Looking for a Psychiatrist in Johannesburg?

If you are searching for the mental health services of a psychiatrist in Johannesburg you may want to think again; here's why. In South Africa today, our culture has developed to an impressive degree in many fields. However, at the same time there are many ways in which South Africa today, and more locally Johannesburg, is not as well off. The crime rate is on a long-term rise. Education is declining at a fast rate. Attempts to treat addiction to drugs have failed completely, and only create further addiction to more dangerous drugs. Local news headlines in towns and cities across Johannesburg and around the world report increasing numbers of psychotic, irrational acts of violence which have no motive and cannot be understood. Yet in our enlightened era, treatment of the problems of the mind remains an area of dark, fearsome ignorance.

Psychiatrists worldwide, nationwide, and local psychiatrists in Johannesburg, have never provided a science of the mind that actually cures mental illness. Instead they use unproven treatments like Electroconvulsive Therapy ECT (electric shocks to the brain) and prescribe mind-altering psychiatric drugs that are intensely destructive. Medical evidence shows that such drugs can, and actually do, create killers. Sexual abuse by therapists is well known to be destructive, yet psychiatrists and psychologists sexually abuse their patients at a startling rate. They commit health insurance fraud at a higher rate than any profession and many come from the dregs of medical school classes. It's a fact that nearby psychiatric doctors in Johannesburg actually create even worse mental health problems in the city.

It is important to know that psychiatry in Gauteng consists, not of methods of healing, but of brutal practices that no self-respecting medical professional would ever call treatment. As author Edward Shorter stated in A History of Psychiatry, psychiatrists have had "a rather poor reputation among their medical colleagues as the dull and the second rate." Despite massive funding increases, Johannesburg psychiatrists have failed to define, let alone cure, the causes of mental problems.

Psychiatrists in Johannesburg and South Africa use a list of so called mental disorders to compare with or judge against a patient's own symptoms of mental problems. The most commonly used list of disorders for psychiatric diagnosis is compiled in a book called the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). In 1952 the DSM contained only 112 entries of mental disorders but the number of disorders has increased dramatically to 374 in 1994, and is still on the increase today. WHY?

A study published in April 2006 by university public health researchers, disclosed that every psychiatric expert involved in the development of the mood disorders listed in the DSM-IV had financial ties with drug companies, before or after the book was published. This report was the first to officially document the wide-ranging and incestuous monetary relationship between the pharmaceutical companies, psychiatrists and other mental health industry personnel responsible for the manual. In effect, the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is a grab bag of billing items for the mental health industry.

The questions used by Johannesburg psychiatrists for patient mental disorder evaluations are not reliable to diagnose any psychiatric condition. If you visit a psychiatrist in the Johannesburg area you will generally have a brief consultation where you are told what is wrong with you without making any physical examination. A psychiatrist report recommending a course of psychiatric treatment is not based on a valid diagnosis. Before being given any medication or treatment by a local psychiatrist in Johannesburg, ask them what physical checks they are going to perform to diagnose you. The chances are they won't perform any physical check, simply because they don't know what causes mental illness.