The initiative to warehouse society's eccentric, dissident and nonconforming originated with the rise of institutions...schools, workhouses, prisons, madhouses...and came primarily from families who pressured magistrates to order confinement or from paternalistic philanthropists who insisted social segregation was in the best interests of all concerned.
The phenomenon of signing over familial and cultural responsibility to institutions arose concurrently with the the European Industrial Revolution and Age of Reason as middle class and elitist values combined with materialist notions of a work ethic began to emerge from the chaos of Reformation times.
Caretakers and administrators were needed to run and staff the institutions, and the roles of asylum overseers devolved upon mediocre doctors who performed poorly in medical school and viewed running and staffing madhouses as routes to social status and upward mobility. Psychiatric "medicine" was a consequence, not a cause, of mental institutions.
Medical inquiries into aberrant behavior and delusional or psychotic states have been patterned since the 18th century on expectations of finding roots of madness in the organic, neurological or biochemical, and psychiatry began to emerge as an outgrowth of the asylum movement that freed family members to join the workforce as industry and mass manufacturing became the economic mainstay of formerly agricultural societies.
Thus, theory preceded fact in the construction and promotion of madhouses.That the care of souls, formerly the domain of the church and, often, its infamous Inquisition, became a matter for medical investigation was an accident of the socioeconomic and political climates of the 18th century.
The subjects of psychiatric inquiry, society's castaways, were fair game for a bizarre array of experimental tortures and barbaric practices ranging from electroshock, water torture, strait jackets, manacles, insulin shock, vomits, overpowering drugs, restraining chairs, laxatives, bloodlettings, manual labor, and most terrible of all, lobotomies. Many of these approaches to "healing" people of their madness prevail today.
By the mid-18th century, critics began to arise denouncing the routine forced treatment by drugs and other dehumanizing methods as ineffective and cruel. Protests continue today, but occur in splintered pockets of society without focus, direction or coalition. Contemporary critics are unable to amass numbers sufficient to sway politicians, alter policy or get resources channeled into viable alternatives to the brutal legacy of early psychiatry. Even today, the "moral management" theories of the 18th century are employed by mainstream psychiatry with regeneration by retraining as the watchwords. Mental institutions of the 1700s, endorsed by families and sanctioned by civil authorities, began to proliferate because they provided avenues of success for failed doctors and freed burdened families of the responsibility for their eccentric or aberrant relatives, thus liberating more and more people to slave on assembly lines of factories.
By 1950, American institutions held half a million people and British asylums contained at least 200,000, and psychiatry began to assert itself as a new science grounded in degenerationist theory and justified by association with a medical model of human behavior. According to the degenerationists, the mad were retrogressives or throwbacks, irredeemable lunatics full of sound and fury signifying nothing. For the psychiatrists of the 1950s, mental ward inmates were a ripe field to harvest for promoting the medical model and for conducting drug and conditioning experiments not so far removed from the pogroms and mass persecutions practiced by Nazi doctors in the interests of achieving "racial purity."
Far from being havens of regeneration, mental wards became societal scrapheaps, places of seclusion and torture, of unchecked experimentation, of lobotomies for society's convenience, all masterminded by the newly affluent and influential gods of psychiatry wielding icepicks and strait jackets. Psychiatry began to come into its own as a function of paternalistic custodianship combined with a terrible authority to punish, condemn and afflict. Psychiatry was attuned to a new socio-political elitism inherent in the rise of the middle class and the ascendancy of institutions as vehicles of control.
Psychiatry in the late 18th century was becoming so influential that its practitioners denounced art and literature as decadent products of the deranged mind, attributing mental illness to Impressionist and Cubist painters and even many writers and poets who refused to live in conformity to accepted modes of morality. Psychiatrists of the time, in the tradition of a cultural impoverishment and paranoid xenophobia that still infects the mental health professions, began to denounce great painters and writers as sufferers of moral, mental and visual disorders. Seminal minds, such as those of Virginia Woolf, Nijinsky, Ernest Hemingway and the composer Schumann, got sucked into the vortex of a new reactionary psychiatric compulsion to define what is normal for society and to stamp out the idiosyncrasies and nonconformities often peculiar to artistic expression. Psychiatry by the late 18th century was gaining legitimacy conveyed by approval of families for the treatment they meted out to aberrant relatives, legal authority granted by the state and the general approbation of a society becoming more and more homogenized as diversity became a quality to fear and hate. Psychiatry was thus enabled to foist off its bizarre methods and unchecked exploitations as attempts to restore decadent eccentrics to normality, reflecting the same level of cultural and linguistic impoverishment that afflicts the profession today.
Contemporary psychiatry has also inherited other lurid delusions and insularities born of degenerationist theory...an egregious racism, assumptions of hereditarianism, sexual prurience. As recently as the 1960s, certified counselors were offering their bodies as instruments of sexual therapy for people unable to achieve orgasm or troubled by premature ejaculation. Added to these limiting attitudes and patent frauds, psychiatry perpetuated for decades the blanket delusions of a new "science" of psychotherapy pioneered by Sigmund Freud and a group of his sycophants who attempted "talking cures" to restore their patients to a normality based on the narcissistic drives and needs of their own ethnic and cultural experience. The model for normality became the drives and establishments of the white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant male...consigning to the scrapheap of humanity any divergent viewpoints, including the experience of women, minorities and other cultures.
Freud's view of humanity is yet another shoddy legacy of early psychiatric tunnel vision. Held to no particular standards, psychiatry was free to indulge in coercions, barbaric experiments and bizarre practices for the good of its patients, their families and society at large. Freud looked upon his patients as mirror images of his own troubles and dark broodings, postulating that all human beings are selfish, aggressive, destructive, devious and continuously engaged in psychological conflicts that are global in nature. According to Freud, madness was a tension between the demands of civilization and the primal desires of rapists, child molesters, murderers and thieves at work in every person's psyche. Civilization, he said, was build on parricide and animated by death instincts. No patient, in his view, could achieve harmony in relationship to others or to society because of man's general depravity. Freud made these deductions using his own psychological constitution as a model while claiming that only psychiatry, operating beyond madness and reason, could achieve authentic reason and remain exempt from the degeneration which is the lot of common man.
Freud's legacy persists and remains all-pervasive, even amidst frantic efforts of psychiatry to validate and establish the medical model as an acceptable explanation of all eccentric or aberrant behavior. Anyone who seeks psychiatric help or gets snared by the mental health system soon learns that psychiatry deals in dead-end pejoratives and absolute judgments that undermine self-esteem and sabotage all movement toward growth, autonomy, personal development and positive change. The deepest roots of psychiatry feed on destruction and theories of perpetual defectiveness.
Investing the psychiatric profession with unchecked authority to manage the lives of emotionally distressed people has resulted in isolation for its victims, who are now systemically labeled, subjected to forced interventions and ghettoized by society at large on the basis of psychiatric assessments justified by false claims to special and arcane knowledge of human behavior.
As psychiatry has grown, it has assiduously discovered and invented mental diseases never before defined or catalogued. It has built a giant bureaucracy and established a wealthy professional lobbying machine, the American Psychiatric Association, constructed specifically to arbitrate what is normal or abnormal in society on a global scale. In the 19th century, psychiatry even ventured into territory previously occupied by religion in claiming that sexual abuses, indulgence in alcohol and other perceived sexual perversion are signs of psychopathology. The psychiatrization of crime and perceived moral failures assumed a fashionability that persists today in the process of determining who is fit or unfit for full participation in a broader society. Insidiously, gradually, but inevitably, psychiatry has come to fill the vaccum left when the established church was divested of its central authority. Endorsed by families and the state and enforced by law, psychiatric coercions have won the approval of society as the mental health professions were elevated to the status of society's priesthood and their rituals to the plane of religious endeavor.
The ascription of force and moral rectitude to psychiatric practice has resulted in compulsory confinement and social ostracization of many creative and gifted individuals who have been rendered voiceless and invisible by psychiatric campaigns to discredit and vilify all behavior and experience that deviates from the standard set by white, Angle-Saxon, Protestant, male, middle class morality. The great majority of patients labeled by mad-doctors have been excommunicated from broader society, forced and intimidated into admitting their inferiority and submitting to psychiatric ministrations, sequestered in brutalizing institutions, deprived of free choice, dignity, rights, opportunities, personalities and legal recourse. As attorneys repeatedly tell the former mental patient seeking redress through the courts, "Yes, you have a valid case, but you won't win and I won't take the risk because JURIES DON'T SYMPATHIZE WITH MENTAL PATIENTS."
This quasi-religious ritual of condemnation has been accomplished with the approval of families, the blind and uncomprehending deference of a misinformed society and the full sanction of the legal system with its police powers.
Freud's misogynistic principles and messianic negativism once permeated the field of psychiatry and remain regrettably entrenched in the practices and procedures of contemporary mainstream clinical treatment of people in emotional crisis.
Psychiatry's tunnel vision has robbed society of a necessary diversity and divested it of even a moderate tolerance for differences, encouraging mindsets of racism, classism and xenophobia that breed oppressions and injustices as a biscuit attracts cockroaches.
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