THE MAL-PRACTICE OF PSYCHIATRY

by Paul Levy


I first entered the psychiatric world in the middle of a life-transforming spiritual
awakening which had gotten catalyzed because of intense emotional abuse from a
psychopathic father. Spiritually emerging into a more expansive and whole part of
myself, I was beginning to recognize the dreamlike nature of the universe, a universe in
which we were all inseparably interconnected with each other. I was so enthusiastic about
my realizations that the anti-bliss patrol got alerted and I got put into psychiatric
hospitals, where I got (mis)diagnosed and medicated out of my mind such that my
spiritual awakening got extinguished and I felt traumatizedliterally, made sickby the
treatment I received. While I was under the care of psychiatry, it was a waking
nightmare: the more I was solidified in the role of being the sick one, the sicker I got,
which in a diabolically self-perpetuating feedback loop, only confirmed to the
psychiatrists how sick I truly was. After the treatment I received from the psychiatric
system, I became truly sick.
It was as if I had gone into a hospital suffering from one illness, and was treated
as if I had a completely different, an illusory illness which not only made my real illness
worse, but it literally drove me crazy, completely destroyed any semblance I had of a
family and almost killed me. To use a physical example, it was like I went into the
hospital suffering from kidney stones and the doctors removed my appendix instead. In
essence, psychiatry put fuel on the fire of the pathological part of my process, and treated
the healthy, healing aspect of my process as if it was a cancerous tumor that needed to be
exterminated at all costs, and I would be the one paying the bill.
Not only was my spiritual awakening not recognized but, rather, pathologized
instead, but in addition, I was not believed about the abuse from my father; on the
contrary, psychiatry colluded with my father and unwittingly enacted a variation of the
very abuse I was pointing at. To top everything off, I was diagnosed as having a mental
illness that I didnt have, and forced to take medicine so as to correct what every single
psychiatrist who treated me told me was a chemical imbalance in my brain
(Unbeknown to me at the time, the DSM III had just come out the year before
announcing this discovery). This chemical imbalance theory was later proven to be
completely bogus.
Diagnosis is a slippery slope; oftentimes it can be a smokescreen for ignorance.
Jung describes a certain type of understanding that I imagine informs many diagnoses as
a fearfully binding power, at times a veritable murder of the soul.
i
[emphasis added]
When I was given a written-in-stone diagnosis by psychiatrists who had a complete
certainty in what they thought was happening within me but actually had less than no
idea, it did feel like a veritable murder of the soul. The shadow side of diagnosis is that
it is the outcome of staring at phenomena with the objective look, that ethically blank,
heartless scientific gaze, as late psychiatrist R. D. Laing calls it; a gaze which does not
see or hear us.
ii
When I received my psychiatric diagnosis, to say I felt unseen was an
understatement. At the same time that the psychiatrists were laying on me their
misdiagnosis, I was in turn diagnosing them in my own head as simply being incredibly
stupid (what I simply call the stupid diagnosis). Laing continues, the methods used to
investigate the objective world, applied to us, are blind to our experience, necessarily so,
and cannot relate to our experience. Such blind method, applied blindly to us, is liable to
destroy us in practice, as it has done already in theory.
iii
I am truly fortunate to have
escaped from psychiatry with my sanity intact.
In being mis-diagnosed by psychiatry as suffering from a chemical imbalance in
my brain, my perceptions about the nature of my own experience were deleted from
having any validity, as if I was being treated as a mental in-valid (which was truly
crazy-making). I felt both objectified and marginalized in my own treatment. In
consulting their hallowed diagnostic manual, the DSM, it was as if the psychiatrists were
reading from a grimoire, trying to match what little they understood of my experience to
something somebody else wrote in a book; it was truly insane. When I was diagnosed, I
was downgraded from having full existential status as a sovereign human being, as I was
no longer considered to be the arbiter of my own experience or rightful possessor of my
own image or definition of myself. Once I received my diagnosis, as if my condition was
being etched in stone, everything I said or did from that moment on was seen through the
stultifying lens of my diagnosis.
A normal baseline for chemical balance has never been established; the
chemical imbalance theory was a complete and utter fake, in which its proponents
pretended they knew something that they didnt. There is no definitive laboratory test for
any so-called mental disorder. Dr. Allen Frances, who has been called perhaps the most
powerful psychiatrist in America and who in 1994 headed the project to write the latest
edition of the psychiatric bible, the DSM-IV, recently blew the whistle on his own
profession. In an interview with Gary Greenberg from Wired Magazine, Frances says
There is no definition of a mental disorder. Its bullshit, I mean you just cant define
it.
iv
Modern day diagnosis of psychiatric disorders is like those medieval maps that dealt
with places in which they didnt know what was going on by writing Dragons Live
Here. The modern day dragons are all of the various psychiatric diagnoses concocted
so as to fill in the blanks for what we dont know.
To quote Dr. Ronald Pies, editor-in-chief emeritus of the Psychiatric Times, "In
truth, the 'chemical imbalance' notion was always a kind of urban legend -- never a theory
seriously propounded by well-informed psychiatrists."
v
And yet, every single psychiatrist
(and there were many) who saw me in all the multiple hospitals always told me I was
suffering from a chemical imbalance in my brain. Were they all simply some of the less-
informed variety of psychiatrists? Pies continues, "In the past 30 years, I don't believe I
have ever heard a knowledgeable, well-trained psychiatrist make such a preposterous
claim [about chemical imbalance in the brain], except perhaps to mock it...the 'chemical
imbalance' image has been vigorously promoted by some pharmaceutical companies.
Were all of the psychiatrists who gave me my preposterous diagnosis, a diagnosis that
was worthy of being mocked by those in the know, not knowledgeable nor well
trained? Pies statement about the idea of a chemical imbalance being vigorously
promoted by some pharmaceutical companies is revealing, as it truly blows the lid off of
whats really been going on.
It has come to light that the pharmaceutical companies knew all along that the
idea of a chemical imbalance was made-up (thought up by people whose brains were
truly chemically imbalanced, I might add). Fabricated by the pharmaceuticals marketing
department, the notion of a chemical imbalance was the product of a fevered imagination
informed by dreams of big bucks, so as to give people a reason to buy their drugs.
Pharmaceutical companies are not not-for-profits; they are all about profits, which is to
say morality is left behind. In wanting to make me part of the apparatus of their system,
psychiatry wanted to harvest my money, time, life-force, mind and health as one
diagnosis would invariably follow another in a never ending spiral that definitely would
have ended my life as I know it. If this isnt evil, I dont know what is.
But I digress. Once in the clutches of psychiatry, I was then medicated to heal my
newly diagnosed chemical imbalance (the medication serving to abort my spiritual
awakening and shut down my creativity), and told that I would have to be on medication
till my dying breath. One doctor even guaranteed (I wonder if I can get my money
back?) that Id have this illness for the rest of my life. I was being given a life sentence
with no possibility for parole, with no time off for good behavior (It should be noted that
I havent taken any psychiatric medication for over thirty years, with no episodes,
which, from the psychiatric point of view, is impossible if I truly had what is now called
bi-polar illness). The fact that I wanted to dialogue about this and question their diagnosis
not only made them angry, but was proof, to the psychiatrists in charge of me, of my
alleged illness. The psychiatrists hoped to one day make me a functioning member of
society; I, on the other hand, was hoping to make psychiatry a functioning member of
society, not one day in the future, but right now. Psychiatry didnt just want to give me a
diagnosis, it wanted to inaugurate me into a whole new career as mental patient.
In my wildest dreams I couldnt imagine more of a hell-realm than psychiatry. It
was only years after I had left the psychiatric community that I began to re-contextualize
and reframe my experiences with psychiatry as a shamanic descent into the underworld,
into the depths of a modern-day Hades. What the psychiatrists were doing was truly
maddening and crazy-making. Psychiatrists are trained to pathologize; once I was
diagnosed and labeled with a mental illness, my behavior was myopically viewed through
the lens of pathology, which only served to draw out the pathological aspect of my
process, further confirming to the psychiatrists the correctness of their diagnosis in a self-
fulfilling prophecy. For example, once my emerging lucidity was violently shut down by
psychiatry, I began feeling depressed, which was a normal thing to feel under such
horrible circumstances. My feeling depressed inspired the psychiatrists, however, to
solidify their diagnosis of me as manic-depressive (as I was now seen as cycling into
the depressive phase of my illness), and they then prescribed an anti-depressant to
help my depression, adding to the cocktail of the anti-psychotic and lithium they
already had me on. It was like I had re-created my family-of-origin traumain Freuds
words, new editions of the old conflictsonly this time on pharmaceuticals.
As time passed under their watch, the spiritual awakening component of my
experience faded into the background, and the unresolved abuse from my father came to
the fore, front and center; this makes perfect sense, as what psychiatry was doing was
simply a variation on a theme, an iteration of the same abuse. Then, in an even more
crazy-making double-bind, the fact that I wanted to talk about the abuse from my father
became the very thing for which I was further pathologized. And, in a true mind-
bender, just like my father, I was told that the treatment I was receiving from psychiatry
was for my own good.
The psychiatrists were like the high priests of a modern, scientific religion who
had invested in them by the power of the state the ability to deem who was sane and to
doom who was insane. By unconsciously identifying with their positions of power,
rank and privilege, they were monopolizing the role of the healthy one, unwittingly
casting the patientin this case meinto the solidified role of the one who is sick. The
psychiatric system was under a self-created and self-reinforcing delusion (is there a
pharmaceutical for this?), as it was simultaneously casting a spell both on itself as well as
its patients. The psychiatric systems mal-practice is harder to see than in other, more
concrete fields, and hence the incompetence and harm often go unrecognized, as they are
operating in the province of the psyche, where much is hidden, shrouded in both mystery
and misunderstanding to begin with.
Though the sickness in a family system is fundamentally nonlocal in nature,
which is to say it pervades the entire system, it typically gets localized and is thought to
exist only in the member who is cast in the role of the identified patientin this case,
me. Psychiatry treated me as if I existed as an isolated entity who had an illness that
was unrelated to the family of which I was a part. In a family system, the members are
not seen as independently existing parts of the system; rather, all of the members are
viewed relationally, which is to say relative to each other, as ultimately speaking, each
interdependent member does not exist apart from the whole web of interrelations within
the system. Apparent pathology in any one of the familys members are oftentimes
derivative from the mutual interactions, communications, shadow dynamics and
unconscious power issues between its members. This is to say that if someone becomes
sick in the family, it is important to place their sickness in the wider context of the inter-
subjective relationships within the family system, which is the underlying matrix out of
which the illness originated and is continuing to be maintained. Since the family is a
system which is contained within, as well as being an expression of, a deeper
interconnected field, when a family member becomes sick, it is an expression of a
pathology in the whole system and deeper field. In becoming the identified patient, I had
also unknowingly assumed the archetypal role of the scapegoat, the sacrificial lamb
who typically carries the family systems (which in my case, now included psychiatrys)
split-off, disowned, unconscious shadow and madness.
I tried to explain to the psychiatrists that I WAS sick, however, but just not in the
way they were imagining. I was suffering from a creative, psychological illnessa
healing illnesswhich was my psyches way of metabolizing the trauma of having a
psychopathic father who had a blank check to act out his pathology. I wasnt manic-
depressive; rather, I was perturbed, in that my emotions were disturbed due to
being the recipient of over-the-top abuse at the hands of a desperately sick, sociopathic
father. The psychiatrists were having none of it, however, as they were of the opinion that
they knew what was happeningboth within my mind and in my familybetter than I
did. I had no legitimacy in their eyes regarding my own experience, as if I had no
psychological title to my own experience, which was truly crazy-making beyond
anything I had ever imagined, even in my wildest dreams. The whole thing was so sci-
filike a bad horror movieit was beyond belief, and yet it was actually happening.
In the psychiatric system, I found myself in a place that felt truly bewitched, as
if under a curse of and controlled by black magicians, where reality was inverted in a way
that was truly get-me-out-of-here crazy. Heres what I wrote in the Afterword of my
recent book Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of Evil:

I was one of the lucky ones, however, as I was able to extricate myself
from the Stone Age, draconian horrors of our might makes right mental
health system as soon as I possibly could. In retrospect, the overall
treatment I received from psychiatry is truly staggering in its
incompetence and level of abuse; Ive barely scratched the surface [in
these words]. The psychiatric systems egregious lack of insight into the
nature of the mind is truly tragic and causes great harm. The extent of
disservice and mistreatment that I received from the mental health
community has been so traumatic and overwhelming that it has taken me
more than thirty years to even begin to wrap my mind around the horror of
what played out. The abuse I suffered at the hands of the psychiatric
community, which embodied true psychological violence in the flesh, is so
beyond my comprehension that even now I struggle to find the words. I
struggle because the abuse was truly an unspeakable form of torture.
vi


What psychiatry acted out was truly criminal, a form of criminal insanity. Psychiatry is
utterly unconscious of the unconscionable psycho-spiritual carnage they are wreaking on
a global scale in order to increase the bottom line of corporate profits.
Blindly enacting their shadow in their treatment of patients as objects, rather
than fellow human beings with whom to be in relation, the psychiatric system had
unwittingly become instruments for what the Native American people call wetiko
simply put, the spirit of evil that is at the root of humanitys inhumanity to itselfthe
very psycho-spiritual disease that years later I would write a book about. Having
graduated college a few years before, while my college friends were in graduate school
busy studying to become doctors, lawyers and professors, I was being certified in a
different way. Little did I realize at the time that my forays into psychiatry were field
work in which I was gathering data so as to prepare me for my future lifes work.
In a spiritual awakening, the old and antiquated structures of the psyche are
breaking down, which can become a breakthrough, however, depending on how it is
contained and related to by the surrounding community and unfolded. The dis-integration
of the personality can be the beginning of a coming together at a more coherent, and
unified level of consciousness. When someone is having a spiritual emergence, it is as if
they have snapped out of a life-long spell and are beginning to see through the illusion of
consensus reality which is woven all around us; because of this they are typically in an
incredibly open, vulnerable, fluid and fragile state. When the person who is spiritually
emerging is being judged and pathologized (by the world, their friends, their family and
the authorities, i.e., psychiatry), however, this can literally evoke the pathological part
of their process to manifest, which simply confirms to those who are pathologizing them
the objective truth that the person is indeed in a pathological state, as they now have even
further evidence to prove the rightness of their judgment, ad infinitum. This processa
self-perpetuating feedback loopcan quickly become a nightmare for the person who
was waking up, as it can literally make them sick. Before my awakening got violently
shut down by psychiatry, my inner subjective feeling was that my prayers were being
answeredthe trauma from my father was being released and liberated.
In a spiritual awakening, an enormous amount of psychic energy and latent
creativity is released, as if a beach-ball that was being held under water had been released
to its natural buoyancy. Talking about the birth of the true personality and its therapeutic
effect, Jung writes that it is as if a stone lying on a germinating seed were lifted away
so that the shoot could begin its natural growth.
vii
As is typical when something is long
held down and suppressed, there can be an over-compensation in one direction until the
shoot sprouting out of the germinating seed of the personality naturally gets in balance
over time. Typically, the person who is waking up can become quite enthusiastic (en-
theos means to be filled with spirit) about the good news they are realizing (Have
you noticed that this universe is a mass shared dream?), which can easily be interpreted
as being a form of mania.
In its initial stage, a spiritual awakening can, and often does look like and mimic a
nervous breakdown, as the persons habitual structures of holding themselves together
fall apart, as their inner constitution is being rewritten. Indigenous cultures the world over
are more aware than our modern, industrial society that when someone begins to act a
little weird, it might be the beginning of their call to potentially become a shaman or
healer, a role which would benefit everyone. Once my spiritual awakening became
ignited, I have no doubt whatsoever that all I needed was a number of months, maybe
even a year, to have a safe container, supported by friends, family and mentors to help me
to integrate what was being revealed to me. Instead of being pathologized, medicated and
all the rest, which simply aborted a deeper process that was emerging, all I needed was to
have my process held in a certain way so that it could creatively unfold itself and be
naturally metabolized and assimilated.
Experiences of trauma, wounding and abuse almost always initiate and catalyze
the shamanic archetype to begin to form-ulate and crystallize itself in the unconscious.
This precipitates a deeper part of the psyche to become mobilized, as the person enacting
the shamanic archetype journeys deep inside themselves, flying on the wings of their
creative imagination so as to address and become acquainted with what has gotten
activated within them. Because spiritual awakenings get catalyzed by experiences of
wounding, abuse and trauma, in a genuine spiritual awakening there is almost always a
co-joining of healthy and pathological factors. The idea is to nourish the healthy aspect of
the process so that it becomes stronger, and the pathological factors naturally fall away as
they become integrated into the wholeness of the newly emerging psyche.
It wasnt just that I was having a spiritual awakening and it was misdiagnosed as
mental illness; due in large part to the treatment I received from psychiatry, I was
literally driven insane. I remember one psychiatrist (who himself was what Woody Allen
might refer to as being a major loon) passionately insisting to me that I had had a
psychotic break from reality. I unquestionably had broken from the trance of consensus
reality; whether it was me or the psychiatrist who was the one who had the real psychotic
break was the question in my mind, a question which I was quickly learning to keep to
myself. It didnt take me long to figure out that if I authentically expressed what I was
subjectively experiencing, I would be pathologized. Many years later, my friend, the late
Harvard psychiatrist Dr. John Mack, shared with me his definition of being crazy: Its
not knowing who to tell, or not tell, what youre experiencing. From his perspective, I
was out of my mind to share my mystical experiences with his colleagues, and in
retrospect, I fully agree.
Of course there are people coming into the psychiatric system who are already
sick, but oftentimes psychiatry cultivates and sustains peoples illness, and then comes in
and says it can help to manage it (filling the pockets of Big Pharma in the process); the
whole thing is sinister beyond belief. Psychiatry has been subsumed into becoming an
arm of a more powerful agency whose darker agenda it unknowingly served. The mental
health system in our country is seriously broken. The psychiatric system and the
pharmaceutical companies (Big Pharma) are co-dependently intertwined with each other
in a genuinely pathological, mutually profitable, and crazy-making relationship. Seen as a
whole system, psychiatry/Big Pharma is like a pathological self-generating entity that
perpetuates itself through its care, creating illness for all involved as it keeps itself in
business. This isnt a paranoid, conspiracy-based point of view; rather, it the opposite: a
clear-sighted perspective of the nature of the beast we are dealing with.
Heres what I wrote in Dispelling Wetiko:

Dont get me wrong: there are plenty of well-intentioned psychiatrists,
including the ones with whom I worked. I am not talking about individual
psychiatrists; I am talking about the underlying psychiatric system as a
whole. It is important to acknowledge that in some ways the psychiatric
system has evolved since the early 80s, but in other ways it has not, or
has even gotten worsewith its increasing reliance on the use of
medication to address most problems, for example. Our mental health
system is an expression of the mental health, or lack thereof, of our
culture. Within the psychiatric worldview, there is a consensual agreement
and implicit, unreflected-upon set of assumptions with reference to
behaviors and modes of thinking/perceiving that are considered normal.
There is a way of understanding the very nature of health and sickness, as
well as fundamental ideas of who we are, that all representatives of the
academy have to accept in order for them to be considered card-carrying
members in good standing. There is an axiomatic set, a way of perceiving
the world that has been drilled into psychiatrists heads during their
training in medical school that is required for them to become true
initiates. The psychiatric system is set up to be a setup, in that built into
the system is the unconscious set of assumptions of materialistic science,
not the least of which posits that we exist as encapsulated, separate selves
apart from the underlying field. In fact, for most psychiatrists, there is
no concept of an underlying field of consciousness at all. Consciousness is
rather understood as something that arises from matter and thus can be
manipulated by material, that is, electro-chemical means (via psychiatric
drugs, for example). It takes an exceptional practitioner of the art of
psychiatry, a true doctor of the soul, to see through the implicit materialist
in-doctrine-ation they have received as part and parcel of their very
conditioning and training. Built into the non-level playing field of
psychiatry, into the very organization and structure of the field, to the
extent that self-reflection is not part of its practice, is the hidden abuse of
power (which also gets played out, once internalized, within traumatized
psychiatric patients heads). It takes more than good intentions for a
psychiatrist to not unwittingly become an instrument for the system to
play out its unconscious, destructive aspect. A true healer knows that they
are meeting themselves time and time again in their patients.
viii


Thankfully, after I got out of the last hospital in 1982, I began meeting my
Buddhist teachers, who instead of pathologizing me for experiencing the dreamlike
nature of reality, were teaching just that. The very fundamental, transformative insight
that I was beginning to realize in my awakeningthe non-objective, dreamlike and
symbolic nature of realitywhich was what I was pathologized for psychiatry for
attempting to articulate, is in fact the very same insight which is not only the pith essence
of all of the great esoteric spiritual wisdom traditions from around the world, but was also
the very insight that ultimately redeemed my experiences with both the psychiatric
system as well as my father and literally saved my life. Needless to say, I was happy to
find myself in such good company, though I wasnt overly thrilled at being left on my
own to deal with the psychological clean-up operation resulting from the traumatic
aftershocks and aftermath of a most unnatural, and unnecessary, psychiatric
disaster. Over the years, as Ive deepened and stabilized my realization of the dreamlike
nature of reality, Ive developed creative ways to get across this realization to others,
making a livingand a beautiful lifein the process.
Our species and its civilization are currently in the throes of a collective nervous
breakdown. If what we, as a species, are doing to ourselves isnt collective madness, then
what in the world is? Our underlying institutionalized and incorporated structures that are
helping to keep us asleep are breaking down and coming apart. Ironically, people who are
awakening to the dreamlike nature of realitypeople who psychiatry is more than
willing to pathologize and prescribe anti-psychotics forare the true anti-psychotic
agents in the greater body politic.
Intrinsic to the Hippocratic oath that all medical doctors take is to cause no harm;
in my case every single psychiatrist broke their sacred vow big time. The treatment I
received from psychiatry not only nearly killed me, but completely destroyed my family;
both of my parents went to their graves convinced, with the certification of the alleged
experts in psychiatry, that their only child suffered from an (illusory) chemical imbalance
and would be mentally diseased for the remainder of his days. Ruptures of the moral
order the likes of which psychiatry plays out on a daily basis do not lend themselves to
language; there are simply no words for the desolation that the abomination that is
psychiatry enacted in my life. Psychiatry could pay me all of the money in the world as
retribution for the devastation it directly caused in my life and it would barely be a drop
in the bucket for the unimaginable wreckage it is responsible for.

A pioneer in the field of spiritual emergence, Paul Levy is a wounded healer in
private practice, assisting others who are also awakening to the dreamlike nature of
reality. He is the author of Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of Evil (North Atlantic
Books, 2013) and The Madness of George W. Bush: A Reflection of Our Collective
Psychosis. An artist, he is deeply steeped in the work of C. G. Jung, and has been a
Tibetan Buddhist practitioner for over thirty years. Please visit Pauls website
www.awakeninthedream.com. You can contact Paul at paul@awakeninthedream.com; he
looks forward to your reflections. Though he reads every email, he regrets that he is not
able to personally respond to all of them. Copyright 2014.

i
Jung, Letters, vol. 1, p. 31.
ii
Laing, Visions, p. 28.
iii
Laing, The Voice of Experience, p. 9-10.
iv
Inside the Battle to Define Mental Illness, Dec. 27, 2010 issue of Wired Magazine
v
Psychiatric Times, (July 11, 2011 issue).
vi
Levy, Dispelling Wetiko, pp. 283-4.
vii
Jung, The Development of Personality, CW 17, para. 317.
viii
Levy, Dispelling Wetiko, pp. 280-1.