Dr. Sami Timimi challenging the assumptions of his training

I’m sorry, but this is just too good. Written by Dr. Sami Timimi, child and adolescent psychiatrist, author of Pathological Child Psychiatry and the Medicalization of Childhood, Jan/Feb 2003.

Found this on the site: Young Minds for children’s mental health. He urges professionals who work with children and young people to question their assumptions. https://www.youngminds.org.uk/magazine/62/timimi.php 

“What is it, then, that keeps professionals believing in the truth of their way of understanding the same picture, when there is no way of proving its validity? I think that in the absence of proof, we use faith to sustain our belief in something. We sift through the evidence in a selective way to reinforce our faith and discredit those we feel to be ‘non-believers’. In other words, our professional mental health ideologies have been constructed by manipulating evidence to fit the framework, rather than adjusting our frameworks to fit the evidence.

If only we could, as a profession, accept the ideological nature of the belief systems we use. There is nothing shameful about having faith and about needing to believe; it is very human. Faith helps to make sense of the world; for many people, faith falling apart is like their world falling apart. I have come across many clients for whom religion has become much more central following a difficult experience in their lives – for example, refugees fleeing war, torture or other terrifying life events. Faith provides a sense of orientation, continuity and a map with which to structure one’s life and make sense of what is happening.

So, what of the system of faith used in modernist child and adolescent psychiatry, with its increasing emphasis on diagnosis and drug treatment? As I attempt to illustrate in my book, when we make a diagnosis we are not discovering the meaning of our client’s problem; rather, we are giving it our (the professionals’) preferred meaning. We are performing a social and political act. And more often than not, we are demonstrating more about our own particular faith, than shedding light on our particular client’s problems.

So, we need to ask ourselves, from a political and cultural standpoint, what value systems our particular faith promotes and, therefore, which faith do we wish to promote(and how flexibly)? If we wish to practice in the way that biomedical child and adolescent psychiatry currently does, then we must accept that we are promoting a system whose values are rooted in the Western philosophical Enlightenment – with its emphasis on discovering universal laws, material reality, controlling nature through technical expertise, and a focus on the individual.

We must be prepared to accept its cultural origins in Western history, where medicine has been an active participant in promoting a white, male, middle-class value system which colonised much of the rest of the world and, in the process, suppressed local culture, beliefs, ideologies and practices.

We must also accept that Western biomedical psychiatry represents the economic value system of capitalist, free market thinking and be happy to go along with the pharmaceutical industry’s drive to open new markets (children’s mental health is a growth area). We must also go along with a short-term perspective on problems and how to solve them, and sign up to the mythical ideal that more production (of knowledge, for example) equates with progress.

And finally, if we wish to sign up to the value system of biomedical psychiatry, we must also understand its political function. Biomedical psychiatry serves governments as one of its agents of social control (a position that sets it apart from the rest of medicine), where so called treatments to deal with a section of society’s ‘deviants’ are forced on to patients, the vast majority of whom have committed no crime.”