and managerial positions in the mental health, corrections, and addictions fields in the United States and England. My wife Nancy and I have been married since 1970 and have four grown children.

Psychiatric Ethics

September 6, 2016 By Phil Hickey | 8 Comments

On June 9, 2016, the very eminent psychiatrist Allen Frances, MD, published an article on the Huffington Post Blog.  The piece was titled Trump Is Breaking Bad, Not Clinically Mad. The gist of the article was that, although the Republican presidential candidate has many flaws, he does not have a mental disorder. Here are some… Continue Reading

A Diluted Murphy Bill Clears the House and Goes to the Senate

August 23, 2016 By Phil Hickey | 31 Comments

INTRODUCTION On Wednesday, July 6, the US House of Representatives passed a watered down version of HB 2646, the so-called Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act.  The bill, which is now a House Resolution, is usually referred to as the Tim Murphy bill, after its principle author, Representative Tim Murphy, PhD, who is also… Continue Reading

Bad News on the Doorstep: Psychologists Prescribing Drugs

July 26, 2016 By Phil Hickey | 42 Comments

[Note:  In this post, “APA” refers to the American Psychological Association] There is an article in the current (July/August) issue of The National Psychologist titled “Iowa becomes 4th state to approve RxP”.  The author is James Bradshaw, Associate Editor.  RxP is a commonly used abbreviation for prescription authority for psychologists. Here are some quotes from… Continue Reading

Non-psychiatrists Working in the Mental Health System

July 6, 2016 By Phil Hickey | 3 Comments

I know from my own experience and from emails I receive from readers that a great many non-psychiatrists who work in the mental health system have seen through the psychiatric hoax.  These individuals, who are growing in number, realize that the problems for which clients seek help are not illnesses in any meaningful sense of… Continue Reading

“The Overdiagnosis of ADHD”

June 28, 2016 By Phil Hickey | 10 Comments

INTRODUCTION On May 23, the very eminent psychiatrist Allen Frances, MD, published on the HuffPost blog an article titled Conclusive Proof ADHD is Overdiagnosed. The general theme, that various “mental illnesses” are being “overdiagnosed” is gaining popularity in recent years among some psychiatrists, presumably in an effort to distance themselves from the trend of psychiatric-drugs-on-demand-for-every-conceivable-human-problem… Continue Reading

Allen Frances:  Still Blaming Everyone But Himself

May 24, 2016 By Phil Hickey | 31 Comments

On May 7, Allen Frances, MD, posted an article on the HuffPost site.  The piece was titled Antidepressants Work, But Only For Really Depressed People. Superficially, the article presents itself as a call to limit the prescribing of the so-called antidepressant drugs to severe cases; but the piece can, I suggest, be more accurately characterized… Continue Reading

ADHD:  The Hoax Unravels

May 10, 2016 By Phil Hickey | 50 Comments

At the risk of stating the obvious, ADHD is not an illness.  Rather, it is an unreliable and disempowering label for a loose collection of arbitrarily chosen and vaguely defined behaviors.  ADHD has been avidly promoted as an illness by pharma-psychiatry for the purpose of selling stimulant drugs.  In which endeavor, they have been phenomenally successful,… Continue Reading

The Anorexia Nervosa Genetics Initiative

April 29, 2016 By Phil Hickey | 21 Comments

INTRODUCTION On March 27, 2014, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill published a press release titled Dr. Cynthia Bulik of UNC leads multinational anorexia genetics project. Cynthia Bulik, PhD, according to Wikipedia, is the “Distinguished Professor of Eating Disorders in the Department of Psychiatry in the School of Medicine at the University of… Continue Reading

The Sandcastle Continues to Crumble

April 22, 2016 By Phil Hickey | 24 Comments

Psychiatry is a hoax.  Its fundamental concepts are spurious to the point of inanity.  Much of its research is blatantly fraudulent.  And its treatments are destructive, disempowering, and stigmatizing.  Psychiatry has no coherent or logical response to the criticisms that it attracts, other than the repetition, mantra-style, of unsubstantiated assertions of safety and efficacy, coupled… Continue Reading

Cyber-Trolls, Site Disrupters, and Related Matters

April 21, 2016 By Phil Hickey | 23 Comments

To state the obvious, this is an anti-psychiatry site, and as such it attracts a fair measure of impassioned comment – some favorable, some unfavorable. From time to time the site gets “bombed”, by which I mean that someone who opposes my ideas “sits” on the site and expresses profound disapproval of anything and everything… Continue Reading

The Germanwings Crash:  Flying Under the Influence

April 5, 2016 By Phil Hickey | 28 Comments

On March 24, 2015, a twenty-seven-year-old German pilot named Andreas Lubitz flew an Airbus A 320 into a French mountainside, killing himself and the 149 other people on board.  Mr. Lubitz was co-piloting the flight, and he caused the aircraft to crash by locking the pilot out of the flight deck and setting the autopilot… Continue Reading

Allen Frances on Anti-Psychiatry

March 24, 2016 By Phil Hickey | 32 Comments

On February 22, Allen Frances, MD, published an article titled:  Psychiatry and Anti-Psychiatry on the HuffPost Blog.  The general theme of the article is that psychiatry may have some problems, but it is basically sound, wholesome, and necessary. Here are some quotes, interspersed with my comments: “Psychiatry used to be a biopsychosocial profession that allowed… Continue Reading

Allen Frances on the Benefits of “Antipsychotics”

March 11, 2016 By Phil Hickey | 35 Comments

On February 1, Allen Frances, MD, published an interesting article on the Huffington Post blog.  The article is called Do Antipsychotics Help or Harm Psychotic Symptoms?, and is a response to Robert Whitaker’s post of January 27:  “Me, Allen Frances, and Climbing Out of a Pigeonhole.  This post, in turn, was a response to Dr…. Continue Reading

Psychiatry Bashing

March 7, 2016 By Phil Hickey | 12 Comments

Last month (February 2016), the British Journal of Psychiatry published an online bulletin titled BASH: badmouthing, attitudes and stigmatisation in healthcare as experienced by medical students, by Ali Ajaz et al.  Here’s the abstract: “Aims and method We used an online questionnaire to investigate medical students’ perceptions of the apparent hierarchy between specialties, whether they… Continue Reading

Exploiting The Placebo Effect:  Deceiving People For Their Own Good?

February 16, 2016 By Phil Hickey | 7 Comments

Readers may remember that a few weeks ago I became involved in an online debate with the very eminent and scholarly psychiatrist Ronald Pies, MD.  That exchange was initiated by a post I wrote concerning a paper on the chemical imbalance theory that Jeffrey Lacasse, PhD, and Jonathan Leo, PhD, had published in the Behavior… Continue Reading

Gender Wage Gap and Depression/Anxiety

February 12, 2016 By Phil Hickey | 7 Comments

In their January 2016 issue, the journal Social Science and Medicine published Unequal depression for equal work? How the wage gap explains gendered disparities in mood disorders, by Jonathan Platt, MPH, Seth Prins, PhD candidate, Lisa Bates, PhD, and Katherine Keyes, PhD, MPH.  All the authors work at Columbia’s Department of Public Health. Here’s the… Continue Reading

Allen Frances Seeks The Middle Way

February 9, 2016 By Phil Hickey | 14 Comments

On January 15, 2016, Allen Frances, MD, Professor Emeritus at Duke University, published an article on the Huffington Post.  The piece is titled:  Psychiatric Medicines Are Not All Good or All Bad. The article denounces both the “medication fanatics” who prescribe psychiatric drugs when they are not needed, and the “die-hard anti-medication crusaders who try… Continue Reading

Are ‘Psychiatric Disorders’ Brain Diseases?

January 19, 2016 By Phil Hickey | 16 Comments

Steven Reidbord MD is a board-certified psychiatrist who practices in San Francisco.  He writes a blog called Reidbord’s Reflections.  On December 12, 2015, he posted an article titled Are psychiatric disorders brain diseases?  It’s an interesting and thought-provoking piece, with many twists and turns. Here are some quotes, interspersed with my comments and reflections. “Of… Continue Reading

Dr. Pies on the Dearth of Civility

January 8, 2016 By Phil Hickey | 16 Comments

On December 3, 2015, Ronald Pies, MD, published Campus Protests, Narcissism, and the Dearth of Civility on Psychiatric Times. The article is subtitled:  What can we do, as a society, to reduce the levels of incivility and narcissism that appear to be on the rise? Here are some quotes: “…I believe we are witnessing the… Continue Reading

Robert Spitzer’s Legacy

January 6, 2016 By Phil Hickey | 2 Comments

Robert Spitzer, MD, the architect of DSM-III (1980), died of heart disease on Christmas Day, 2015, at age 83. Most major media outlets published obituaries in which Dr. Spitzer was praised on the grounds that he had brought scientific rigor to psychiatry by naming and defining the various psychiatric illnesses. Here are a few illustrative… Continue Reading

Bipolar 2 research

January 5, 2016 By Phil Hickey | 3 Comments

I am a 58 year old male. I was born into a dysfunctional family with issues of shame and guilt.  I believe that this affected my psychological state. I had severe Asthma and I was unintentionally put in front of an open fire and out in a cold street in my pram where I was exposed to… Continue Reading

Psychiatry and Crime

January 4, 2016 By Phil Hickey | 10 Comments

In DSM-III-R, the APA defined a mental disorder as: “…a clinically significant behavioral or psychological syndrome or pattern that occurs in a person and that is associated with present distress (a painful symptom) or disability (impairment in one or more important areas of functioning) or with a significantly increased risk of suffering death, pain, disability,… Continue Reading

Psychiatry: A Protected Cartel

December 29, 2015 By Phil Hickey | 8 Comments

On December 27, 2015, Richard Lewis, a regular contributor to Mad In America, posted on that site Deafening Silence: What Happens When the Whistle Blows and Nobody Hears?  Here are the first two paragraphs: “What happens when someone finally ‘blows the whistle,’ exposing potential harm and possible death caused by today’s mental health system? Is… Continue Reading

Allen Frances Still Trying to Excuse Psychiatry’s (and his own) Role in the ADHD ‘Epidemic’

December 8, 2015 By Phil Hickey | 32 Comments

On November 9, 2015, Allen Frances, MD, posted an interesting article on the Huffington Post’s Blog.  The article is titled Why Are So Many College and High School Kids Abusing Adderall. The gist of the article is that the “excessive use of ADHD medication” is a more legitimate target for a war on drugs than… Continue Reading

My Response to Dr. Pies’ Response

November 30, 2015 By Phil Hickey | 12 Comments

On November 18, 2015, Dr. Pies sent his response to my November 17 article to MIA.  MIA posted it, and forwarded a copy to me.  It reads: “I have read Dr. Philip Hickey’s 8400+ word treatise, and I have only the following to say with regard to the two key points at issue: Notwithstanding my… Continue Reading

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The phrase "mental health" as used in the name of this website is simply a term of convenience. It specifically does not imply that the human problems embraced by this term are illnesses, or that their absence constitutes health. Indeed, the fundamental tenet of this site is that there are no mental illnesses, and that conceptualizing human problems in this way is spurious, destructive, disempowering, and stigmatizing.

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The purpose of this website is to provide a forum where current practices and ideas in the mental health field can be critically examined and discussed. It is not possible in this kind of context to provide psychological help or advice to individuals who may read this site, and nothing written here should be construed in this manner. Readers seeking psychological help should consult a qualified practitioner in their own local area. They should explain their concerns to this person and develop a trusting working relationship. It is only in a one-to-one relationship of this kind that specific advice should be given or taken.

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