Gordon Warme - The Relationship Between Culture and Psychiatric ‘Disorders’

This week we interview Dr Gordon Warme. Dr Warme is a medical doctor specializing in psychiatry. He trained with Karl Menninger at the Menninger Clinic in the US and at Heidelberg University in Germany, and has been a faculty member at the Menninger Clinic, the University of Kansas, and has been an academic at the University of Toronto for 40 years.

His most recent book, published in 2016 is Brain Evangelists: How Psychiatry Has Convinced Us to Believe in Its Far-Fetched Science and Dubious Treatments in which he blows the whistle on modern psychiatry, arguing that, in the long history of medicine, biological and chemical “abnormalities” in psychiatric patients have never been identified, and labels such as schizophrenia and depression are misleading metaphors that dehumanize patients.

In the episode we discuss:

How Dr Warme came to specialise in psychiatry. His experience of being trained by doctors who had a strong psychoanalytic approach. That Sigmund Freud wanted psychiatry to be scientific, but Dr Warme feels that this led Freud astray. The relationship between culture and psychiatric ‘disorders’. Watching, describing and talking as important therapeutic skills to develop. Dr Warme’s view of how drugs are used in psychiatry and that he hasn’t prescribed for many years. The Rosenhan Experiment. Where psychiatry is heading as a profession.

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