Mike Bundrant is the host of Mental Health Exposed, a radio program from our friends at Natural News. He is a former mental health counselor and had an inside look at how the system works. as Bundrant points out, the system has some "dirty secrets".
"The conventional mental health system is a cruel joke," he writes for Natural news. "It's ugly."
Bundrant and others like him say the mental health industry is just as dirty as Big Pharma itself, creating conditions and "curing" with prescriptions. This means many counselors and psychiatrists are interested in treating mental illness with one solution - drugs.
The Mental Health Industry's Dirty Secrets
We've seen this issue arise more so in the last 2 decades than ever before. Through the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (essentially the bible of mental health for psychiatrists), hundreds of disease have essentially been 'created' and reclassified. Because of this, mental health 'issues' are skyrocketing and more individuals are on antipsychotic drugs than ever. Not surprisingly, as much as 70% of psychiatrists involved in the DSM have financial ties to drug companies.
"The bottom line is that it's about the bottom line. So many clients, so much money. Keep the practices full, the insurance companies appeased and the revolving door turning."Case notes are taken with the idea that they may one day be viewed in a lawsuit. Counselors are told to, essentially, cover their butts and protect themselves, their companies, and the insurance companies from liability. In many cases this is seen as a priority over helping the patients.
As with medical doctors, mental health professionals may even be guilty of diagnosing the most serious conditions possible, all to authorize more treatment and therefore more money. What may be a situational condition, treatable with one or two sessions of therapy, could turn into a diagnosis for major depressive disorder, treatable with prescription drugs and ongoing, no-end-in-sight counseling appointments.
Millions of Americans have been diagnosed with depression and likely millions more feel depressed but lack a diagnosis. These people would often benefit from talking to someone (and eating better, but that's another article entirely) rather than popping a pill. But when they are seen as a number or a dollar sign, they are shortchanged on true treatment and real help.
Though many mental health professionals are in their field for noble reasons and act with some sense of moral accountability, many more are caught up as cogs in a crooked system, the same system that sees selling pills as more important than being truly healthy. In a world where creativity is deemed a mental illness, dangerous drugs are being dispensed with impunity.
I work in the behavioral and mental health sector and it's distressing to watch from the sidelines. I am just the computer guy but I was unfortunately tasked with training doctors in ePrescribing and I see the massive amounts of meds prescribed to the masses. I often see 5 drugs or more dispensed per visit with a return time of every 3 months to adjust dosages or try something else. There are a lot of doctors that really want to help but have no real choice in order to keep a job but to push meds and other docs are only glorified drug dealers pushing out the latest and greatest drug per the drug reps. Our system alone pushes patients through every twenty minutes to keep up with the never ending lines of broken people. So the doctors never even have a chance to discuss anything with the client at any depth. One instance had me in with the doctor as I trained him to ePrescribe, the patient had barely finished two sentences and the doctor was shoving scripts in their hand and sending them out the door. I was horrified as the patient was clearly making up situations to get his Xanax refilled. The counselors, if allowed the time, are a little better at actually helping the patients talk through issues and guiding them to find answers without medications but they are at the whim of the psychiatrist who may choose to dose the patient with some zombie medication.
Funding is continually pulled from our programs and more people have issues so the only recourse is to cram more onto the doctors to bring in money from federal incentive programs. You don't get kick backs for the counselors and so they get little pay for a thankless job and turnover rate is insane. It's truly a sad state of affairs and I used to think I was indirectly helping people, but not so much these days. Originally I was involved with an open ended residential treatment program which was very effective and people were allowed to stay as long as needed with continual group sessions to get their lives together. Medications were only dispensed for general health and most of the major drugs were eventually reduced or removed as they went through the program. That however is no longer a viable model because the state and federal programs demand numbers of patients treated versus those actually getting better.