David Tolin: Pseudoscience in Mental Health Treatments
A Stockholm Psychiatry Lecture given at Nobel Forum, Karolinska Institutet May 28 2013 by Dr David Tolin, Director, The Institute of Living and Adjunct Associate Professor at Yale University. Dr Tolin is well known for his research on OCD and Hoarding and has was the host of the TV series “The OCD project”. Dr. Tolin discusses the contribution of scientific and pseudoscientific theories and methods to mental health treatment. Characteristics of mental health pseudoscience will be described, with several real-life examples. He discusses ways to distinguish scientific from pseudoscientific practices, and provides guidelines for clinicians, consumers, and regulators that will help insure that mental health treatment is based on the best scientific evidence available.
36 Comments
Very well spoken, clear and powerful flow of information. Listening to this lecture felt like hearing answers to a bunch of questions I didn’t even know I had. I dream of having the gift of developing my theories/thoughts as perfectly as this.
https://youtu.be/DK_QTie-s1s
my guy is dismantling pseudoscientific bullshit with a screwdriver
Mental health is when life gets hard but you want a legitimate excuse to give up without feeling shameful. A diagnosis/label takes away the blame from you to external circumstances.
8:00
So those who disagree with their psychiatrist get labeled as "Borderline". That alone should be cause for concern.
Psychiatry is the pseudoscience, its treatments are pseudoscience and highly damaging. The people who work in this industry are sick in the head.
therapists always do a salespitch to sell themselves and never tell upfront about how many people are harmed and ill advised by therapists in their treatment modality.. there is no real supervision.. that's why the profession is full of power hungry manipulative unethical useless and harmful people who willingly take the therapist's throne and watch you bow down to them for advice with any problem in life.
I'll give you the dirty list:
Psychiatry
Therapy like CBT never worked for me. I end up arguing and disagreeing with the therapists and their methods and conclusions. For me therapy is not life-changing and I think the sessions I received caused more harm than good.
Where can I buy one of those nifty purple hats though?
My guess the proximity of money and people with urgent and ill defined problems which are largely self reported and self described, a well educated class of practitioners but lacking discipline due to the difficulty in diagnosis or pricing efficacy or malpractice. This can lead to a lot of people doing their best and reporting anecdotal evidence. But it creates the environment for pseudoscience to thrive.
Very informative video. I work in mental health and it's scary how much pseudoscience and "If it feels true it is true" makes it into therapy sessions. I'm interested why he excluded religion from his definition of pseudoscience though. As a former Christian of 30+ years it's very apparent to me how religion fits every bullet point/criteria of pseudo science spelled out in this lecture.
Lol here's to you tapping and emdr
Psychiatry's future is the toilet bowl 🚽. The people who work in this industry are a toilet 🚽
Great lecture..more relevant than ever now in 2023.
As a :victim" of the draconian section 135act mental health care detention.. ultimately the result of a complaint I made to the police over three years ago relating to new neighbour's and a stream of malicious intrusions that followed..
On the police recommendation I attended an interview with themselves then with their suggested medical colleague "psychiatrist" (now much to my regret) the report that followed was defamatory and a damning read littered with negative bias! I complained to "Mersey Care" an amendment was offered..but to date the report of errors /lies) has not been rectified after many requests!..Meanwhile my police complaint request was never pursued..the psychiatrist collusion and the spurious medical report clearly did what it intended!
I moved area shortly afterwards..
So after the late 2019 event .Mersey Care decided to reactivate the drama by detaining me!
So I'm into my sixth week at the Hartley Centre Southport ..awaiting legal representation!
An outrage and power grab…
Severe & sustained emotional abuse causes duress…extreme distress…which can cause all manner of mental/psychological distress.
I wonder what his thoughts might be on "effective" therapy by which the prison system treats prisoners according to "Enneagrams" about their personality and behaviorisms. It seems not a far fetch to believe these convicted people are being conned into believing they are getting better in just the same way they believe reading scripture would actually benefit them. This reminds me of the Purple Hat Therapy in a way.
Beware of psychiatrists, They are wicked men & women playing us all as insane. But the real insanity is psychiatry itself. A pseudoscience which has never cured anything but inflicted oceans of suffering on humanity. They are criminals.
Where can I go to get shoe bashing therapy?
A down-and-out person is brought before a Standard of Care psychiatrist: He responds by handing him a disease-like Freudian label, then neurotoxic drugs or ECT. Soon, his patient is being made into a long term cash cow, to secure financialization! Deceit? / The former actor Michael Landon believed in building human potential. For about 2 weeks, he moved into an Autism asylum – where he encouraged everyone to become great. One man stated: "If he believed that we were that great, maybe we are!" / If people are distracted or depressed – then enlist them to sing in Glee Clubs, so they can begin to develop a mental + emotional dedication, a cathexis – which is what Mental Health is!
Psychiatry's mental health treatments are pseudoscience not safe and effective alternatives.
Psychiatry is as dangerous as chiropractors and acupuncturists
The bible warns against takkmg hesd to false doctrines. And God says that mans wisdom is corrupted. We see this with phyciatry. People gotta realize that humans are flawed an corrupt. You cant trust people. It doesent matter what there profession is. Trust in the word of God because theres no confusion or lies with Gods word. Phyciatry is human wisdom , its another doctrine that conducts " solutions" for the spirirual matters of the human heart an brain. You wanna be whole ? Follow Gods guidance not mans. Becauss it you follow mans then your well being will become motheaten. The way to become happy is to obey Gods commandments. Jesus said that his meat or food is doing the will of God. Becauss when you do the will of God youll be more content an filled then what anything else can offer. Wages of sin is death. It is sin to trust in the mans wisdom over Gods.
psychiatry falls into the same catogory as dianetics!
Some will not agree and we call them borderline, this got my like
This man didn’t get nearly enough credit for his jokes!
Looks like a battle of algorithms here. The snake on a stick algorithm on the emblem for the "royal college of psychiatry" .s tangent .5 cosine square to .64 then sine .5 cosine squared to .27. In biblical mythology (Myth of jesus) there is a reference to the "taking up of serpents" to "cure illnesess". The algorithm is also used in movie scripts and we were not allowed to use it in our essays "nil mark". It is despised by senior academics, but the 'working clasess are notoriously credulous of their "prescribed authority figures". I feel we are going to wait a long time for the "massess to make the intellectual effort to actually check anything and grasp simple maths and physics.
Psychiatry is a predatory system rooted in deception and exploitation, designed to trap people into a never ending cycle of dependence. Psychiatrists manipulate individuals into believing they have mental illnesses, weaponizing vulnerability to create lifelong customers. This isn’t about care or healing it’s about control and financial gain, no matter the cost to human lives. The process is insidious. It begins with a diagnosis often based on vague or subjective criteria, followed by the prescription of powerful, mind altering drugs. These medications frequently cause debilitating side effects physical, mental, and emotional which are then conveniently labeled as "new symptoms" of an evolving condition. The solution? More drugs. This creates a spiraling feedback loop where patients are constantly medicated, never cured, and always dependent on the system. Psychiatry does not address root causes. It does not seek to heal. Instead, it labels, medicates, and profits. The pharmaceutical companies fuel this machine, incentivizing psychiatrists with financial rewards and promoting the normalization of drug dependency as "treatment." The result is a society full of overmedicated individuals whose suffering is exploited for profit. This is not healthcare. This is a system built to enslave people, strip them of their autonomy, and turn their pain into profits. It’s time to confront this fraudulent industry and expose it for what it truly is: a dangerous, exploitative racket that profits from human misery while pretending to offer solutions.
@ 15:50 – none of us gave Informed Consent to GP's/Psychi's/Neurologists/Gastrointestinal specialists/etc. Not once. No forms, no signatures, nothing. All of this could've all been avoided if we had given Informed Consent. If it weren't related to Psychotropic Pharmaceuticals, it'd be an ethics violation, crime against humanity, and medical malpractice, etc. Most of us doubted the research/longterm efficacy of these Pharmaceuticals (critical thinking) that we saw in the commercials/magazines, but we were desperate, and we never saw a proper Counsellor for our modern-day society stress to learn CBT/DBT that our parents never taught us – to a certain extent.
It doesn't matter what the research shows/doesn't show or supports/doesn't support. As long as you know what you're getting yourself into with these longitudinal outcomes clinical trials. So, consumer's choice. You're free to try a 'Selective' SRI/'Selective NRI, Anti-Convulsant, Tranquilizer, Benzo, etc. But please just give informed consent first. It's extremely important. Most of us have lost thousands upon thousands of dollars over decades because of Psychotropic Pharmaceuticals.
@20:24 & @30:30 – be careful for 'medical spellbinding' and that they perceive that they've been cared for by a Doctor with a white coat and badge (perceived as all-knowing)/perceive that they've treated. ie: placebo effect at first vs. longitudinal outcome. But watch for hypomania induced by "S"SRIs/"S"NRI's. Look up Dr Peter Breggins's YT lectures.
No psychiatrist has ever believed my side effects, reports of harm, or even proof of trauma. "Trauma-informed therapy" is one of the named treatments that failed me. No one has ever checked on me after a treatment.
Fabulous presentation thank you
Mental illness is in the mind of the beholder. M arr
We deal with the evidence that contradicts by labelling the contradictors as delusional.
Mr Tolin knows that algorithm, but the rule book (canon) interferes with publishing it.
My mom belives in the biomedical model and I only think it’s valid for autism and psychopathy.
I believe that bipolar, schizophrenia, adhd, borderline personality, and depression, aren’t even real.
Sadness is a temporary feeling to things that either make us feel sad, or a response to not being happy anymore.
And borderline, skirzophrenia, and borderline personality disorder, are just made up mental disorders to make people feel worthless, guilty, stupid, and delusional.