----- Original Message -----
Sent: Thursday, August 05, 2004 12:04
PM
Subject: Re: [PEN-L] The rise of an
emotion based left was Bush using drugs
I agree: as I've said
before, people such as Castro and Noriega
are dismissed as
"crazy" by establishmentarian figures.
As someone who deals
with the community of parents of kids on the autistic
spectrum,
I'm always fighting
the urge (not just by others) to diagnose various people as autistic,
Asperger's, etc.
without actually knowing them personally and therapeutically. (These
people include
Albert
Einstein, Bill Gates, the fictional Napoleon Dynamite, etc.)
Hi all,
I disagree strongly with this view. .
.
Mental health tags are continually used to discredit
whistleblowers, Marxists, and others who challenge orthodoxy. This
reproduces the dominant view that mental health questions only pertain to
individuals, particularly those individuals who are not conformist in a
pernicious hierarchical social order. It also reproduces the Western view
that mental health applies to isolated individuals, not societies and their
leaders. . .
Bush on the Couch is a very important work that brings
bourgeois psychoanalysts and phsycologists beyond the clinic and applies
their insights to the true sources of perversion in the land.
Yes,
there is a danger in this. . .but the prevailing ideology of individual
causation of disease and illness, captured in the dominant ideology of
biomedicine is far, far worse. . .
Marx and others are fair game for
this analysis as well. . .
Brian McKenna
