Who loves psychiatry?

An Editorial, as seen in the March 2008 Bridge by Rod Bercaw, from the Enough Room weblog (We do recommend that he reorganize the color scheme, and correct some of the text formatting)

Organized crime families love psychiatry because it only takes an allegation of psychiatric illness to discredit a person. If no one is listening to the victim of criminal abuse the criminals can do whatever they want. Who is going to believe or listen to the victim?

Kate Millett has written*

*(Kate Millet, “Legal Rights and the Mental Health System,” Queen's Law Journal, Vol. 17, (1992), No. 1, pp. 215-223)

“Psychiatry [. . .] functions as an arm of social force, ultimately an arm of the state, with state powers, police powers, real locks and bars, drugs and torments.

“[It embodies] an idea, the idea that the individual carries an invisible disease, or taint, which no pathology can prove, but which experts can intuit and cure by force. This idea prevails by common consent, by publicity and propaganda, by the borrowing from the prestige of science itself and applying the force of the state and its overwhelming armory of physical power. [. . .] The system would not work without force. [. . .]

“Here the ideology is a perversion of reason and science, the medical model of mental illness. [. . .] The medical model [. . .] is not based upon any reality, nor is it medical, though it uses the prestige of physical medicine and the reality of physical disease to mystify us and to command a general social consent, lay or legal.

“[. . .] our communal faith in the existence of mental illness is completely religious and unscientific. We believe without any proof whatsoever. Without any evidence of what science means by illness. [. . .] In medicine, there is no disease or illness without pathology, and pathology is something one can see and prove. Physical medicine and science itself rest on proof.”

In February 2008 David Tarloff went to the New York office of a psychiatrist to rob the man who had put him into the mental hospital in 1991. He wanted money to get his mother out of a nursing home and to take her to Hawaii. He brought along women's clothing for her and some adult diapers. He also brought nine-inch knives and a meat cleaver to persuade the psychiatrist to part with his money. While waiting for the shrink the psychologist partner of the psychiatrist confronted Tarloff, who proceeded to kill the psychologist.

No politician wants to ban nine-inch knives or meat cleavers. What ordinary cook needs nine-inch knives and meat cleavers? What about pillows, which are used to kill?

Police say Tarloff stopped taking his psychiatric medications. The student shooter at Northern Illinois University, who killed five students then himself, also stopped taking his medication. Few journalists recognize this pattern as the cause of violence. Medications.

When will the States and the U.S. Congress question the drug companies persuading humans to take medications that make them violent when they stop taking them? When will politicians recognize that psychiatrists can’t function without police forcing people to accept treatment of imaginary illnesses?