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Today
there is an urgent need to challenge the dominance
of psychiatry and its control over the lives of people
it deems ‘mentally ill’. Psychiatry believes
that ‘mental illness’ is related to an underlying
biological pathology or genetic defect. There are
though no reliable diagnostic tests whereby it can
be proven that someone has a so-called mental illness,
such as schizophrenia for instance, which is related
to or caused by biological factors. Psychiatric diagnosis
rests on the assessment of a psychiatrist categorising
reported symptoms. The cause of a person’s severe
mental distress or ‘mental illness’ as psychiatry
would judge it is very often not seen as the result
of personal, societal or psychosocial factors but
instead the problem is seen as one residing within
the patient’s brain. Psychiatry’s answer
is psychiatric or neuroleptic drugs which they argue
help to redress the ‘bio-chemical imbalance’
in the brain and thereby treat the symptoms of the
‘disease’. The fact is though that these
drugs have been proven to have a debilitating and
blunting effect on a person’s emotional and mental
capabilities. Psychiatry admits that these drugs can
and do lead to tardive dyskinesia and other serious
neurological disorders and yet it continues to prescribe
them.
There needs to be a much greater recognition that
severe mental distress is often the result of people’s
sense of alienation and fragmentation within the political
and economic structure of society where meaning and
value is attributed only to the pursuit of money,
privilege and status. In today’s consumerist
and capitalist driven societies people have largely
lost a sense of meaning and belonging. It is no coincidence
that this has been accompanied by a rise in people
reporting symptoms of severe mental distress. Psychiatry
often removes these perspectives from its practice.
People need to question psychiatry and its adherence
to the biological model which labels mental suffering
as illness. One should examine psychiatry in the context
of its ignoble history and on the grounds of sound
and holistic treatment. The anti/critical psychiatry
movements are pointing the way forward when they say
that people should be helped to come to terms with
their suffering and not feel that they must endure
a lifetime of disabling drug ‘treatments’.
It is appalling that today the degrading practice
of Electro Conclusive ‘Therapy’ (ECT) continues.
There is a serious attempt to revive this brain damaging
‘treatment’ as a more widely practised ‘intervention’
in psychiatric practice.
Unlike in many other countries, Ireland, north and
south, has no critical or anti- psychiatry movement.
Psychiatry, it has to said, exists to protect its
own prestige and professional power and in certain
respects it shares an interesting similarity with
colonialism. Given the experience of colonisation
in Ireland, cultural oppression and emigration, we
know that there is a link between this experience
and high levels of mental suffering. It does not mean
that Irish people, blacks, or any other oppressed
ethnic group or indigenous population, are more genetically
predisposed to ‘mental illness’ than others.
As with colonialism, psychiatry today continues to
extend its borders in the whole area of human behaviour.
Many aspects of human variation and behaviour have
been drawn into its territory of pathology and colonised.
This has been done through a close alignment with
the multi-national pharmaceutical companies. There
now exists ‘a pill for every ill’ culture,
pills for shyness, social phobias, and so on. Children
are now being targeted with drugs for so called attention
deficit disorder. These are now all viewed as disorders
related to bio-chemical imbalances in the brain which
can be treated through new drugs. We are expected
to think and act in certain ways, a ‘project
of homogenisation’ as described by the anti –psychiatrist
R D Laing. Any deviation from this as such is often
regarded as a sign of pathology or disease in the
individual. Like colonial powers psychiatry does not
welcome resistance. Psychiatry’s role in eugenics
and racism is well documented and the writings of
Michel Foucault and Thomas Szasz have been instrumental
in making this visible. We in Ireland need a critical
or anti-psychiatry movement that can offer real alternatives
and support, a movement that rejects the biological
model of so-called mental illness.
Thankfully,
courageous individuals highly qualified in psychiatry
who became disillusioned with the practice have challenged
this model. The most controversialist perhaps of the
20th century was R D Laing. His book, The Divided
Self, was an attempt to portray the inner world of
a ‘schizophrenic’ which he presented as
an attempt to live in an unliveable situation. His
work was centred on understanding and treating the
person with support in the form of daily group and
individual therapy in a caring environment without
mind disabling drugs. He believed that the experience
of a breakdown could lead to a breakthrough. David
Cooper, a contemporary of Laing, was ideologically
more Marxist and believed that a whole new socio-economic
cultural shift was needed to end psychiatric oppression.One
of the most brilliant anti-psychiatrists and thinkers
of our time is Thomas Szasz, Professor of Psychiatry
Emeritus at the State University of New York Health
Science Centre in Syracuse, New York. Throughout his
long and distinguished career Szasz has waged a relentless
battle against biological psychiatry. According to
Szasz, the very concept of ‘mental illness’
is a myth. He has argued effectively that a ‘disease
of the mind’ is not the same as a disease of
the brain. He has brilliantly taken issue with the
semantics of psychiatry, the definitions, who gains
from the definitions, and who loses out as a result
of them. Also psychiatrists present themselves as
scientists and psychiatry and the political system
through it gain the power to effectively ‘detain’
and control people, subjecting them to forced psychiatric
drug ‘treatment’. His latest book, Liberation
by Oppression, is a strong and insightful debunking
of the psychiatric pseudoscience that demeans the
human spirit and has hurt countless lives.
In relation to the multi-national pharmaceutical companies
producing these psychiatric drugs, Ireland today is
an attractive base. They are amongst the biggest companies
operating in Ireland. The profitability of the industry
is reflected in the amount of corporate tax paid to
the 26 county government in the last two years, over
$250 million. No other ‘medical speciality’
is underwritten by the drug industry to a degree even
vaguely approaching that of psychiatry. There is no
disputing the fact that these drugs for many people
act as chemical straitjackets and cause a wide range
of serious and distressing symptoms.
Given that there is no empirical and reliable evidence
to prove a biological cause to mental illness we need
to recognise how society can cause people mental suffering
which can then get labelled as ‘mental illness’.
The
way forward therefore is not a practice that is fundamentally
flawed and loaded with an ignoble history which largely
benefits drugs companies and can act as a form of
social control. The dehumanising ideology of psychiatry
must be replaced. We need a re-connecting of the individual
with a meaningful culture, a re-visioning of medicine
as the art and science of holistically healing body
and mind. Given the growing control that psychiatry
is exercising this is one form of oppression that
must be resisted and the Irish experience should place
people in a position to understand and inspire opposition
to it.
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