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http://www.zolatimes.com/V4.5/psychiat.html
The Insanity of Psychiatry
by Jim Peron
In our secular age psychiatry has become
the new religion and the psychiatrist has
become the new priest. Psychiatry is
mystical in that the lay person can’t understand it
and in that it claims to be able to explain
life to us. Let anything unusual happen and the
media seeks out some psychiatrist who can
“explain” it. In the past a tragedy would bring
out priests and ministers. Today such
events are plagued with hordes of counselors and
therapists. We have instant analysis at our
fingertips — not even the oracles of Delphi
worked this efficiently. If man is a
religious being torn between mysticism and reason, then
psychiatry is his attempt to fuse the two.
Psychiatry is a powerful entity in our
legal and social system. It can be used to exonerate
those guilty of committing crimes, and it
can be used to incarcerate those who have
committed no crime. It can persuade judges
to grant or deny child custody, etc. In his
book The Power of Psychiatry, Jonas
Robitscher, who is both a lawyer and a
psychiatrist, listed 51 ways that
psychiatrists can exert power. And, no doubt, since the
book’s publication new powers have been
granted. But psychiatric power is based on
myths. What power psychiatry has, comes
from our belief in those myths. A closer look
reveals how silly these myths can be.
Psychiatrists Study
Masturbation
For years adolescents were warned of the
dangers of masturbation. Hairy hands,
blindness, and a host of infirmities, would
strike the practitioner of “solitary vice.” These
attitudes came from the anti-sexual side of
religion and they seem rather foolish to today’s
more enlightened mind. But what is often
forgotten is that psychiatry picked up these
Victorian attitudes about sex — lock,
stock, and chastity belt. One can make the case
that psychiatry disguised Victorian
religion by dressing it in scientific drag.
One of the most interesting examples of
this appeared in the New Orleans Medical and
Surgical Journal from just over a century
ago. An editorial in this respected medical
journal warned that “neither plague, nor
war, nor smallpox, nor a crowd of similar evils,
have resulted more disastrously for
humanity than the habit of masturbation: it is the
destroying element of civilized humanity.”
The clergy picked up on “scientific” warnings of
this kind to bolster their own
anti-pleasure beliefs. So, first psychiatry took its clues from
the clergy and then the clergy quoted
psychiatry. Thus, using each other for support, they
set up a system difficult for the layman of
that day to crack.
Of course, we know that enlightenment was
to come. Didn’t Freud appear on the scene
and redeem us from this insanity? No! Freud
remystified (falsely approached) morality by
adding the concept of the subconscious. Now
the evil still existed, but we didn’t know
why we were evil. Instead of demons and
devils driving the wicked, the force was in their
mind and called the subconscious.
Psychoanalysis, therefore, would serve as the great
exorcist.
There has been some progress among
psychiatrists in the way they view masturbation. At
the beginning it was said to cause all
sorts of “mental illnesses.” Then Freud tied it only to
neurosis. Later, the eminent psychiatrist
Karl Menninger proclaimed that it wasn’t a
mental illness at all. However, his
revision claimed that “masturbation occasions a heavy
burden of guilt, because in the unconscious
mind it always represents aggression against
someone.” According to this well-known
psychiatrist people masturbate because they are
angry, not because they are horny.
From 'Sin', to 'Mental
Illness', to 'Therapy'
The issue of masturbation shows clearly the
confusion inherent in psychiatric theory.
When the general moral climate declared
masturbation sinful the psychiatrist called it
mental illness. He could do that because
mental illness is created by a psychiatrist
labeling an act as “mental illness.”
Psychiatrists create the diseases they pretend to
cure by an act of rhetorical fiat. When the
moral climate changed so did the
nomenclature. In fact, today masturbation
is no longer called a mental illness — now it is
considered a therapy. “Sexperts” Masters
and Johnson have proclaimed a lack of
masturbation to be a problem. This new
illness is called “masturbatory orgasmic
inadequacy.” It is found in women who have
“not achieved orgasmic release by partner or
self-stimulation in either homosexual or
heterosexual experience."
Freud, in his attack on masturbation,
pointed out that young men seduced by women at
an early age don’t develop neurasthenia (a
neurotic condition which he claimed resulted
from masturbation). On the other hand,
women seduced by men at an early age become
frigid. One need not point out that this is
the old double standard medicalized. Sexually
active young men avoid mental illness while
similar sexual activity for young women
causes it. Freud obviously did not consider
with whom these young men were supposed
to be sexually active. Young women have
been ruled out; older women would only raise
the mother-figure concept. This did leave
other young men—but homosexuals have long
been a favored psychiatric scapegoat.
The purpose of psychiatry is to treat
mental illness. The goal of the psychiatrist is to make
“sick” people well. That is simple enough.
But the problem compounds when someone
has the audacity to ask what is meant by
the term “mental illness.” One psychiatric
textbook admitted: “diagnosis is, more or
less, an arbitrary matter.” Even the US
Supreme Court admitted that mental illness
“is to a large extent based on medical
impressions drawn from subjective analysis
and filtered through the experience of the
diagnostician. This process often makes it
very difficult for the expert physician to offer
definite conclusions about any particular
patient.”
Be Careful Whose Voice You
Listen To
In one rather well-known experiment, a
group of college students were sent to psychiatric
institutions over a period of time. The
students were told to say they heard voices but to
be totally truthful in their responses on
everything else. They were also instructed to act
normal in every way. The bulk of the
students were admitted for “therapy,” since the
psychiatrists couldn’t tell the sane from
the insane. When the nature of the experiment was
revealed, the institutions were quite
embarrassed by the incident. The professor who
conducted the study then announced that it
would be repeated over the next few months
with other subjects. The admission rate at
these institutions dropped dramatically after the
announcement. This proved that once again
the psychiatrists were impotent, since in fact
no further test subjects had been sent to
them.
As mentioned earlier, the psychiatric
establishment has called homosexuality a mental
illness for years. Under political pressure
they voted this mental illness out of
existence. The psychiatrists, however,
haven’t been willing to surrender one victim unless
they can replace him with another. The new
“patient” is the homophobe who
contaminated with “homophobia” which is the
dislike of homosexuality and homosexuals.
One therapist went so far as to say: “I
would never consider a patient healthy unless he
had overcome his prejudice against
homosexuality.” This same psychiatrist wrote an entire
book to examine this “disease called
homophobia.” So, here we have one of the great
psychiatric reversals (similar to the one
that has taken place regarding masturbation). At
one time the homosexual was sick. This
justified psychiatric incarceration, electric shock
therapy, frontal lobotomies, and a host of
other tortures. Then gays fought back and now
homosexuality per se is no longer a mental
illness — it’s been voted out of existence. Of
course psychiatrists now tell us that the
anti-homosexual is mentally ill. This, I assume,
would include the 40 per cent of
psychiatrists in the American Psychiatric Association
who voted to retain homosexuality as an
illness.
Don’t get the impression that psychiatry
has retreated from anti-homosexuality. It hasn’t.
Today one isn’t necessarily ill if they are
homosexual, but they are if they are gay and
don’t like it. There is, of course, no
similar category of mental illness for heterosexuals
who don’t want to be heterosexual.
Psychiatry has thus managed to condemn both
homophobes and homosexuals alike. They
didn’t actually abolish one "mental illness" ....
they simply redrew the lines of demarcation
and in the process created a whole new
mental disease. It should be noted how easy
it is for the psychiatric profession to
create new mental illnesses by simply
taking a vote. After all, if disease could rely
upon medical consensus for it to exist,
then the medical profession could abolish cancer
overnight. But real medicine is (or should
be) determined by objective, scientific facts, and
not the subjective moral opinions of its
elite.
The Wonderful New Mental
Illness: Homophobia
Some gays thought the new line of
demarcation and the disease it created — homophobia
— was wonderful. It was touted by some as a
major victory for gay liberation. The
National Gay Rights Task Force, in the US,
called homophobia “a flawed personality
trait” which “mental health professionals
have identified.” At a conference sponsored by
gay groups, one speaker announced:
“Homophobia is the problem, not homosexuality.
Homophobia is the pathology, not
homosexuality.”
Now, by making bigotry a "mental illness,"
one thereby removes the bigot from the realm
of morality and places him in the medical
realm instead. This reclassification of bigotry
establishes a foundation for the
exoneration of the bigot. Such a theory of bigotry would,
for example, serve well the interests of
past perpetrators of apartheid. They could defend
their crimes by claiming “diminished mental
capacity” due to “the disease of negrophobia.”
Instead of a Truth Commission we could
create a commission of psychiatrists to treat the
poor victims of this new disease.
This is virtually what happened in the case
of Dan White, the assassin of San Francisco
Mayor George Moscone and gay city
Supervisor Harvey Milk. White couldn’t be
inflicted with the disease of homophobia
and be responsible for his crime at the same
time. By medicalizing White’s actions the
court was saying that the assassinations were
actually a symptom of his disease. The
trial of White ended with him being found to suffer
from “diminished capacity” and he received
a slap-on-the-wrist sentence. The city’s gay
population was shocked; but large segments
of their own leadership had established the
foundation on which this exoneration was
based by accepting the existence of a phony
disease called “homophobia”.
It is the fact that no definition for
mental illness exists that makes psychiatry so flexible.
The choices are endless and limited only by
the imagination of the psychiatrist. About the
only group free of such charges are the
psychiatrists themselves, although one could
charge them with paranoia since they are so
quick to accuse people of being mentally ill.
The Psychopathology of
Bachelorhood
Dr. Irving Bieber, a prominent
psychiatrist, once told Time magazine: “There is increasing
recognition that bachelorhood is
symptomatic of psychopathology." There’s even a
category of mental illness for smokers.
It’s called a “Tobacco Use Disorder” and is
revealed “when the use of the substance is
directly associated with stress at the need to
use the substance repeatedly; or there is
evidence of a serious tobacco-related physical
disorder in the individual who is judged to
be physiologically dependent upon tobacco.”
Since we don’t know what a mental illness
is, then anything can be used to cure it and
anyone can be said to suffer from it.
Therapies can come and go as quickly as the
illnesses. In fact, as shown earlier, the
two can reverse themselves.
Today psychotherapy takes on many forms.
About any activity the human mind can
conceive of, the psychiatric mind can call
therapeutic. Back in the days when Jesus was
considered something of a therapist,
instead of a patient, he met a madman whose major
symptom was to run about nude. Today Jesus
would be quite surprised, and Beau
Brummel quite thrilled, to learn that
nudity is a therapy. Some therapists have claimed
that sexual intercourse with their patients
is therapeutic. As many as 10 per cent
have admitted to engaging in such
“therapy.” Other therapists have recommended
prostitutes for their patients, and Masters
and Johnson have even dispensed prostitutes to
clients like some doctors dispense pills.
Today the major concern with the abuse of
psychiatry revolves around the courts and the
insanity defense plea. As Dr. Thomas Szasz
has pointed out, in addition to accusing the
innocent, psychiatry has made big business
out of excusing the guilty. Some “syndrome”
or “illness” can easily be found to excuse
virtually any criminal act. And the more
horrendous the crime the more obvious the
disease to the psychiatrist. After all “sane
people don’t.......(fill in the crime of
your choice).”
"Truth" is a Mental
Illness
The great problem with psychiatric
testimony is that one can say anything and not be guilty
of perjury. And it often happens just that
way. The defense psychiatrist says the defendant
was insane and the prosecution psychiatrist
says he wasn’t. Which one is lying? Neither
one—but they can’t both be telling the
truth. But in psychiatry there is no “truth”. If
anything, the desire to find “truth” is
probably evidence that one is mentally disturbed. In
psychiatry there is only subjective,
individual moral judgments. There is no science.
Where other witnesses are told to limit
their testimony to the facts, psychiatrists
are specifically allowed to interpret the
facts as subjectively as they wish.
The psychiatrist began to worm his way into
the courts about fifty years ago. His eventual
goal is the total medicalization of society
via the legal process. Leading forensic
psychiatrist Manfred Guttmacher wanted
court psychiatrists to sit in on trials. “It is my
belief that the time has arrived or had I
better say, is fast approaching, when the
psychiatrist would be of more assistance to
the court, in all cases in which psychiatric
issues are pertinent, if he were more
closely related to the judge. This psychiatrist, as I
envisage him, would be a sworn court
official, specifically trained for his task, who would
sit in the particular courtroom in which he
was needed, free to give and even offer advice
to the judge on psychiatric issues ... Such
a sworn court official could be available for
consultation with any of the trial judges —
even perhaps with judges at the appellate court
level.”
It is surprising that Dr. Guttmacher didn’t
suggest replacing judges with psychiatrists and
doing away with the middle man. Karl
Menninger, a psychiatrist famous for claiming the
punishment of criminals is a crime itself,
said: “Psychiatry must sooner or later totally
displace existing legal methods.” And noted
psychiatrist Brock Chisholm went even
further when he said that “the and eventual
eradication of the concept of right and wrong
... are the belated objective of
practically all effective psychotherapy.”
The end result of the medicalization of
society would be the therapeutic state: the rule of
the psychiatocracy. An editorial in the
American Journal of Psychiatry stated: “As
studies of the effects of social and inner
forces on human behavior, we are uniquely
qualified to help social policy makers
devise ways to make our science and technology
work better for us.” And a former president
of the American Psychiatric Association
proclaimed: “As I see it our professional
borders are virtually unlimited.” However this
idea of rule-by-the-psychiatrist caused one
therapist to write: “This dangerous games of
‘no limits’ has [given] psychiatrists and
psychologists ... the license to become politically
active; experts on architecture,
consultants to astronauts, students of porpoises, advisers
on urban renewal and commentators, orators
or authors on virtually anything.”
The future belongs to the psychiatrist. His
goal is the complete medicalization of society:
the world as patient and the rule if the
psychiatocracy. Since the psychiatrist has a vested
interest in diagnosing as many people as
possible as mentally ill, the whole process can
continue till the world is divided between
the masses who are patients and the elite few
who are therapists. If you don’t believe
it, you’re crazy.
Jim Peron is a South African journalist who
was interviewed by Alberto Mingardi in a
recent issue of The Laissez Faire City
Times. He has recently finished a book entitled
Two Masters: the Conflict Between
Christianity and Capitalism.
Email:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
-30-
from The Laissez Faire City Times,
Vol 4, No 5, January 31, 2000
http://www.zolatimes.com/V4.5/psychiat.html
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