There is no scientific test that has ever shown a chemical imbalance in the brain as the cause of unwanted emotions.

     That whole idea came from experiments with rodents in the nineteen-thirties which suggested that paranoia was caused by high levels of dopamine in the brain. While that might or might not be factually true for rats, a rodent is not a human being.

     Perhaps the psychiatrists’ equation of a rat with a human being was what led them to be okay with the brutality of the treatments they performed on people’s bodies in the thirties to
try to “cure” the behavior they labeled as schizophrenia.

     First came their removal of teeth, appendixes, ovaries, testes, colons, and other body parts to eliminate the “infection” that was causing a patient’s schizophrenia. Surgically removing the ovaries and testes, of course, equaled sterilization, akin to what the Nazi psychiatrists were doing then in the concentration camps.

     Then came insulin shock therapy. Patients – or more accurately, victims – were put into comas by massive daily injections of insulin into their bodies for weeks on end. Few ever regained their mental acuity afterward.

     Next came the lobotomy. In the mid nineteen-thirties Antonio Egas Moniz was allowed to drill two small holes in the skull of “patients” from a Portugese asylum and through those
openings cut the nerve fibers between the front of the brain and the rest of the brain. It was “blind surgery,” as the psychiatrist could not see what he was actually cutting inside the
person’s head.

     In the late nineteen-thirties American psychiatrist Walter Freeman announced his “improved” lobotomy procedure. He hammered an ice pick through the victim’s eye socket and “wiggled it around” to sever nerve connections in the brain. So enthusiastic was he about this procedure that he began a cross country road trip he dubbed “Operation Icepick” and he drove from one state mental hospital to another to promote his operation being used on patients who had long since lost their right to consent to such barbaric treatment.

     In 1940 alone, an estimated five thousand lobotomies were performed in America

     Then came electroconvulsive therapy, another brutal assault on a body thanks to
psychiatry’s misguided attempt to “cure” schizophrenia. A seizure was induced in an
anesthetized patient by attaching electrodes to the sides of the head and unleashing up to
four hundred volts of electricity across the brain.

     In 1952 many of these barbaric psychiatric procedures – so many of which were hidden
from public views by being inflicted on the innocent inmates of psychiatric institutions – were to a large degree replaced by psychiatrists prescribing psychotropic drugs. In that year the FDA approved the use of Thorazine, the first drug to be approved for the treatment of mental disorders.

     With Thorazine, there were no holes left in the eye sockets, no broken bones from massive electrical shock, no permanent catatonia from recurring insulin overdose. Instead, you just took a pill.

     But the results were similar. One ad for Thorazine during its first major Big Pharma drug marketing campaign stated that it “reduces or eliminates the need for restraint and seclusion” and “reduces destruction of personal and hospital property.”

     That marketing soon expanded from asylums to the general public. By 1964 fifty million prescriptions for Thorazine had been filled. The income of its Big Pharma manufacturer,
Smith, Kline and French, skyrocketed the company’s profit with an eightfold increase in revenue.
Psychiatry’s war with drugs had begun. It was a war against us.

     A war justified by the still unproven idea of a chemical imbalance in our brains.