OF THE
TIMES
"Perhaps most radically ... Thomas Szasz deemed mental illness a mythic and monstrous beast, and proclaimed that 'mental illness' was a fiction. Insanity, he has continued ever since to claim, is not a real disease, whose nature has been progressively scientifically unveiled; mental illness is rather a myth, forged by psychiatrists for their own greater glory. Over the centuries, medical men and their supporters have been involved, argues Szasz, in a self-serving 'manufacture of madness.' In this, he indicts both the pretensions of organic psychiatry and the psychodynamic followers of Freud, whose notion of the 'unconscious' in effect breathed new life into the obsolete metaphysical Cartesian dualism. For Szasz, any expectation of finding the etiology of mental illness in body or mind -- above all in some mental underworld -- must be a lost cause, a dead-end, a linguistic error, and even an exercise in bad faith. 'Mental illness' or the 'unconscious' are not realities but at best metaphors. In promoting such ideas, psychiatrists have either been involved in improper cognitive imperialism or have rather naively pictorialized the psyche -- reifying the fictive substance behind the substantive. Properly speaking, contends Szasz, insanity is not a disease with origins to be excavated, but a behavior with meanings to be decoded. Social existence is a rule-governed game-playing ritual in which the mad person bends the rules and exploits the loopholes. Since the mad person is engaged in social performances that obey certain expectations so as to defy others, the pertinent questions are not about the origins, but about the conventions, of insanity. In this light, Szasz dismisses traditional approaches to the history of madness, as questions mal post and aims to reformulate them." - From: Porter, R., Introduction, in Porter, R. and Wright, D., eds.,The Confinement of the Insane: International Perspectives, 1800-1965(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)
The great psychiatric explorer and innovator RD Laing once wrote that, "If the patient is disturbed, then the family is disturbing..."
Meanwhile, the psychiatric industry continues to cling to their self-built edifice of a simulacrum of science-as-they-see-it.
Which is tantamount to a delusional syndrome.
For years,the psychiatrics sold us this fable that their drugs filled some 'chemical imbalance' in our brains, and they're still selling us the nonsense that you can change the world if you change your perceptions.
Well, they've obviously done that. They perceive themselves to be doctors who actually help people with their mental issues. Whilst the reality is none of their patients gets cured, not one recovers unless by their own efforts and rather more humane, sensitive and empathic interactions with others.
In reality, the psychiatric industry is bereft of a clear understanding of the impact of the context in which patients develop emotional and mental issues. And the best they can do is further undermine most of their patients with drugs and judgements about how inadequate they are as human beings. Control is the name of the game.
Just as we look back now in muted horror at the way people suffering from an overload of abuse in the past were treated, our descendants will be looking back at the today's psychiatric industry and sighing deeply at how misguided they were.