By Kenneth C. Eng, 9/1/05

I went to the psychiatrist and this is what he said. He said, "Ooo-ee-ooo-ah-ah, ting tang, walla walla bing bang." And then he shrunk my dick.

Well, actually, he didn’t say that, but he may as well have. Having been forced to attend many psychotherapy sessions by NYU (see "Discrimination Against Asians at NYU," published by Down In The Dirt Issue 12, August 2004 if you want to have a good laugh), I have found that psychiatrists are no more credible than witchdoctors. Yet, most people immediately associate them with intellectuals and deep thinkers, frequently trusting them to give advice on the most serious of issues. I’m usually not one to use vulgarity, but I can say without hyperbole that psychiatry and psychology are total fucking rubbish. Before you go out and waste your money on "therapy", let me fill you in on some little-known truths.

For starters, almost everything in every psychology textbook is either wrong or based on subjectivity. Here is a catalog of venom that you will find in just about any psychology textbook:

My rebuttal:

Define unrealistic please. There are some disorders listed in textbooks that seem perfectly valid to me. Aerophobia, the fear of flying, is perfectly reasonable, since you can very well die in a plane. Amaxophobia, the fear of driving and vehicles, is also sound because you can die in a car or by a car. Astraphobia, the fear of thunder, can apply to pretty much everyone who jumps when a crash of lightning roars in the sky. I don’t even see why xenophobia is on the chart. Would you trust a stranger in the middle of the night?

I guess most psychiatrists are mentally disordered by their own classification. They all have dementophobia, the fear of insanity.

My rebuttal:

Lawyers constantly think about law. Does that make them obsessive? Doctors constantly think about medicine. Why don’t we label them as obsessive? Most of Hollywood comes up with the same ideas over and over again. Are they obsessive?

Psychiatrists constantly have these ridiculous definitions in their minds when they’re brainwashing their patients. Therefore, psychiatrists are also obsessive.

My rebuttal:

Just about 95% of all people I know of seem to subconsciously edit out memories and perceptions they don’t like. Why don’t we diagnose every one of them with that disorder?

My rebuttal:

What is normal? Why should one try to be normal?

My rebuttal:

How is this a disorder? Just because I happen to have a high self esteem and I don’t give a damn about anyone else doesn’t make me "insane" (if "insanity" can even be classified as anything more than a word).

My rebuttal:

I was in a state of elation when I got my first novel sold. I am not insane. Quod Erot Demonstratum.

My rebuttal:

How can you tell if someone is deluded or if he’s really being persecuted? From my experience, most psychiatrists won’t take the time to check the facts. And ethically, everyone has the right to think of themselves in any way, so why lock someone up for thinking of himself as great? Erratic and unpredictable behaviors are exactly what make me such a successful novelist.

My rebuttal:

I think it’s inappropriate to laugh at David Letterman’s jokes because they’re simply not funny. I think religious beliefs are completely silly. Most foreigners have incoherent speech when trying to speak English. George W. Bush saying "Osama Bin Ladin is a coward" is completely infantile, senseless and immature (you’re not a coward if you blow up the buildings of a world power).

I think having sex is obscene and strange. So every psychiatrist who has a child – go check yourself into the nearest mental institution!

My rebuttal:

Judging by all of the above, I’d say psychiatrists are pretty delusional themselves.

But most importantly, why don’t we analyze what "abnormal behaviors" are as a whole. According to what I have read, abnormality, as defined by psychologists, is anything that is beyond the norms of human civilization. Curious it is that most psychology textbooks usually have sections devoted to "abnormal behavior" and fill those sections with lists of mental disorders much like how an Advanced Dungeons and Dragons book lists spells and creatures. Evidently, psychologists believe that abnormality is equivalent to disorder, and seek to "cure" these disorders. Nonetheless, none of these Ph.D.-ridden shrinks seem to realize that abnormality is not necessarily wrong. If everyone on the planet started to think that women were inferior and should be enslaved, it would not make it right to enslave women. If everyone on the planet started stealing each other’s ideas and making movies out of them, it would not be ethical. If everyone agreed that the sky was brown when it was clearly blue, it doesn’t change the fact that the sky is blue. I thought psychiatrists were supposed to have much more mental insight than the rest of us. How come they are so obsessed with conformity?

The fact of the matter is psychiatrists and psychologists are the modern versions of what priests were in the past. They try to make every human behave in a uniform manner, weeding out the dissidents that scare them. Moreover, they offer a perverse form of "absolution" to their subjects (a.k.a. patients) by attributing any idiotic human errors to a list of "mental disorders" that they fabricated without logical or soundly scientific foundation. The fact of the matter is that every damn fool is responsible for his own mistakes. Period. Psychiatrists are just trying to rationalize away every one of their clients’ guilty secrets so that they can keep their customers coming back for more mental indulgences. They are just businessmen, after all.

My personal experience with psychiatrists has verified their malignance. When I attended Stony Brook University, I showed my article The Human Element (published by Philosophy Today, December 2005) to a well-known psychology professor. Incidentally, it was September 11, 2001, the same day that the World Trade Center was destroyed. I expected a psychiatrist, having some supposed mastery over the mind, to be able to control his emotions, but when we were speaking about the essay, he could not help but cry on occasion. Out of nowhere, he would make immature jokes about the Taliban much like a 7-year-old would, expecting me to laugh. In addition, he often glared at me and raised his voice for no apparent reason when I was merely contesting his opinions. In the end, he stated that my essay had absolutely no intellectual value (and the crud they publish in the American Journal of Psychology does?)

When I was forced by NYU to attend a therapy session later on in my academic career, I found even more disturbing truths. I recall recounting to the counselor what had happened to me in school. I spoke of the censorship I was enduring, the fact that the Chairman of Tisch was spying on me and distributing my personal information, and the racial discrimination against Asians at NYU. She pretty much nodded off everything I was saying and then offered me a bunch of psychiatric drugs. Believe me, this girl could not have been happier to sell me a pill and get me out of the room. When I asked her to reiterate what I had told her about my problems at NYU, she gave only a vague and half-mistaken account.

Later on, I was forced to see another psychiatrist. This one claimed that I was schizophrenic on the grounds that I was thrown out of class so many times. He also said that I was paranoid because I was concerned about the possibility of having my ideas stolen, that I was obsessive because I spend an average of twelve hours a day writing, and that I was delusional because I claimed that the Chairman of NYU was conspiring to have me thrown out of school. He did not have the brains or the will to consider the possibility that I was thrown out of class merely because I expressed an unpopular opinion. In fact, he was even shocked when I told him (willingly, mind you) that I said, "Hitler is not a coward" in class. Furthermore, he did not seem to have the mental capacity to understand that ideas are stolen very frequently. Nor did he seem to comprehend that I write 12 hours a day because it is my job, and that David Irving was in fact monitoring my activity in school and telling everyone everything about me (I have all the files from my personal records).

More perturbing were the questions the shrink was asking me – "Do you have friends?" "Do you believe that ghosts are real?" "What does this inkblot look like?" "Do you think violence is acceptable?" The volume of these types of questions notwithstanding, their sheer idiocy was enough to discount any credibility he had. My not having friends is irrelevant to my ability to act ethically. The fact that he judged my individual value based on my value to society is further proof that psychiatrists are simply compliant machines infatuated with obedience. My beliefs about ghosts are equally irrelevant, as are my perceptions on what a splotch of black on a paper looks like. That he had to ask me shows that psychiatrists are probably more paranoid than their patients. And yes, I do think violence is acceptable for various metaphysical reasons. But since I was tired of having to attend these sessions and constantly tell him that everything he was saying was rubbish, I didn’t argue. I just told the bastard everything he wanted to hear and flipped the finger outside his door.

The last psychiatrist NYU forced me to see was Mohammed Valady of the FBSNY. His behavior was irrefutable evidence of psychiatry’s invalidity. On the first session, he yelled at me and told me that he would throw me out of the program if I did not comply with his every word (knowing that if I did not complete the program, severe legal action would be taken against me). Throughout the sessions, his speech was incoherent, and he mostly rambled with anecdotes that went nowhere. He would constantly repeat the same phrases over and over again -- "you caused your own suffering", "you deserve to be here", "how many people your age do you know of who have been thrown out of class so many times?", "by expressing your opinions, you have put yourself here." Repetition and threats are typical tactics used for brainwashing. He didn’t even consider it possible for NYU professors to be capable of racial discrimination (as he said, "I know that university professors treat everyone fairly") and referred to my account of the situation at NYU as false without even bothering to verify the evidence. And if that wasn’t enough to remove all trust in psychology, "Doctor" Valady also remarked about my honest account of the situation, "Do you actually expected me to believe this shit?"

Wow Valady, did it take you 8 years of college to learn to call other people’s arguments "shit" without any reason? I’m sure your parents are real proud that they spent all that tuition, boy. I’m sure listening to people whine all day about their problems beats being the youngest published SF novelist in America.

In conclusion, psychiatry is nothing more than a cult, a new religious order, that is meant to propagate unfounded principles for the purpose of creating mass-conformity and steering attention away from more important sciences like physics (although arguably, the basic principles of physics can be debated, at least physicists struggle to avoid subjectivity). No, I don’t have a Ph.D. in cognitive sciences, and I’m bloody glad I don’t. Anyone intelligent person who takes an introductory course in psychology should be able to deduce that psychiatrists are about as credible as those fortune tellers who make you pay 5 bucks so that they can tell you that you have five toes on each foot.