Bipolar I disorder is a deadly disease if left untreated. And yet, antipsychiatry activists continue to reject advances in neuroscience as well as indisputable evidence of the efficacy of mood stabilizers and other drugs to treat the symptoms of severe mental illness.

In 1960, Thomas Szasz, an American psychiatrist and academic, published The Myth of Mental Illness, denying the existence of mental illness altogether. Dr. Szasz’s book is still in print and continues to be required reading in some university and college sociology programs. In 1991, Peter Breggin, an American psychiatrist and student of Dr. Szasz, published Toxic Psychiatry, not only criticizing the biological model of mental illness, but also labelling psychotropic drugs as “the worst plague of brain damage in medical history.”

In 2016, the late Bonnie Burstow, a senior lecturer at Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, created a firestorm of controversy when she launched a scholarship in her name for a thesis student conducting related research supporting her anti-psychiatry beliefs. However, no individual or organization has fuelled the antipsychiatry movement more aggressively than the Church of Scientology. By recruiting celebrities such as John Travolta and Tom Cruise, Scientologists have raised enormous financial resources to support its agenda. In December 2005, influential public officials and entertainment industry leaders gathered in Los Angeles to mark the opening of its new museum, Psychiatry: An Industry of Death.

Just as distressing is the belief by leading voices on mental health and addictions, including Canadian physician and author, Dr. Gabor Maté. In his new book The Myth of Normal, co-authored with his son Daniel Maté, he refutes the biological approach to mental illness, when he writes about the “faulty assumptions that exemplify the simplistic genetic narrative.” When scholars, educators, doctors, nurses, politicians and religious institutions brush off the disabling effects of a mental illness as a personal weakness or moral failure, or the manifestation of early childhood trauma, is it any mystery that Jim has had to fight in the courts for financial benefits routinely granted to people living with physical impairments?