When we use the term “mental illness”, not “brain illness”, do we put our patients in harm’s way?  …Drs. Mary Baker & Matthew Menken 2001.

As long as there is such a thing as “Psychiatry” there will need to be such a thing as “mental illness”. The writer of this Washington Post article ponders if tragic stories like this will change psychiatry.

…. Her story may change psychiatry.

Psychiatry will never change. It will continue to be the thing it is or not be at all. Within a day of the publication of this WP article, The American Psychiatric Association tweets: “New research suggests that a subset of patients with psychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia may actually have an autoimmune disease that attacks the brain”

Psychiatry will cling to the ridiculous idea of “schizophenia’ and so-called mental illness until there is one last patient on earth who has not been rediagnosed with an encephalopathic condition – a dysmentative and behavioral brain disorder. There is no such discrete disease as “schizophrenia”. It is a constellation of neurological signs and symptoms, a predominantly neurodevelopmental or genetic encephalopathy that may also be caused by an acquired biological disease process.

The medical establishment needs to discharge “psychiatry” from its ranks. Those psychiatrists that want to tend to matters of metaphorical illness, i.e. “mental health” can congregate with their psychologist friends and those that see that the domain of medicine dictates that they concern themselves with the brain’s semblance of mind and consciousness should practice under new subspecialty of neurology.

20 Years …trapped in a consciousness disordered state of horrific suffering. That’s 20 years in harm’s way.