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TelePsychiatry: Lives Ruined at a Distance

Colin Taufer

There was a time when psychiatric diagnosis required live face to face consultation before patients’ lives were ruined through psychiatry. Now, through modern technology, lives are also ruined at a distance with telepsychiatry: psych evaluation and drug prescription through teleconferencing.

That telepsychiatry exists at all as a form of psychiatric “therapy” only highlights the broken and destructive nature of the psychiatric diagnostic process. Like all psychiatric examination, telepsychiatry diagnosis requires no blood tests, x-rays, brain scans or any other biological testing for that matter. Diagnosis is purely subjective and unscientific, full of guesswork and conjecture. There is no need for lab work of any kind.

This lack of scientific verification in the process guarantees incorrect evaluations. There are numerous physiological reasons a patient may be experiencing lethargy: brain injury, poor nutrition, dehydration, stomach virus, hypothyroidism, etc. But a psychiatrist, with their unscientific analysis, does not search for or find a cause, instead they only see symptoms (inactivity, apathy, disinterest) and conclude the patient is suffering from depression and needs a lifetime supply of dangerous and expensive (and very profitable) antidepressants.

On one end of the line sits the patient staring into his computer’s camera; anxious, concerned, uncertain. On the other end is the psychiatrist, ready to label the patient and issue a prescription. The patient talks about life and problems of living. The psych listens for symptoms (not root physical causes), does some mental guesswork, stamps the patient with a mental illness (insurance requires something is defined an illness before they’ll pay for it), issues a prescription and clicks goodbye.

Psychiatry has taken an already inhuman practice, full of unscientific conclusions and destructive “cures”, and made it even more subjective and more impersonal. This is telepsychiatry.

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Colin Taufer is a career educator, writer and lifelong advocate for human rights. With each article, he hopes to shine a light onto the dark world of psychiatry, to make stronger champions of human rights, to stir into action, to enlighten. He appreciates feedback from readers.

He can be reached at: ColinsColumn@gmail.com