Deafness, insensitivity, brutality and institutional abuse have become the modus operandi of mainstream psychiatry in its endless quest to preserve a facade of esoteric scientific knowledge while preserving its own self-exalting professional status.
Like any religion, psychiatry has generated its own justifying dogmas by insisting on observing its subjects in paltry isolation to search for the roots of emotional and psychic trauma in the constitutions of the persons afflicted.
By imposing this tunnel vision on its subjects, psychiatry has fostered a blame the victim mentality about emotional distress that precludes examination of other factors at play in the functionality and, more important, the emotional stability and perceptual faculties of human beings.
By forcing patients to confess their disease and repent by complying with whatever regime psychiatrists invent and foist off on them as "treatment plans," psychiatry has stripped human beings of their individuality, their autonomy and their ability to take responsibility for their own lives in a broader society.
Removing patients from the contexts of community and relegating them to institutional and clinical settings, depriving them of support and connection to the mainstream of life, blocking their access to the wherewithal of survival available in society at large is a direct and deleterious consequence of psychiatric power to invoke the force of law to incarcerate and criminalize its subjects.
Modern psychodynamics succeed in further victimizing the harmlessly eccentric by abrogating their rights to become responsible for their own management and ultimate destinies while blaming simultaneously for their "helpless" plight. To observe, categorize and define the person in isolation, to appropriate the power of defining individual identity by imposing labels and infantilizing regimes...all these approaches contribute to tunnel vision, throwing focus exclusively on the patient and his or her deficiencies while distracting attention from other possible sources of emotional distress.
Among those sources of trauma are parental authoritarianism, sibling domination and aggression, spousal abuse, employment stress, deaths of friends or family members, adjusting to major geographic dislocations, retraumatization by systemic abuse, economic conditions created by systemic criminalization and stigmatization, unemployment forced upon qualified individuals by the discrimination that accompanies public knowledge of a psychiatric history, spiritual uncertainties, environmental pollutants, severe allergies, paradoxical reactions to psychotropic drugs. Normal human contact with patients is out of bounds in so-called therapy. The mental heath professional, in the ongoing bid to maintain power, control and a sense of superiority, assumes a remote aloofness and a deliberate deafness aims at keeping distance between professional and patient. This distance reinforces the therapeutic perception of patients as somehow alien, qualitatively different from the professionals and other human beings who have escaped or evaded the mental illness label.
This arrogant assumption of professional superiority perpetuates the myth of psychiatry as omniscient and the patient as defective, helpless and irresponsible. The patient-therapist relationship is in truth a one-way contract in light of the tremendous power differential inherent in so-called mental health care. Doing business in a one-dimension mileau is a strategy meant to belittle and disempower the patient while enhancing the mental health professional's right to dominate, define, judge, pronounce, confine and mandate.
The continuous thrust of therapy is not consideration of a constellation of environmental, social, economic, vocational and emotional factors comprising the individual's surround but assiduous ascription of abnormality and innate defectiveness to the passive subject under observation. Psychiatrists are actually trained in medical school to look microscopically for abnormalities rather than engage in a mutual quest for the patient's strengths, talents, abilities, goals, hopes, dreams, ambitions and plans. From the outset, entering therapy is tantamount to announcing, "I am defective. You have special knowledge I cannot access. You have godlike powers to fix what is wrong with me."
The power imbalance is an inescapable consequence of the authority invested in psychiatry by families and societal institutions. As society progressively defines itself as normal - assuming cultural, linguistic and imaginative impoverishment combined with crass materialism and compulsion to control can be universally regarded as normal - its proponents sanction the exclusion of outsiders and aliens and appoints psychiatry the task of weeding them out. Psychiatry accomplishes its job by wielding legal power to sequester and invalidate the voices of those elements society finds disturbing, uncomfortable or reflective of divergent values.
The alienness imposed upon victims of psychiatry is reinforced by the scientific pretensions of mental health authorities, the enforced distanced created by power differentials, the locked wards and dehumanizing "therapies", all of which combine to negate any hope for recognition of a compassionate common humanity. This imposed alienness, which constitutes systemic destruction of personal identity, is then made the rationale for shutting out the voices of psychiatric victims, ensuring loss of credibility and ruin of reputation so that psychiatry may pursue its inhumane atrocities unimpeded by mainstream media exposure or lawsuits to stop the wrongful imprisonments, forced drugging and invasive treatments psychiatrists use to terrify and intimidate their ever-expanding pool of cash cows into unquestioning compliance.
By blaming the victim's genes, neurochemistry and biology for emotional stresses that may be normal responses to abnormal situations, by concentrating efforts on branding its subjects defective, inferior and irredeemably unreliable, psychiatry consolidates its power to do harm under the guise of providing help to those it systemically devalues and stigmatizes. What a racket.