To Whopper - So by the 50% being true, that'd be back when they had lobotomy and inhumane treatment of patients, right? Yes
I think you got the gist of it, yes. If you look at medicine and how it was conducted decades ago, of course it's going to seem barbaric by today's standards.
It wasn't until the 80s where people started associating being overweight, eating a high fat diet, and smoking as (edit: un)healthy. In fact some doctors were even saying smoking was healthy further back in the 50s. Does that make all of medicine BS because there were advances showing certain medical practices were wrong? Of course not.
If you read the history of psychiatry, people were put into asylums as they were known back then for decades with little hope. Back in the day, there was no real treatment for schizophrenia. If someone had it, many of them, for all intents and purposes, didn't get better but couldn't be let into society because they could not care for themselves or were dangerous.
Add to the equation that these people were shunned by society, they had no voice to advocate for themselves, and had no political clout (no money, no attention, etc), and you had a situation where asylums were treating these people no better than animals in several occasions. States didn't want to fund these people. Several of them were on the order of one doctor for literally thousands of patients.
Meds that treated schizophrenia didn't come out until a few decades ago, and while they worked, they did have major side effects. Due to advancement of medications, schizophrenics could actually now look forward to the odds of being hospitalized only on the order of weeks instead of for the rest of their lives provided they keep up with treatment.
It wasn't until the 60s to 70s where schizophrenics were actually given patient rights. This is in large part due to the civil rights movement. The same advancements that occurred for people of color also occurred for psychiatric patients in asylums. It's just that most people don't know about them because they aren't psychiatrists.
And that's where the video is actually true but taken out of context. Yes, psychotic patients were often not treated well, but the premises the video takes are completely false.
1) Mental illness such as schizophrenia does exist. 2) The people with the disorder weren't treated well. 3) Improvements were made.
Yet the video makes it out as if psychiatry is stuck in those days. In reality, it actually was psychiatrists in many of those cases that actually caused those improvements. For example, asylums are funded by the state. Most states do not want to fund mental illness and as a result led to asylums being poorly managed. Often times its psychiatrists and the family members of the mentally ill fighting for more treatment opportunities and respect for the mentally ill.
One could, for example, make a video that only showed every single bad police act ever done, then make the assertion that as a profession, police officers should be banned.
Of course, such an assertion would be ridiculous to the public, but that's because the public understands what a police officer does, and that they are people and can make mistakes, but the profession is needed by society. People don't understand psychiatry, and the video, done by people that have decided to make psychiatry their villian (by their religion, if you want to call it that), is made with the full intent of exploiting and misleading the public based on their lack of knowledge.
I've said this several times in the past. The mentally ill, like several other underprivileged groups are more likely to be exploited. I welcome the effort of any group that wants to advocate for them and at the same time expose bad doctors. The problem here is Scientology, or their sham front group CCHR that made this video aren't that. They're trying to make themselves out to appear that, but they're not that. They're more on the order of a whacko stalker ex-lover trying to take down a guy by exaggerating or outright lie about everything he's done.