This quote from Thomas Szasz, a leading psychiatrist and outspoken critic of coercive psychiatry, summarises society’s attitude towards people with an alleged mental illness.
He went further in his book ‘The Myth of Mental Illness‘, saying that mental illness was created as we moved out of ‘The Age of Faith’ into ‘The Age of Reason (Madness)’ with the rise in power of science as an influence on social thinking.
His work is “based on the principles that each person has the right to bodily and mental self-ownership and the right to be free from violence from others”.
It is beyond the scope of this post to provide enough evidence of the fact that ‘Mental Illness’ is a myth created by society to keep certain members of our society under control. All I can do is provide you with some information to think about and pointers on where to find more information! People under the ‘care’ of our psychiatric services deserve better assistance, not further abuse.
As we have moved out of The Age of Faith, we can no longer torture and burn witches and heretics. In The Age of Reason, we assess them as being deviant and requiring treatment to make them ‘normal’. They are incarcerated in ‘Treatment Facilities’ and given ‘psychotropic drugs’ to stop them from thinking. We label them as ‘Insane’ and strip them of dignity.
Our current model of treatment and care
Psychiatry is a sub-branch of Allopathic Medicine and, as such, is based on the belief that disorders and malfunctions of the human body are caused by a disorder, or imbalance, of the chemistry of the physical form. With this belief structure, psychiatry believes that a person’s thoughts and behaviour are determined by a person’s inner chemistry. In effect this removes responsibility of the person for their behaviour as they have no control over their chemistry and are a victim of the circumstances of heredity. Their DNA inherited from their family determines how they will think, behave and act.
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