Marta Russell wrote:
>
> Not all help is *competent* help.
True. But some is.
> Psychiatry is not a science.
Is this only a way of saying it isn't quite exact? Also true, but given the problems it has to deal with it's better than nothing.
> There
> are no blood tests for various mental conditions.
Mostly true, but not quite.
> Many people seeking
> help are prescribed medications that harm them, not help them.
True, but so is the opposite. I used to be very antimedication too, until I had to help confront the problems medications can sometimes address.
> When
> the patient knows this and expresses it,
Why necessarily accord the patient's perception primary acceptance? This gets to Yoshie's comments in a later post about the "informed consumer," a questionable myth.
> their experience can be
> invalidated by a "know it all" psychiatrist.
True, to the extent that some psychiatrists are schmucks. It's a larger extent than I like, but, seeing the patient as some kind of noble savage is no sounder a form of thought.
> Anyone who has
> communication with those who have been in the trenches knows of
> instances where psychiatrists are WRONG with diagnoses and treatment.
Yes, this is quite true. Let me add a few other criticisms of the psychiatric profession. They tend to take a narrow, limited view of the social context in which patients exist. They sometimes think they can sum up treatment in the attempt to mix the ultimate cocktail. (They've gotten more modest about this in the last few years.) They aren't anywhere as good as they ought to be at distinguishing the issues they properly confront from those that have to do with the exigencies of managed care. (Here too, though, there's been some improvement in recent years, as they've felt more jerked around by HMO's.). I could go on.
>
> Forced treatment takes the right of the individual to act in their own
> interest away.
Do you believe that all individuals are self-actualizing and clear in advancing their own interest all of the time?
> Geez just look at forced electroshock therapy. Some
> docs and hospitals still think that is a valid form of treatment and
> force it upon patients.
See the article Yoshie posted later. I have my own doubts about ECT, but just as I have doubts about medication, I suspect a blanket condemnation is questionable. I have fr less actual contact with ECT, so have a less developed opinion about it.
>
>
> Futher "mental illness" is a loose category that can be used to
> silence those who voice opposition to political regimes and get
> committed to institutions for it -- " for their own good" !
Also true, but in many years of working in an emergency room I have met only one political oppositionist. He complained of alcoholism, but didn't need or want psychiatric evaluation. He wandered in carrying armloads of books by Raya Dunayevskaya. I like her too, but didn't think discussing her under the circumstances would help him very much. He never saw the psychiatrists, and, if he had, I'm sure they wouldn't have been interested, either in Raya D or in his psychiatric problems, which, though obvious, weren't acute in a way that demanded their attention. Leftists like to think about psychiatric issues in these terms, but their political implications are more indirect, practically all of the time. Psychiatry is political like, say, housework is political. The personal is always, in some sense, political. And then, of course, there are the class and race implications of psychiatry, which you might have mentioned, and you would have been right.
Let me go back to one of your more telling remarks:
> Dump bourgeiose theory for a moment.
>
I agree. Liberal civil libertarian individualism has attractions. I'm susceptible too, but I do think it's a limited approach.
Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema