Mental health needs support, not blame

The Dec. 18 Forum article by Douglas E. Rapozo (“Psychiatrists can be deadly to

people and nations”) does much to poison public attitudes toward mental health

programs and promote an anti-scientific bias in your readership.

He blames

the Bosnian genocide not on Radovan Karadzic as much as on the fact that

Karadzic is a psychiatrist. He goes on to blame the Nazi holocaust on

psychiatry and mental health programs. Engineering, physics, mathematics and

probably every other field of study have been employed for immoral purposes.

But all of these scientific disciplines, including medicine and psychiatry,

have brought us out of a dark and ignorant past.

The Garden Island does not

serve its readership well when it chooses to devote a quarter of a page to the

ranting of an individual with an obvious ax to grind against doctors. How can

anyone in his right mind believe the German atrocities of World War II can be

blamed on psychiatry? Does the writer also condemn physics because an atomic

bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? I doubt it.

You chose to run

the article under the headline “Psychiatrists can be deadly to people and

nations.” Shame on you. You might as well have written “Citizens can be deadly

to people and nations.” At least it would have been more honest.

The writer

offered absolutely no rational argument to support your headline. He offered no

evidence supporting his conclusion that psychiatry and mental health research

are not practiced according to scientific method. The medical journals offer

abundant testimony to the contrary. And more testimony is available from the

millions of men, women and children whose lives have been saved through the

services of mental health programs.

It is unfortunate that the writer seeks

to blame the evils of the holocaust or psychiatry. If we are to prevent such

things from happening again, we need to support mental health programs, not

demonize them.

DAVID ROACH

Kapa’a