The Pandemic of Fake Psychiatric Diagnoses
19th September 2025
Read it.
On 12 September, UK child and adolescent psychiatristSami Timimi published “When mental-health diagnoses become brands, the real drivers of our psychic pain are hidden” in the Globe and Mail, a Canadian newspaper.
In his superb article, Sami carefully explains how he arrives at his painful conclusion:
You see there is a truth that we (in the mental-health business) hope no one will notice – we literally don’t know what we are talking about when it comes to mental health.
An obvious problem is that all definitions of psychiatric disorders are subjective. They are not objective facts such as a broken bone is. This means they can be expanded in a myriad of ways to capture a kaleidoscope of distress, alienation, and dissatisfaction, and that psychiatric diagnoses are consumer brands, not medical diseases.
In medicine, a diagnosis is aimed at determining which disease explains a person’s symptoms and signs, which enables effective matching of a treatment to address specific disease processes.
This is not the case in psychiatry. And all psychiatric drugs have nonspecific effects that are not directed against some cause of a disease. Their effects are similar to those of alcohol, narcotics, and other brain-active substances.
Psychiatry, like astrology or numerology, is a pseudo-science. Actually, you could say that “economics” is equally a pseudo-science. Real Science is characterized by two things: (1) Measurement and (2) The ability to make reliable predictions. Pseud0-sciences use measurement to bolster their claims, but none of them can make reliable predictions.