Peter Kosenko wrote:
> don't have an answer today for everyone's nuanced questions of the matter.
>
> By the way, the Japanese school slasher was supposedly on some sort of psychotropic medication as an outpatient "maintenance" case (actually, he probably wasn't an "out"-anything, since I think he was simply given the drugs and told to take them). "Drug treatment" alone apparently didn't help him deal with whatever problems he had.
>
The actual mechanism by which class and race discrimination in provision of psychiatric care lies in exactly this. It is easy and cheap to prescribe drugs. They do help up to a point, but tend to be very inadequate without other forms of non-drug therapy and supportive services in the case of the really severe illnesses. This was what happened with Andrew Goldstein, who pushed Kendra Webdale in front of a train. He was a chronic schizophrenic, if I recall, who had many admissions, and had been denied services in a half-way house that could have kept him taking his pills, relieved him of some of the stresses of making daily decisions about eating, housing, etc. The NEW YORK TIMES exposed the records which demonstrated how he had been forced out of hospitals prematurely.
This goes to show that psychotropics and other forms of coerced treatment are not, in themselves, the problem. Fiscal constraints ensure that they will be both over- and under-used, in ways that diminish their valuable but delimited utility.
Let me also respond to an exchange between Yoshie and Ian. This will make this a long post, but I want to keep within limits.
I agree here --
Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> >Ian Murray wrote:
> >>
> >> ==========
> >> The current pharmaco-therapeutic regime exists for the sake of workers
> >> and managers of "mental" institutions, which in turn exist for
> >> Capital; that they might benefit patients is epiphenomenal, given our
> >> immense ignorance of our own brains.
> >>
> >> Ian
> >
> >This is my sense of it too -- having watched the for-profit nursing
> >home industry, the adult "care" industry, the home "care" industry,
> >state institutions for the deaf, the blind and the "incurables."
> >These corporations and institutions benefit much more than the
> >"patients" who are often forced to live in them. People are forced to
> >be there by powerful lobbied interests which serve to keep the funding
> >going to their vested interest rather than to the individual to make a
> >choice about where they would like to live and with whom.
> >
> >Marta
>
> What's the practical alternative to "the for-profit nursing home
> industry, the adult 'care' industry, the home 'care' industry, state
> institutions for the deaf, the blind and the 'incurables'"? Since
> you appear to be arguing against both state & corporate institutions
> (as well as anything in-between), what is left? Families? Friends?
> Living alone?
>
> Yoshie
The anti-therapeutic civil libertarian stance often seems to reduce to liberal individualism. As my next-to-last post should make clear, I am as much of a critic of psychiatry as any, but the notion that people with addictions, significant psychiatric illness, character disorders, etc., are potentially "informed consumers" in the same way as consumers of toasters is absurd.
Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema