Lost in Language: the Myopic Blur of a Psychiatrist’s Mind

     Last year Dr. Josef Witt-Doerring posted an hour and a half long interview with Awais Aftab, a psychiatrist who has become a controversial spokesman for the general validity of contemporary psychiatric practice. Much of the criticism has been directed at his glossing over valid concerns about inadequate diagnostic tools, over-medication, and sketchy informed consent protocol about the harm of psychiatric drugs and the potential ordeal of trying to quit them.

     In his interview, Dr. Josef brings these points up and asks Aftab about them. Aftab confirms those flaws in modern psychiatric practice in a long winded, multi-syllabic, academic reiteration of them. “It’s a complex, multi-causal picture, in reality,” he concludes.

     Dr. Josef then asks him what the consequences are for patients from those deficiencies in the psychiatric system.

     Aftab’s answer reveals an aspect of the psychiatric mind which shows how removed from human reality psychiatry has become. Or, possibly, has always been. “On the one hand, the consequences are kinda conceptual and narrative,” Aftab answers. “On the other hand, they relate to treatment factors. People have a distorted understanding of the nature of their problems.”

     That’s the main personal harm from psychiatry today? A patient’s lack of conceptual understanding of his condition?

     Not the stigmatization of a misleading “mental disorder” label? Not the numbing of one’s emotions, the sexual dysfunction, and the increased likelihood of suicide from psychiatric drugs? Not the Catch-22 ordeal of not being able to get off the drug when you want to return to a normal state without a painful eighteen month tapering process?

     Aftab is a man who is lost in language. The symbols of the words are more significant to him than the troubled human conditions they are trying to describe and repair. A neat and tidy, well groomed theory of psychiatry is more important to him than the effects on a human being of the application of psychiatric theory.

     This is a man so lost in mental concepts that he is utterly removed from the world around him. Actual living human beings and their troubles in life are not real to him. Worse, those patients are apparently of secondary importance to the throne of psychiatric theory, and therefore to its authority.