Discussion The concept of "Mentall ilness" is a harmfull and dangerous social construct.

[StateOfMind]

I am not going to try and re-invent the wheel here which is why I'm putting focus on following citations. All I can say is that what I have experienced was awe-full hell in the hands of psychiatry, ranging between 2016 and 2018 and in different countries. I don't promote suicide but given the circumstances of some or even many people I can totally understand why they would want to go down that path.

- Be sure to also check out SSRI stories (linked in the footnote) [04]

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[01] "The social forces Foucault sees driving this confinement include the need for an extra-judicial mechanism for getting rid of undesirables, and the wish to regulate unemployment and wages (the cheap labour of the workhouses applied downward pressure on the wages of free labour). He argues that the conceptual distinction between the mad and the rational was in a sense a product of this physical separation into confinement: confinement made the mad conveniently available to medical doctors who began to view madness as a natural object worthy of study and then as an illness to be cured."

Michel Foucault - Madness and Civilization
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madness_and_Civilization

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[02] 'The legitimacy of psychiatry is questioned by Szasz, who compares it to alchemy and astrology, and argues that it offends the values of autonomy and liberty. Szasz believes that the concept of mental illness is not only logically absurd but has harmful consequences: instead of treating cases of ethical or legal deviation as occasions when a person should be taught personal responsibility, attempts are made to "cure" the deviants, for example by giving them tranquilizers. Psychotherapy is regarded by Szasz as useful not to help people recover from illnesses, but to help them "learn about themselves, others, and life." Discussing Jean-Martin Charcot and hysteria, Szasz argues that hysteria is an emotional problem and that Charcot's patients were not really ill.'

Thomas Szasz - The Myth of Mental Illness
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_Mental_Illness

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[03] "The bedrock of political medicine is coercion masquerading as medical treatment. : In this process, physicians diagnose a disapproved condition as an "illness" and declare the intervention they impose on the victim a "treatment," and legislators and judges legitimate these categorizations. In the same way, physician-eugenicists advocated killing certain disabled or ill persons as a form of treatment for both society and patient long before the Nazis came to power."

"In his book Asylums, Erving Goffman coined the term 'total institution' for mental hospitals and similar places which took over and confined a person's whole life. Goffman placed psychiatric hospitals in the same category as concentration camps, prisons, military organizations, orphanages, and monasteries. In Asylums Goffman describes how the institutionalisation process socialises people into the role of a good patient, someone 'dull, harmless and inconspicuous'; it in turn reinforces notions of chronicity in severe mental illness."

Erving Goffman - Asylums
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asylums_(book)

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While your here check following resources (content may be disturbing for some readers)

[04] "SSRI Stories is a collection of over 6,000 stories that have appeared in the media (newspapers, TV, scientific journals) in which prescription drugs were mentioned and in which the drugs may be linked to a variety of adverse outcomes including violence."

ssristories.org
https://ssristories.org/

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Anti-psychiatry
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-psychiatry

 

[PrettyMoose]

What makes it all even worse for the individual, aside from the abuses by the system, is the discovery that real help doesn't actually exist and that "help" was a charade all along. This only makes hopelessness more extreme. No wonder suicide is more likely after leaving a psych ward.

 

[StateOfMind]

And it is further compounded by people who may know it's bullshit but are too afraid to speak out.

 

[Una]

Hi 'StateOfMind',

Thank you for this great thread.

I have been reading/researching this subject for quite some time and have arrived at the very similar conclusion;

1. What is considered 'normal' where 'normal' stands for not displaying any form of behavior that deviates from accepted norms of behavior, which is how majority behaves, has changed greatly throughout history and societies/cultures,

2. If, as in today's society, 'help' is understood and accepted to mean diagnose/label and then medicate the individual whose behaviors deviates from what is considered 'normal' - such 'help' only serves to convince the person even more that there is something wrong with them, that they have to be 'fixed/cured' in order to live in society,

3. As a result those with money may end up merely as 'eccentrics' spending their times in luxury sanatoriums/rehabs, most end up struggling with inadequate/overburdened health systems of various countries, and the most unfortunate ones are in jails, on the streets and in homeless shelters.

4. In my view the only way to really help those that suffer because they view the world differently then most and behave accordingly, would be to never start with trying to 'fix/change' them so to 'slot' them somehow/somewhere into the main stream society, but to first and foremost see, hear and accept them as they are and only then design a holistic, individual healing program/treatment, tailored to each person, with the overarching aim of empowering and supporting them to find their own place in human society. Such a healing program/treatment would involve cross-discipline specialists, and also the person's family/friends and community. I know it sounds like a pipe-dream, and it probably is, given the world in which we live, but, in my view, it is the only way to really help those that are now, conveniently and cheaply, swiped under the broad and ill-defined term of 'mental illness'. In the same time - nobody questions providing the suitable treatment and support, including equipment if required, for someone who, for example, drove while drunk/drugged and ended up severely injured. This is not to say that such a person should not be helped, of course they should. But so should a so-called 'mentally ill' person who has done nothing more to 'deserve' such a fate but to have been born with genetically loaded gun that was triggered once enough trauma occurred.

 

[GoodPersonEffed]

I saw the thread title and my first thought was, "read Foucault's Madness and Civilization." It's a tough read because of his writing style, but very informative about how the concept of "madness" and eventually "mental illness" evolved in relation to money and confinement.

His historical research led him to the thesis that madness was historically not socially stigmatizing, and in some cases honored socially and in literature and art. Then during a Western world financial crisis from, if I recall, the mid 1600s-1800s, people were imprisoned for debt and not working, and the "mad" were swept up in the moral imprisonment in England, France, and eventually the Amercian colonies. People who wanted the money of rich relatives could accuse them of madness and get them imprisoned.

During this period, institutions in England and France would let the "mad" out in the yards on Sundays so they would be on display as a form of entertainment, which made the "mad" an example and created an us vs. them framework, further reinforcing the social engineering goals of the state, similar to public hangings, and creating the stigma we still experience today. Toward the end of this period was the birth of psychiatry and the creation of institutions specifically for mental illness.

The wikipedia entry on this book gives an excellent summary if one doesn't want to read the book.

 

[a.n.kirillov]

Thank you for the suggestion, I have never heard of Gofmann. Another writer that helped me reconstruct my thinking on psychiatry and psychology after becoming disillusioned with it was David Smail.

Power, Interest and Psychology: Elements of a Social Materialist Understanding of Distress http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1948347.Power_Interest_and_Psychology

 

[noaccount]

wanna read some real out-there extrapolation on all this? just for fun ;)

Anthropology: Reclaiming the dragon (what was primitive communism?) - Lionel Sims

Article arguing that class society and patriarchy only arose ten to twenty thousand years ago. For over a hundred thousand years, before this counterrevolution, we lived in more gender-egalitarian and anarchist/communist hunter-gatherer societies. Lionel Sims shows the evidence for this...

libcom.org