Having had my fill of anti-theism, the emergence of anti-psychiatry comes as a welcome diversion. Any attempt to debunk psychiatry is commendable, partly because psychiatrists are usually in greater danger of permanent mental instability than their patients and partly because psychiatrists have not come to any consensus on what it is they are treating: some think the mind is entirely treatable by manipulating the brain through chemicals or electroshock, others favour therapy through the kind of exchange people used to have with a bartender – or a priest in prior ages. Almost none admit to the existence of the human spirit, so almost all are at sea.
Batty though most psychiatrists are, those who gathered recently in Toronto for a conference called PsychOUT, are battier still and, ironically, remind me somewhat of the grand-loon of psychiatry, R. D. Laing, whose theories included: psychotic behaviour is a valid expression of distress; psychiatry is not a science (well, true); schizophrenia should be valued as a cathartic and transformative experience; and psychiatrists themselves are responsible for the madness of many of their patients – hard to argue against that last point.
From the National Post:
David Carmichael, a mentally-ill youth fitness advocate and aspiring federal politician who drugged and suffocated his 11-year-old son in a hotel room, is not your typical academic conference presenter.
Then again, PsychOUT, a controversial strategy session this weekend at the University of Toronto for “organizing resistance against psychiatry,” is not a typical conference.
A rare global event for the anti-psychiatry movement, with speakers from as far as Ghana, it is billed as a celebration of Mad Pride with an eye to the future overthrow of psychiatry, which has replaced religion as the primary oppressor of the human mind.
As organizer Bonnie Burstow puts it, modern psychiatry is beyond saving, and destroying it “is unachievable in the short run. But the long run is a very different thing.”
As a first step, the conference will promote new Ontario legislation aimed at defunding electroshock therapy, seen by anti-psychiatrists as a particularly brutal assault on people unfairly labelled as crazy.
I have an aquaintance for whom electroshock therapy is the only thing that works to treat her depression. It is a last resort, and the patient is put under anesthesia.
Manipulating the brain through chemicals does work for many people, as does therapy. The problem with therapy, from my perspective, is this: You go to a therapist because your thinking is disordered, and you need help ordering it again. You’ve got to be very careful in your choice of a therapist – if their faith, worldview, morals are different from yours, their definition of “ordered” will be different from your definition of healthy and ordered. But, when you are sick, how can you make that decision? Your thought processes are still disordered and ill, so how can you make that judgement successfully?
The “Mad Pride” movement is very frightening to me. These people need help, and are incapable of seeing it. It is disturbing that they may well be successful in the long term.
Intersting, that further down in the article, Carmichael says:
It wasn’t the doctors that caused his problems, it was his own stupidity. These drugs are powerfull, you don’t ever fiddle with them on your own.