Paper:Psychiatry As Social Control

I take your first point point. But if they did use the argument it would be disingenuous and incorrect for a number of reasons. And if we endorse positions which dismiss the notion of mental illness and psychiatry wholesale, we are being quite unreasonable. I'd rather be as right as possible and let them be wrong.

I take your next point, too. The paper is not all wrong - it's criticisms of psychiatric abuses are important. But I'm sure it's a moral disaster to totally dismiss the notion of mental illness.

You can criticize me if needed, too. I prefer to know if I'm blithering or bloviating as soon as possible, after some indulgence, of course . I appreciate your politeness, though .

 

It depends, again. There are real illnesses here, as well as illnesses created by committees defining them. These are then labelled as mental in the process. Most of these are going to be social issues or brain disorders. "Mental" is an invented category, socially acceptable, with no objective evidence. The problems are real. The pidgeonholes/categories are problematic, and in some cases nonsense (though the worst of those never made it into DSM ... you should see the ones rejected that were taken seriously for a while). Don't forget that homosexuality was once a mental illness. So was opposing the State, at least in Russia.

The moral disaster is in inferring that large numbers of people currently diagnosed with mental illnesses are not sick or do not need nor deserve help. The biggest moral disaster is actually the norm right now, there is insufficient funding to investigate biomedical causes of the brain issues in the majority of "mental" diseases, and a lot of funding is going into vague theories that have no objective measures available. The PACE trial is the one example of the latter that we are familiar with here. The fiasco with CBT and asthma and schizophrenia is also important ... this is much wider than just ME.

Here is a mantra I think they should adopt - no psychiatric clinical trials without objective outcome measures.

 

There's something interesting I read in a book by Gerhard Strate (Der Fall Mollath). He's arguing there is an ambivalence between instinctive needs and reason/humanism. The human still has an instinctive need to identify unwanted groups and to exclude them. But he also wants to be "civilized". One solution is psychiatry: It will "mark" unwanted people (here: with a psychological-psychiatric illness) who will be excluded.

Interesting argument.