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sophia-sadek.livejournal.comBack in the day word leaked out of the Soviet Union that political dissidents were being incarcerated as mental patients. To be opposed to the outcome of the proletarian Revolution was seen as a symptom of psychosis. A rationale could easily be made that only a sick mind would seek to depose the all-powerful Communist Party. The logic of psychiatry is such that the profession is perfect as an instrument of political control. It is the ideal Orwellian power tool.
Thomas Szasz criticized the feigned shock and horror of American psychiatrists over this news. He pointed to a similar mechanism in the American version of the profession that characterizes defiant children as sick in the head. It is a nifty device that provides parents with the authority to dope up children when they become frighteningly disobedient. It also gives teachers the capacity to marginalize students who have yet to buy into the program of educational indoctrination.
In their work on the problem of social problems Malcolm Spector and John Kitsuse describe the political machinations of American and other Western psychiatrists to control the debate over the political aspects of psychiatry. When calls for an investigation into Soviet practices went out few sociologists had the cycles to spare on the project. Psychiatrists insisted on recruiting researchers who were not hostile to their profession. The fear that a sociological inquiry into Soviet abuses would be used to look into abuses on the other side of the Iron Curtain was not unfounded. After all the field of sociology was known to be critical of psychiatry including the famous Rosenhan experiment. (That study sent fake patients into mental "health" facilities in order to further open up the can of worms of psychiatric abuse.)
Psychiatry serves well as a loophole in the institution of civil rights. Anyone can be stigmatized as a mental case and denied rights supposedly guaranteed by the government. Children can be defrauded of their rights to parental contact when one or both parents rub government bureaucrats the wrong way. Once an individual has been sucked into the mental "health" regime they are never the same as before. Even if a victim of psychiatry escapes the brain damage of "treatment," they cannot escape the iron maw of official stigma. Certainly this is not completely the fault of psychiatry itself, but the profession resists attempts to strip it of such power. We can see this in Spector and Kitsuse's description of resistance to investigations into psychiatric abuse.
Do you truly believe that Western psychiatry is immune to the practices witnessed in the Soviet Union? Have you ever met anyone who is the victim of psychiatric abuse? Could it be said that any mental "health" patient has escaped psychiatric abuse?
Links: Thomas Szasz on the Soviet psychiatry. Spector and Kitsuse on psychiatric resistance to sociological investigation.
Thomas Szasz criticized the feigned shock and horror of American psychiatrists over this news. He pointed to a similar mechanism in the American version of the profession that characterizes defiant children as sick in the head. It is a nifty device that provides parents with the authority to dope up children when they become frighteningly disobedient. It also gives teachers the capacity to marginalize students who have yet to buy into the program of educational indoctrination.
In their work on the problem of social problems Malcolm Spector and John Kitsuse describe the political machinations of American and other Western psychiatrists to control the debate over the political aspects of psychiatry. When calls for an investigation into Soviet practices went out few sociologists had the cycles to spare on the project. Psychiatrists insisted on recruiting researchers who were not hostile to their profession. The fear that a sociological inquiry into Soviet abuses would be used to look into abuses on the other side of the Iron Curtain was not unfounded. After all the field of sociology was known to be critical of psychiatry including the famous Rosenhan experiment. (That study sent fake patients into mental "health" facilities in order to further open up the can of worms of psychiatric abuse.)
Psychiatry serves well as a loophole in the institution of civil rights. Anyone can be stigmatized as a mental case and denied rights supposedly guaranteed by the government. Children can be defrauded of their rights to parental contact when one or both parents rub government bureaucrats the wrong way. Once an individual has been sucked into the mental "health" regime they are never the same as before. Even if a victim of psychiatry escapes the brain damage of "treatment," they cannot escape the iron maw of official stigma. Certainly this is not completely the fault of psychiatry itself, but the profession resists attempts to strip it of such power. We can see this in Spector and Kitsuse's description of resistance to investigations into psychiatric abuse.
Do you truly believe that Western psychiatry is immune to the practices witnessed in the Soviet Union? Have you ever met anyone who is the victim of psychiatric abuse? Could it be said that any mental "health" patient has escaped psychiatric abuse?
Links: Thomas Szasz on the Soviet psychiatry. Spector and Kitsuse on psychiatric resistance to sociological investigation.
