I got linked to a thread on Twitter the other day written by a long-time psychiatrist who declared that his field was a fraud.

Quoted in full for your enjoyment:

I’ve been practicing psychiatry for 38 years. I love my job, my peers, and my patients. But I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m participating in the biggest intellectual scam of this era. We claim to be a science, but have no understanding how thought or behavior is generated.

Many billions of dollars are spent each year in an industry built on a corrupt body of pseudoscience, cultivated and exploited by monied interests for decades. This scientific fraud has been more successful than any other of our day. Our diagnoses are contrived by our guild, the APA, with the collaboration of monied interests—and are so unrelated to actual science that they are copyrighted and published to profit that organization.

In the process of selling a corporatist, medication-oriented model of treatment, psychiatry has been stunningly successful in redefining what it means to be a human being. Meanwhile, 20 years of peak psychiatry has resulted in a 30% increase of suicide in the United States—and American psychiatry has absolutely nothing constructive to say about it.

That hits harder than Tom Cruise jumping up and down on Oprah’s couch.

The key sentence here is “stunningly successful in redefining what it means to be a human being”.

When paired with, “have no understanding how thought or behavior is generated”, you get a con-job of mammoth proportions.

I do my best to leave the real deep-thoughts over at my extremely verbose Substack, but the failure modes of science and technology are becoming unavoidable in daily life.

In the good doctor’s three paragraphs we find multiple, and closely related issues that have bothered me for years now.

– The corruption of science.

– The stunning ignorance of human nature.

– Passing off half-cocked materialism as if it were as rock-solid as Newton’s laws of motion.

– The belief that there is no such thing as good and evil, only expert knowledge used to adjust brains and bodies with chemicals.

This is exactly what is going on with the AI hype. The more the machinery takes over, the less valuable the human touch.

Goes without saying that I strongly disagree with this direction. I’m solidly in the pro-human camp. Neuroscience and AI and all the rest are not just technologies for you to use. They’re bringing a fundamental transformation in how we understand our own existence.

If all you take from that is “science bad”, borrow a higher IQ for the day and read it again.

This is exactly why I blew the dust off of Squat Every Day recently. There’s many pro-human lessons in that book. Even moreso now that I myself have a deeper understanding of the issues and the stakes.

What’s coming isn’t just about typing into clever chat-bots or having better drugs to sass up your neuro-chemicals.

It’s going to answer the question of whether human beings matter at all.

There’s ways you, personally, can prepare for this. Even knowing that you’re staring down the barrel of a deep philosophical and, yes, spiritual crisis puts you well ahead of the pack.

Gloomy? Perhaps. Don’t say I didn’t tell you. But it’s not the Terminator that’ll get you. It’s forgetting all about your own inner being.

You can take the pills and eat the bugs, or you can wake up the sleeping parts of your own self… the parts of you that can do things you’d never imagine if you spend your day chained to a not-so-smart phone.

Get more integral human insights when you click here.

Matt Perryman