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What Is 'crazy' Anyway? The Abuse Of Psychiatric Power
Author: David Carnes  | Posted: 23-10-2006 | Comments: 0 | Views: 89 | Rating: (53)  (?) 
A lot of people's definition of "insane" seems to be "not being what I want you to be and refusing to think what I tell you to think".
When you are a small child your parents are your gods, and they know it. It is a struggle for every parent to give up this godlike status as the child grows up, and often they will fight to keep this status even after their offspring reaches adulthood. The interactions of many families are based on irrational belief systems and systems of manipulation and intimidation that preserve the authority of the parents through subtle psychological means long after the parents should have voluntarily relinquished their authority over their offspring. Like petty dictators, some parents simply do not want to let go of power.
So if the son or daughter breaks "family tradition" by thinking and expressing thoughts and ideas that are radically different than those of his/her parents, then he or she is labelled "crazy" by them. When a child grows up (and thus cannot be spanked or grounded), some parents will resort to abuse of the mental health system or even the legal system to "discipline" their adult offspring for thinking forbidden thoughts.
In extreme cases, attempted imprisonment in a mental institution may be the punishment sought for the "thought crime" (in order to intimidate the offspring into falling back into line). This attempt has been made by the parents of at least a couple of adult, fully sane friends of mine (one of them because he converted to a major religion that his parents didn't approve of).
Of course, nobody ever CALLS it "thought crime" – it's "delusion"; and of course they're not punishing him, they're performing an "intervention" so that he can be "treated". As if we could change the nature of something by using new words for it. Just like in George Orwell's novel "1984", if we can change the words for something then we can change people's thinking and turn lies into truth.
If the newly minted "lunatic" protests by referring to concepts like "thought crime" and "punishment", well, that's only to be expected, because after all, he's "paranoid", full of "unconscious hostility" and "conspiracy theories". In the battle of dueling vocabularies, the side with the greatest numbers and the most money to spend usually wins. I am a lawyer and you'd be surprised at how easy it is to confine someone in a mental institution for a 90-day "observation". Especially with a parent's affidavit.
But some psychologists will admit that about 50% of the time when Person A visits a psychologist to see about therapy or institutionalization for Person B, it's actually Person A who is the one in greater need of treatment, not Person B. Often the only thing wrong with Person B is what Person A has done to him (read "People of the Lie" by M. Scott Peck for more on this), and Person A wishes to have Person B labeled "crazy" in order to let himself off the hook for what he has done to Person B. And if Person A is the one paying the psychologist's bill, who do you think the psychologist will diagnose as "crazy" – the hand that's buttering his bread, or the person who the paying client wishes to have a label attached to?
But it's not just family. Of course there is such a thing as true mental illness, but the mental health system also serves a double function of upholding "social consensus reality" (the set of propositions that everyone in a given society is expected to believe, whether true or not, and that is generally determined by society's most powerful people) through penal sanctions, confinement, ostracism, labeling, etc.
A person might be diagnosed as a "danger to society" simply because his unconventional thinking is a danger to "social consensus reality" – in other words, if he isn't prevented from mouthing off, other people might start believing him, thus threatening the interests of the powerful in society (the ones who endow the universities that train the psychologists, and who pay hefty taxes to the state that licenses them).
Alternatively, Person B might be judged a "danger to himself" – after all, if he keeps on thinking like this, he's gonna get himself permanently labeled "crazy", and then how can he get a job and support himself? And if you are rendered unemployable because the "mental health professionals" attached a socially debilitating label to you, then (through an ingenious example of circular reasoning) your resulting poverty proves that you are a "danger to yourself" – after all, you'd be living on the street if it weren't for the charity of Person A. Thus justifying incarceration in a mental institution or guardianship in favor of Person A.
Kind of like 200 years ago, when it was against the law to teach black people to read and write, and their resulting illiteracy was used as evidence of their supposed "intellectual inferiority", in turn re-justifying the law forbidding them from going to school. Another way of putting it is that it's like a mafia protection racket – "Please, we beg you to obey us in order to protect yourself against what we will do to you if you don't obey us (so it's for your own good!)".
And parents are easy to win over, because the real "danger" the "lunatic" represents to them is the danger of the parents (or the spouse in some cases) losing their influence over him/her, of the parents losing the last vestiges of their former godlike status. Thus the state recruits the family of the "lunatic" as ally and betrayer.
Keep your mind free. Forgiveness is a wonderful thing (and absolutely necessary if you want a life worth living), but forgiving someone doesn't mean you have to believe their lies (or if they are sincere but misguided, then forgiveness carries with it no obligation to believe the same lies they believe).
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