ABSTRACT
The central claim equating distress with disease has consequences: it permits the American Psychiatric Association (APA) to cyclically develop, sanction and sell a recognisably invalid classification system, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM); it encourages organisations, researchers and clinicians to erroneously but vigorously portray non-specific behaviour-controlling psychoactive chemicals as precision medicines targeting bodily malfunctions; and it convinces mental health clinicians to use or threaten to use coercion as an integral part of 'treatment' for disturbing behaviour. These are some direct consequences of what we call a 'mad science'. Major institutional arrangements shield mad science from the usual requirements of science. There is now a broad recognition that psychiatry and psychiatric research, the engine of mad science, is awash in money that distorts honest enquiry. The research enterprise should be an arena that prizes free and open enquiry, criticism, independence of thought and unbiased research. Science and the scientific enterprise in mental health have been debased.
