**TL;DR** - **Those who dismiss psychiatry are those who have never benefitted from it.** One of the great positives of the previous years has been the increased openness and acceptance of mental health problems. After years of people ignorantly dismissing them, the various manifestations of mental health problems are being recognised and treated. Gradually, the stigma around them is being dismantled. Yet, there remains a fragment of society who dismisses them and disparages psychiatry as a form of head shrinking that does more harm than good. This could not be further from the truth. In fact, stating that psychiatry is a sham is both bigoted and dangerous. Psychiatry is not a question of throwing drugs at the problem and hope it goes away. It involves talking therapy whereby the patient's mental state is assessed by a medical doctor who has an expert understanding of the brain and how it works. It is not a question of 'tell me how you feel' and then possibly prescribing anti-depressants. Someone's mental state can be assessed by having conversations about normal topics such as politics and sport as it allows the psychiatrist to gain insight into how the patient is able to deal with a normal situation and how their mind is working. Therefore, those that peddle this falsehood are endangering the mental stability and health of many. Psychiatry helps by providing emotional and medicinal (if necessary) support.

Psychiatry, as a branch of medicine concerned with the treatment of mental illness, should be viewed as same as those of common diseases such as fever and cold. The truthfulness of psychiatry could be called into question considering the fact that no significant improvements can be seen on a person with mental health problems after receiving treatments first few times. However, different from other types of diseases that patients can recover soon after taking medicine, their symptoms can only be reduced gradually given the complex nature of mental health issues. To illustrate it, diagnosing the specific type of disorders a person has takes a long period of time since many mental issues share similar symptoms. For example, sometimes schizophrenia is firstly identified as depression because they have similar symptoms such as delusions and hallucinations. In addition, the aim of psychiatry is not to completely eliminate one’s mental health issue since most mental disorders are incurable, but to improve the quality of life. Due to the plasticity of human brain, people with some degree of mental illness can live a positive life receiving treatment and maintain a good interpersonal relationship. If misunderstanding psychiatry undermines the contribution of psychiatrists, then denying its value could harm the group of people with mental health problems. The refusal to receive treatments from professional doctors may aggravate their mental health issues and increase the difficulty for them to be fully recovered. What is more, it should be noticed that the stigmatization in society to psychiatry negatively affects the evaluation of people’s real mental capacity. People with distrust of their psychiatrists may unconsciously act according to biased ideas in society and lower the efficiency of mental health treatments, which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Thus, their mental conditions may confuse psychiatrists to find the real cause of their problems. Though psychiatry should be seen indiscriminately as other medical treatments, considering the complexity of mental health issues, psychiatrists need to conduct more comprehensive tasks such as diagnosing the correct mental disorders and applying treatments including evaluating cognitive ability and offering appropriate medicine to people with mental health issues. Thus, psychiatry is not a sham but a more complicated field of medicine comparing with fever and cold which benefits people with mental health problems significantly.

Psychiatry is borderline shamanistic, but sometimes, that's still incredibly necessary. I simply can not function without my medicine.