Psychiatry

Psychiatry
Interest of	• Peter Breggin • Vladimir Bukovsky • Ewen Cameron
Discipline devoted to the diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of mental disorder, can often be just a reinforcement of the prejudices of the era. Open for power abuse since there are less legal safeguards.

Psychiatry is the medical specialty devoted to the diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of mental disorders. These include various maladaptations related to mood, behaviour, cognition, and perceptions.

The discipline is, and has historically been, viewed as controversial by those under its care, sociologists and psychiatrists themselves. Reasons cited for this controversy include the subjectivity of diagnosis, the use of diagnosis and treatment for social and political control including detaining citizens and treating them without consent, and the side effects of treatments like electroconvulsive therapy, antipsychotics and historical procedures like lobotomy and other forms of psychosurgery or insulin shock therapy.

Punitive Psychiatry

Political abuse of psychiatry, also commonly referred to as punitive psychiatry, is the misuse of psychiatry, including diagnosis, detention, and treatment, for the purposes of obstructing the human rights of individuals and/or groups in a society.  In other words, abuse of psychiatry (including that for political purposes) is the deliberate action of having citizens psychiatrically diagnosed who need neither psychiatric restraint nor psychiatric treatment.

Since forced psychiatry often has less legal recourse than criminal procedures, this can be a more effective and underhand way to punish dissidents. Some forms of treatment, like psychiatric drugs or lobotomy, will often permanently reduce the mental capacity of the patient. In addition, just the use of psychiatric treatments can often create a debilitating social and political stigma.

Canada

The Duplessis Orphans were several thousand orphaned children that were falsely certified as mentally ill by the government of the province of Quebec, Canada, and confined to psychiatric institutions.

France

In 2018 a French court ordered French member of parliament and leader of the National Front Marine Le Pen to submit to a psychiatric evaluation as part of its investigation into her decision to post images of Islamic State executions on Twitter.

United States

• "Drapetomania" was a supposed mental illness described by American physician Samuel A. Cartwright in 1851 that caused black slaves to flee captivity. In addition to inventing drapetomania, Cartwright prescribed a remedy. His feeling was that with "proper medical advice, strictly followed, this troublesome practice that many Negroes have of running away can be almost entirely prevented." In the case of slaves "sulky and dissatisfied without cause"—a warning sign of imminent flight—Cartwright prescribed "whipping the devil out of them" as a "preventative measure". As a remedy for this disease, doctors also made running a physical impossibility by prescribing the removal of both big toes. Cartwright also proposed "dysaesthesia aethiopica" as a mental illness that caused laziness among slaves.
• In the United States, political dissenters have been involuntarily committed. For example, in 1927 a demonstrator named Aurora D'Angelo was sent to a mental health facility for psychiatric evaluation after she participated in a rally in support of Sacco and Vanzetti.
• When Clennon W. King, Jr., an African-American pastor and activist of the Civil Rights Movement, attempted to enroll at the all-white University of Mississippi for summer graduate courses in 1958, the Mississippi police arrested him on the grounds that "any nigger who tried to enter Ole Miss must be crazy." Keeping King's whereabouts secret for 48 hours, the Mississippi authorities kept him confined to a mental hospital for twelve days before a panel of doctors established the activist's sanity.
• In the 1964 election, Fact magazine polled American Psychiatric Association members on whether Barry Goldwater was fit to be president and published "The Unconscious of a Conservative: A Special Issue on the Mind of Barry Goldwater." This led to the adoption of an ethical rule against diagnosis of public figures by a clinician who has not performed an examination or been authorized to release information by the patient. This became the Goldwater rule.
• In the 1970s, Martha Beall Mitchell, wife of U.S. Attorney General John Mitchell, was diagnosed with a paranoid mental disorder for claiming that the administration of President Richard M. Nixon was engaged in illegal activities. Many of her claims were later proved correct, and the term "Martha Mitchell effect" was coined to describe mental health misdiagnoses when accurate claims are dismissed as delusional.
• In 1972 Thomas Eagleton was forced to withdraw as a vice presidential candidate for being treated for depression.
• In 2010, the book The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease by psychiatrist Jonathan Metzl (who also has a Ph.D. in American studies) was published. The book covers the history of the 1960s Ionia State Hospital located in Ionia, Michigan and now converted to a prison and focuses on exposing the trend of this hospital to diagnose African Americans with schizophrenia because of their civil rights ideas. The book suggests that in part the sudden influx of such diagnoses could be traced to a change in wording in the DSM-II, which compared to the previous edition added "hostility" and "aggression" as signs of the disorder.
• Clinical psychologist Bruce E. Levine, argues that Oppositional Defiant Disorder, which can be easily used to pathologize anti-authoritarianism, is an abuse of psychiatry.
• In 2014, The Mercury News published a series of articles detailing questionable use of psychotropic drugs within California's foster care system where bad behavior is attributed to various mental conditions, and little care is provided besides drugs. Likewise, many experts questioned the long-term effects of high dosages on developing brains, and some former patients reported permanent side effects even after stopping the meds.

California

• "5150 (involuntary psychiatric hold)" – There are many instances of usage of California law section 5150, which allows for involuntary psychiatric hold based on the opinion of a law enforcement official, psychological professional (or many other individuals who hold no qualification for making psychological assessment), which have been challenged as being unrelated to safety, and misused as an extension of political power.

New York

Whistleblowers who part ranks with their organizations have had their mental stability questioned, such as, for example, NYPD veteran Adrian Schoolcraft who was coerced to falsify crime statistics in his department and then became a whistleblower. In 2010 he was forcibly committed to a psychiatric hospital.

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References

This page imported content from Wikipedia on 22.11.2021.
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