[lbo-talk] Let them eat Prozac (was: let's argue about the causeofmental illness

Dwayne Monroe dwayne.monroe at gmail.com
Sun Sep 27 16:15:43 PDT 2009


Carrol wrote:

<snip>

...we are in the same atmosphere as that of various food faddists that both Dwayne and shag have mercilessly mocked in the past. Individuals who cherry pick evidence to fit their beliefs and write it up in sparkling prose.

[...]

Amateur judgments of medical issues are often correct -- and often not correct. And there is no way for amateurs to recognize which is which.

It's too much like conspiracy theories: even if true, they are politically useless because political action can be organized only about issues on which the facts are evident from the daily headlines, without even reading the articles.

.........

As Shag noted, Healy is a psychiatrist, not an amateur.

He's not against his own field and does not claim drugs are useless. His argument is much subtler than that of the "food faddists" we've satirized and dissected.

Unlike the crusading foodies, who misdiagnose our food system problems as a symptom of our supposed alienation from a romanticized Nature, Healy precisely identifies the capitalism in the room.

Healy writes:

The truth is, we didn't win. The world changed. Both psychiatry and anti-psychiatry were swept away and replaced by a new corporate psychiatry. Galbraith has argued we no longer have free markets; corporations work out what they have to sell and then prepare the market so that we will want those products (Slide 12). It works for cars, oil, and everything else, why would it not work for psychiatry? Prescription only status makes the psychiatric market easier than almost any other market - a comparatively few hearts and minds need to be won."

[...]

Note carefully what Healy's saying: other useful tools -- such as cars and petrol -- are engineered and marketed with profit requirements at the forefront. To acknowledge this isn't anti-technology ranting, it's a recognition of the way our ideological and built environments have been shaped according to the needs of capitalism. Healy's question isn't, do drugs work? It's, what drugs are available to us and why?

I suggest that anyone who thinks Healy is a No-logo style anti-corporatist (that is, lots of anti but little analysis) re-read what he's written.

.d.



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