Informed Consent Laws Can Protect You, but They Can’t Keep Shrinks Honest

     Keeping shrinks honest is probably not possible, of course. Psychiatry is a practice based on lies, so even a well-intentioned psychiatrist is not capable of delivering a truthful informed consent interview.

     Zapping patients with 460 volts of electricity, removing parts of their brain, drugging them into zombie-dom are all standard psychiatric practice for using force to “cure” abnormal people. How can shrinks honestly convey the dangers of their “therapy” without losing all their patients?

     Even the first step of standard informed consent is not one that can be carried out truthfully. “Explain fully to a patient the criteria used for the diagnosis of his condition.”

     With most medical procedures the diagnosis is based on physical evidence from blood tests, RIs, CAT scans, or other fact gathering procedures. A psychiatric diagnosis comes from the DSM, the several hundred page tome of collected thoughts from panels of psychiatrists about what constitutes – in their opinion only – a mental disorder. Not one of their 297 labels for mental conditions is based on any concrete physical evidence.

     Step two of the informed consent procedure is to inform the patient of the risks or dangers associated with the recommended treatment. With ECT or with psychotropic drugs, that would mean revealing the results of the studies that show permanent memory loss and cardiac problems from ECT and increased suicidal and homicidal tendencies from psychotropic drugs, per their FDA Black Box warnings.

     Some states use what they call a “reasonable patient” standard to judge what’s required to be disclosed by a medical practitioner to the patient. In other words, what would a reasonable person would want to know about his or her proposed treatment? Most reasonable patients would probably reject many psychiatric procedures or medications if they knew how serious the risks were from them.

     Other states use a “reasonable physician” standard for their informed consent laws. In other  words, what would a reasonable doctor disclose to his patient? The question is, would any “reasonable physician” choose to be a psychiatrist?

     Bureau of Labor Statistics reported about 27,100 psychiatrists practicing in America in 2025. There are approximately 1,082,187 licensed physicians practicing in this country as of August, 2025.

     Only 2.5% of all American doctors are shrinks. That’s still a lot of unreasonable doctors. 1/3 of American psychiatrists are immigrants. It’s much easier to become a psychiatrist in many other countries because the training is faster and it’s much less competitive being accepted in those med schools.

     Could therefore be a much stronger motivation for those shrinks to “make good money” in America than to “do no harm.” 

     Depends on your definition of what’s “reasonable.” Two BMW’s or a happy, healthy patient.