Insight Matters
Summer 2005

Editorial

Intellectual Terrorism
Henry A. Nasrallah, M.D., Editor

Terrorism and the random destruction of human life permeate the news and the consciousness of most of the inhabitants of our planet these days. Some have developed a sense of resignation about the inevitability of senseless acts of terror while others are fighting back. We psychiatrists have been observing from the sidelines, watching the murders of innocent individuals and contemplating how the normal circuitry of the human mind can be so twisted with blind hate and murderous rage. Our diagnostic criteria appear inadequate to pigeon-hole the bizarre acts of cheerfully destroying oneself and others for abstruse ideological reasons.

But what about the random acts of "intellectual terrorism" directed at psychiatry itself by anti-psychiatry groups over the past few decades? How do we respond to those who adamantly deny the existence of psychiatric disorders, belittle those who suffer from mental illness and negate the substantial science that guides its treatment? Why do we and our patients have to put up every year at the APA annual convention with individuals carrying placards that proclaim "psychiatrists are killers" or "psychiatry drugs are poisons"? Is this freedom of speech or hate speech that represents intellectual terrorism? No matter how much we pretend to take it in stride and not take it to heart, it still is a vicious attack on our medical discipline that is rarely inflicted on other medical specialties. Furthermore, it perpetuates and feeds into the stigma of mental illness and deters many psychiatrically ill individuals from seeking the treatments they sorely need.

I recall being shocked as a resident many years ago when our Grand Rounds speaker , supposedly a "distinguished" academic psychiatrist (in fact, a department chair!) hurled perverse intellectual bombs at the audience by screeching : "Schizophrenia is a myth, mental illness is a myth, there is no such thing as mental illness" ! Having just worked up several acutely psychotic patients on the ward with intense delusions, hallucinations, and bizarre behavior as well as several severely depressed and suicidal patients , I was shocked and outraged by what I heard. But as a junior resident, my professional identity was jarred and my passion to pursue neurobiology and neuropharmacology research was transiently dampened. Having heard many ridiculous anti-psychiatry slogans since then , I often wondered why we as psychiatrists tolerate such irrationality from within our ranks, not just the venomous garbage gushing from the gaggle of cults outside of us. It seems that our tolerance of severely disturbed thinking and behavior in the clinical populations we treat every day has inoculated us to the outrage inflicted by fanatic intellectual terrorists around us.

OK, it's time for me to end this editorial and go to treat a waiting room full of patients with depression, a disabling disease that some Hollywood celebrity claims does not exist .

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