Posted by Chris O on April 11, 2016, at 17:48:07
In reply to Re: Mad in America » Christ_empowered, posted by Tabitha on April 11, 2016, at 15:18:00
Hi, Tabitha,
"Then they assume you're a person who needs to function at the best level you can, so they will keep tweaking your meds to correct for side effects."
I think in sharing you make some poignant points about psychiatry, especially about how it bases its treatment of individuals on their assumed "success" or "failure" in the economic market. And this validates one of the reasons I question the ethical and true empathic validity of psychiatry itself: Psychiatry is essentially a secular religion with our supposedly "free" neoliberal market being the end-all/be-all basis of its morality. So, the more money you have, the more "normal," you are assumed to be; the less money you have, the more "deviant" you are assumed to be, the more of a "loser" "criminal" "outcast" you are assumed to be. Now, that certainly sucks. But since we no longer have any kind of over-arching broad religious value system in American culture, this (the vaguely Calvinist market) is what has replaced it.
And in terms of anti-psychiatry talking about mental illness in terms of "deviance," I think some of the people in that movement are framing "deviance" in a positive light, as a challenge to the Calvinist neoliberal "free" market as the end-all be-all of morality, as a way of saying that the market is defining people's legitimate suffering at its hands as "deviance," and trying to medicalize them into silence. I think Christ Empowered may share some of my opinions on this issue. What do you think?
Sincerely,
Chris
poster:Chris O
thread:1088004
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20160331/msgs/1088086.html