They’ve said it about schizophrenia, they’ve said it about bipolarity, and they’ve said it about depression.
They, of course, being the pharmaceutical industry and the mental health [strikeout]industry[/strikeout] profession. Mental illnesses are, according to them, genuine, specifically known, got-our-scientific-diagnostic-tweezers-on-whats-causing-it, low-level biological brain disturbances, and, to be specific about it. “chemical imbalances”.
Take this pill. You feel the way you do because your neurotransmitters are all fucked up. That kind of thing happens, just like thyroid disease and diabetes, you know. We know all about it, and this pill is, for your ailment, just like insulin is for a diabetic.
We’ve been saying it for years: they’re lying.
(We being the psychiatric inmates’ liberation movement. I’ve been diagnosed manic-dep (before it was renamed bipolar) and paranoid schizophrenic, and have been on the wrong side of the locked doors in a couple of looney bins. But yeah, we’re organized and we’re mad. Well, OK so we’re not all that damn organized, so show me a social-change movement that is?)
Yes, they are lying. Often they have the best of intentions. They want to help. Sometimes they have a bit short of the best of intentions. They want to fill an unmet need and thereby make a profit in the lucrative pharmaceutical arena. Sometimes there’s nothing discernably good about their intentions. They want to render an incarcerated population tractable and amenable to rules, regulations, and institutional control and don’t much care what it does to them in the process. All of these at various times and places, usually in massive parallel.
That which we call mental illness is an aggregated polyglot mess of human emotional cognitive and behavioral patterns that remain identified as such and therefore fall under the auspices of the mental health profession after the easy picks — the phenomena that yielded their etiological and prognostical secrets to conventional scientific inquiry over the last hundred years — were transferred to portions of medical science that both medicine and science regarded as legitimate in ways they weren’t entirely ready to extend to psychiatry. Internal medicine. Endocrinology. Neurology. You no longer get a bed on the mental health ward if you are known to suffer from tertiary syphilis, hypothyroidism, or epilepsy. In the last couple decades of the 20th Century, psychiatry may have mustered enough stature to keep its patients and problems once they are understood — Alzheimer’s hasn’t been fully pulled out from under them even now that we know how it works. But in many ways it’s too late. Most of what’s left in the bag are complex phenomenae that probably don’t have singular causes, physiological causes to which symptoms can be attributed w/o consideration for social and situational factors, and even things which can’t even be unequivocably labeled “undesirable”.
We have been saying this. And in response we often get laughed at, ridiculed, dismissed with “OH, come ON, in this day and age are you REALLY going to try to claim that there’s no such thing as mental illness? C’mon, they know what causes it now!!”
Well now, whaddaya know?! There’s a nice peer-reviewed article reporting research that supports our case!
People who find beneficent effects from psychiatric pharmaceuticals abound; whether the field knows what causes the symptoms we, ourselves, often describe as PROBLEMS or how and why this or that med seems to help alleviate the suffering, that much is still true: some folks benefit from this.
I could also, however, fill a large concert hall with open, out, outspoken, angry survivors of psychiatric treatment we did not benefit from and did not appreciate (yeah, it includes me, I’m in that group).
Many of us were subjected to involuntary treatment. I’d be opposed to involuntary treatment even if they could convincingly prove they had identified a mental illness, knew what caused it and had the cure in their hands. But more to the point, many of us voluntarily turned to them because they said they knew what they were doing, they said they had the fix for the problem, and they were doctors and they were believed, they were listened to and their recommendations followed in good faith.
They lied.
I am not a radical in the movement. I don’t demand that psychiatrists and mental health support staff be disbarred, their professions disbanded, their membership prosecuted for crimes against humanity.
But I think they should be required to come clean about how little they know, how much guesswork they’re still doing on both problem-description and treatment-attempt, and how much is still unexplained and therefore up for grabs to a good explanatory model.
And of course an end to forced treatment, period.
