With little exaggeration, we
may say that inheriting the rubric of 'mental illness', to be placed in the
position of having to use such a phrase to describe one's past or present status
seriously curtails one's future prospects in almost every sphere of life. You
can attempt to dismiss it as an impossibly crude, hopelessly absurd and
overly-simplistic explanation for a particular period in your life, yet, despite
your awareness of this fact, would-be employers still turn up their noses as
though you had spent years marinading in some foul and rancid sauce. They will
have the presence of mind, of course, to nod sympathetically as they are aware
they should in such cases, but ultimately, your unlikely to get the call, nor
indeed, should you expect to, for once you have accepted the term 'mental
illness' as being in any way a satisfactory designation for who you are, what
you were, or, what please God, you hope never to be again, if you accept all of
that, then you have what I would call a real problem; you have embraced the
mythology of the psycho-pharmaceutical complex.
Of course, no self-respecting myth-making apparatus would be complete without a holy book and in this era of neurological reductionism its text is written in the few square centimetres of 'impossibly complex' space between your ears. Its pages, the twisting labyrinthine neural networks of axons and dentrites. Its words; anything that is zipped, zapped, ferried, shipped, hauled, transported or responsible for acts thereof within and between this admittedly wondrous architecture; to wit, trillions of neurotransmitters, potassium ions, amino acids and sundry assorted exotic molecules that fizz in and out of existence in the seething electrified soup of the synaptic junctions. Its grammar; well, its anyone's guess really - your laptop would sooner rewrite its own source code and dispatch itself to the moon than an administered neuroleptic change who you are - though it may make you less of what you are.
And yet, despite this, we still have knowledgeable scholars, whom we call neurologists who seek to interpret the holy writ, holy and sanctified because what transpires there, oddly enough, tells them just about everything they need to know about ourselves and 'our sins'. Under the old regimes - both animist and monotheistic - we were possessed by all manner of demons whose names were, in one famous instance at least, legion; well plus ca change; Roger Blashfield writing in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease in 1996 and tracing the staggering expansion of afflictions documented in the pages of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual predicted it's fifth edition would have '1256 pages, will contain 1800 diagnostic criteria, eleven appendices and would generate $80 million in revenue for the APA.' He was of course lampooning the whole tragi-farcical evolution of syndromes, disorders and diseases each multiplying exponentially as a consequence of our 'vastly improved technologies' - MRI and PET- and each coming with a tailor-made and competitively priced solution; why three Hail Mary's and an Our Father when we now have Zyprexa and Olanzapine, or a decade of the rosary - when your nasty demons can be pacified by Syrenase or Chlorpromazine and so it goes, and so it never stops in fact, for we are now lifetime subscribers, a shareholders fantasy, a captive market (did we mention your condition was deteriorative?), battery humans in the factories of Pfizer and Novartis. In the wards you are made to pad limply as limbic disembodied ghosts grateful for your daily benediction - a sad, appalling, grotesque charade. There is a genuine affliction here alright - its called Stockholm's Syndrome.
Thomas S. Szasz, the Hungarian born US psychiatrist, has, in a series of works provided in modern times what many regard as the most trenchant critique of the 'myth of mental illness'. In his preface to the book of the same title he regards his mission as laying bare the 'sociohistorical and epistemological roots of the modern concept of mental illness.' In Foucauldian terms this may be seen as an attempt to alter the landscape of the "archive", to challenge the system of it's enunciability, which, we can say, has become so crystallized that it has made it impossible for us to conceptualize the range of phenomena associated with 'mental illness' other than equating them with a pathological aetiology. In his introduction Szasz writes;
"It is widely believed that mental illness is a type of disease, and that psychiatry is a
branch of medicine; and yet, whereas people readily think of and call themselves 'sick', they rarely think of and called themselves 'mentally sick'. The reason for this, as I shall try to show, is really quite simple: a person might feel sad or elated, insignificant or grandiose, suicidal or homicidal, and so forth; he is however not likely to categorize himself as mentally ill or insane; that he is, is more likely to be suggested by someone else. This then is why bodily diseases are characteristically treated with the consent of the patient, while mental diseases are characteristically treated without his consent. Individuals who nowadays seek private psychoanalytic or psychotherapeutic help do not as a rule consider themselves either sick', but rather view their difficulties as problems in living and the help they receive as a form of counselling. In short, while medical diagnoses are the names of genuine diseases, psychiatric diagnoses are stigmatising labels."
It is, in fact, bewildering to behold the manner by which wisdom such as this is so readily debunked. It seems the best way to fight your fiercest opponent is to dismiss them as though they are somehow beneath response. It may be declared; 'clinical trials have demonstrated the efficacy of neuroleptics in treating psychosis', or depression has been shown to be 'endogenous' and therefore it is to be assumed that Szasz's arguments have been somehow undermined. Even if, some far distant day in the future all the sub-disciplines currently concerned with the understanding of the body and the complexity of events that take place therein were to announce that a new supercomputer could track all the thousands of variables that gave rise to a singular feeling in time that feeling will not and cannot be expressed by the experient in the language of molecules. The multiplicity of events that have taken place within the body to give rise to the emotion are rendered by the experient in condensed metaphorical form through the vehicles of language and behaviour. There has been a translative leap from an extremely complex 'low-level' set of interactions to a higher, more manageable code. What seems to have escaped behaviourists in particular, who maintain that body gesture alone communicates most of what can be known about an individual is that there is an incalculable amount of surplus expression merely constrained by the physical limitations of the bodily form.
The arguments of Szasz, in fact, remain the same, and the words above are as true today as they were first written over fifty years ago. The only difference however is that they do not receive any exposure or legitimation by the psycho-pharmaceutical complex for the perfectly understandable reason that if his ideas were absorbed and acted upon, 'it', along with its myth-making apparatus would quite simply cease to exist. I certainly don't recall any instance whereby Szasz made assertions of having any especial knowledge with respect to the interaction of ions, molecules or acids with neurons and their trillion odd tributaries in the brain. It was perfectly obvious that in reality he didn't need to have any knowledge of such things. So we have ingeniously determined that 'energies' are being transferred from one structure to another. We have given these structures and their related processes thousands, indeed millions, of different names to differentiate them and this we regard as 'knowledge' and the most fluent expositors of such information we generally deem to be 'knowledgeable', perhaps even expert and yet we can say no more of the substance that binds them all; "energy", other than that it is a "force". Where 'it' came from we are simply at a loss. In fact, it is best not to ask at all, as one may well 'go mad'. In reality, no-one has the faintest idea of how the brain produces a thought and no clinician, psychiatrist or neurologist has any real understanding of what is happening to the brain when neuroleptics are introduced - in fact, the only empirically discernible real-world changes wrought by the over-prescription of these poorly understood psycho stimulants are the healthier stock options for pharmaceutica. inc.
In point of fact I don't think Szasz has gone far enough in his denunciation of psychiatric diagnoses and the stigma that is of course necessarily attached to them. When mental health associations and even patient advocacy groups decry the stigma attached to 'mental illness' they do so in a manner that suggests they are little aware that the greatest source of stigma that may be encountered by someone who is undergoing difficulties in living is to have their struggles reduced to and being called a 'mental illness'. The stigma emerges directly from the description itself and thus the battle-cry we wish 'to challenge the stigma attached to mental illness' is as fine an example of an oxymoron as one could wish to encounter. From the point at which this dominant "meme" or "signifier" is brought into play an entire network of unhelpful auxiliary associations are mobilised in the minds of the average person which no amount of awareness raising, educational leaflets or destigmatizing talk sessions can possibly erase.
To the sympathetic layperson the entire set of problems will ultimately spring from a 'mental illness' regardless of how humanistic, holistic or comprehensive are the successive supplementary' explanations. And why would they not think so given that the groups set up specifically to look out for the interests of those who have difficulties in living are themselves choosing this most unhelpful and ultimately misleading of terms. For them the dominant rubric chosen is done so obviously to point out the basic reality that lies behind the condition This is in fact the phrase that they themselves appear happy to use to convey to the world the nature of their difficulties. What is worse because of their prominence in the media and their copious usage of the phrase it is implied that others who have been through the psychiatric system are themselves content to have their experiences thus compounded and designated.
They are not and they never will.
The Critical Psychiatry website
Index.html
Of course, no self-respecting myth-making apparatus would be complete without a holy book and in this era of neurological reductionism its text is written in the few square centimetres of 'impossibly complex' space between your ears. Its pages, the twisting labyrinthine neural networks of axons and dentrites. Its words; anything that is zipped, zapped, ferried, shipped, hauled, transported or responsible for acts thereof within and between this admittedly wondrous architecture; to wit, trillions of neurotransmitters, potassium ions, amino acids and sundry assorted exotic molecules that fizz in and out of existence in the seething electrified soup of the synaptic junctions. Its grammar; well, its anyone's guess really - your laptop would sooner rewrite its own source code and dispatch itself to the moon than an administered neuroleptic change who you are - though it may make you less of what you are.
And yet, despite this, we still have knowledgeable scholars, whom we call neurologists who seek to interpret the holy writ, holy and sanctified because what transpires there, oddly enough, tells them just about everything they need to know about ourselves and 'our sins'. Under the old regimes - both animist and monotheistic - we were possessed by all manner of demons whose names were, in one famous instance at least, legion; well plus ca change; Roger Blashfield writing in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease in 1996 and tracing the staggering expansion of afflictions documented in the pages of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual predicted it's fifth edition would have '1256 pages, will contain 1800 diagnostic criteria, eleven appendices and would generate $80 million in revenue for the APA.' He was of course lampooning the whole tragi-farcical evolution of syndromes, disorders and diseases each multiplying exponentially as a consequence of our 'vastly improved technologies' - MRI and PET- and each coming with a tailor-made and competitively priced solution; why three Hail Mary's and an Our Father when we now have Zyprexa and Olanzapine, or a decade of the rosary - when your nasty demons can be pacified by Syrenase or Chlorpromazine and so it goes, and so it never stops in fact, for we are now lifetime subscribers, a shareholders fantasy, a captive market (did we mention your condition was deteriorative?), battery humans in the factories of Pfizer and Novartis. In the wards you are made to pad limply as limbic disembodied ghosts grateful for your daily benediction - a sad, appalling, grotesque charade. There is a genuine affliction here alright - its called Stockholm's Syndrome.
Thomas S. Szasz, the Hungarian born US psychiatrist, has, in a series of works provided in modern times what many regard as the most trenchant critique of the 'myth of mental illness'. In his preface to the book of the same title he regards his mission as laying bare the 'sociohistorical and epistemological roots of the modern concept of mental illness.' In Foucauldian terms this may be seen as an attempt to alter the landscape of the "archive", to challenge the system of it's enunciability, which, we can say, has become so crystallized that it has made it impossible for us to conceptualize the range of phenomena associated with 'mental illness' other than equating them with a pathological aetiology. In his introduction Szasz writes;
"It is widely believed that mental illness is a type of disease, and that psychiatry is a
branch of medicine; and yet, whereas people readily think of and call themselves 'sick', they rarely think of and called themselves 'mentally sick'. The reason for this, as I shall try to show, is really quite simple: a person might feel sad or elated, insignificant or grandiose, suicidal or homicidal, and so forth; he is however not likely to categorize himself as mentally ill or insane; that he is, is more likely to be suggested by someone else. This then is why bodily diseases are characteristically treated with the consent of the patient, while mental diseases are characteristically treated without his consent. Individuals who nowadays seek private psychoanalytic or psychotherapeutic help do not as a rule consider themselves either sick', but rather view their difficulties as problems in living and the help they receive as a form of counselling. In short, while medical diagnoses are the names of genuine diseases, psychiatric diagnoses are stigmatising labels."
It is, in fact, bewildering to behold the manner by which wisdom such as this is so readily debunked. It seems the best way to fight your fiercest opponent is to dismiss them as though they are somehow beneath response. It may be declared; 'clinical trials have demonstrated the efficacy of neuroleptics in treating psychosis', or depression has been shown to be 'endogenous' and therefore it is to be assumed that Szasz's arguments have been somehow undermined. Even if, some far distant day in the future all the sub-disciplines currently concerned with the understanding of the body and the complexity of events that take place therein were to announce that a new supercomputer could track all the thousands of variables that gave rise to a singular feeling in time that feeling will not and cannot be expressed by the experient in the language of molecules. The multiplicity of events that have taken place within the body to give rise to the emotion are rendered by the experient in condensed metaphorical form through the vehicles of language and behaviour. There has been a translative leap from an extremely complex 'low-level' set of interactions to a higher, more manageable code. What seems to have escaped behaviourists in particular, who maintain that body gesture alone communicates most of what can be known about an individual is that there is an incalculable amount of surplus expression merely constrained by the physical limitations of the bodily form.
The arguments of Szasz, in fact, remain the same, and the words above are as true today as they were first written over fifty years ago. The only difference however is that they do not receive any exposure or legitimation by the psycho-pharmaceutical complex for the perfectly understandable reason that if his ideas were absorbed and acted upon, 'it', along with its myth-making apparatus would quite simply cease to exist. I certainly don't recall any instance whereby Szasz made assertions of having any especial knowledge with respect to the interaction of ions, molecules or acids with neurons and their trillion odd tributaries in the brain. It was perfectly obvious that in reality he didn't need to have any knowledge of such things. So we have ingeniously determined that 'energies' are being transferred from one structure to another. We have given these structures and their related processes thousands, indeed millions, of different names to differentiate them and this we regard as 'knowledge' and the most fluent expositors of such information we generally deem to be 'knowledgeable', perhaps even expert and yet we can say no more of the substance that binds them all; "energy", other than that it is a "force". Where 'it' came from we are simply at a loss. In fact, it is best not to ask at all, as one may well 'go mad'. In reality, no-one has the faintest idea of how the brain produces a thought and no clinician, psychiatrist or neurologist has any real understanding of what is happening to the brain when neuroleptics are introduced - in fact, the only empirically discernible real-world changes wrought by the over-prescription of these poorly understood psycho stimulants are the healthier stock options for pharmaceutica. inc.
In point of fact I don't think Szasz has gone far enough in his denunciation of psychiatric diagnoses and the stigma that is of course necessarily attached to them. When mental health associations and even patient advocacy groups decry the stigma attached to 'mental illness' they do so in a manner that suggests they are little aware that the greatest source of stigma that may be encountered by someone who is undergoing difficulties in living is to have their struggles reduced to and being called a 'mental illness'. The stigma emerges directly from the description itself and thus the battle-cry we wish 'to challenge the stigma attached to mental illness' is as fine an example of an oxymoron as one could wish to encounter. From the point at which this dominant "meme" or "signifier" is brought into play an entire network of unhelpful auxiliary associations are mobilised in the minds of the average person which no amount of awareness raising, educational leaflets or destigmatizing talk sessions can possibly erase.
To the sympathetic layperson the entire set of problems will ultimately spring from a 'mental illness' regardless of how humanistic, holistic or comprehensive are the successive supplementary' explanations. And why would they not think so given that the groups set up specifically to look out for the interests of those who have difficulties in living are themselves choosing this most unhelpful and ultimately misleading of terms. For them the dominant rubric chosen is done so obviously to point out the basic reality that lies behind the condition This is in fact the phrase that they themselves appear happy to use to convey to the world the nature of their difficulties. What is worse because of their prominence in the media and their copious usage of the phrase it is implied that others who have been through the psychiatric system are themselves content to have their experiences thus compounded and designated.
They are not and they never will.
The Critical Psychiatry website
Index.html
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