This Perfect Day Arrives

by Liberty and Power

If you thought the Bush administration couldn’t get worse, you’re in for a surprise. It’s about to launch a national mental-illness screening/treatment program modeled on a Texas scheme that is spending a fortune in tax money handing out powerful drugs and which has been under suspicion of corruption involving—what else?—drug companies. (The whistleblower has been fired.)

Of course the government’s schools will be in the frontlines in the search for mental disease. That would be bad enough if mental illness were real rather than metaphorical. But considering that the term masks a pseudoscientific exercise in the control of people who don’t live by accepted social rules, the program is especially ominous. Is This Perfect Day upon us? Forced diagnosis and treatment of counterfeit illnesses—I’m sure glad we have an advocate of limited government in the White House. See here. Nods to Jeff Schaler.

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Sheldon Richman - 6/24/2004

For the reasons I've already suggested, the concept is unsuited to the purpose you propose. Human conduct has reasons, not causes (like diseases). Human beings are persons, not defect-ridden robots. (I'm not denying the existence of disturbed and disturbing persons.) As for evidence that the concept is not used the way you suggest, just observe what psychiatrists and the legal system they've helped shape do routinely. Millions of people each year are subject to involuntary psychiatric intervention (in- and out-patient). The National Association for the Mentally Ill counsels people on how to have their "sick" family members taken away by the police and committed to mental hosptitals. (Deception is permissible in their book.) The evidence is all around.

Oscar Chamberlain - 6/24/2004

What research do you have to show that practitioners do not use it for the purpose that I stated?

Sheldon Richman - 6/23/2004

Mental illness "is also used to help understand behavior and to help the individual better assert dominion over his or her life." That's precisely what it does not do. Typically, the "diagnosis" justifies turning the "patient" into a serf (for his own good, of course), who can be hospitalized (confined) against his will if he does not obey (i.e., take drugs he would rather not take). One does not understand disturbed and disturbing behavior by acribing it to disease. Rather, one inquires into what the actor is trying to accomplish by his actions, which by nature are strategic (though not necessarily premeditated or elaborately planned.)

Oscar Chamberlain - 6/23/2004

Can the term mental illness be misused? Sure. Can the government use the concept in horrid ways? Yes. Do I want George Bush determining mental health? The mind boggles.

But suggesting that the concept of mental illness can only used to control or excuse is simply not true. It is also used to help understand behavior and to help the individual better assert dominion over his or her life.

Sheldon Richman - 6/22/2004

Joy and sorrow are by no means metaphorical; they are direct experiences. Functional diseases typically have anatomical bases. On the other hand, mental illnesses are recognizable only by the complex (mis)behavior that people engage in. Real illness doesn't cause complex behavior. Behavior has reasons not causes. Moreover, speculating that such behavior is caused by chemical events not detectable at autopsy or by yet-undiscovered diseases is a plea for faith. Where is the evidence? Strange that we never wonder about the chemical imbalances in the brains of good or talented people, only those who disturb us. See this: http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/5083.html for an elaboration. A concept such as mental illness must be judged by how it is used: it is used 1) to control people who have committed no crimes and 2) to excuse other people of their responsibility for crimes they have committed. That's pretty damning.

Oscar Chamberlain - 6/22/2004

1. There are lots of very real physical phenomena that don't show up in autopsies, either because the problem has to do with biochemical process that disappear when they stop or because we don't know what evidence to look for. This is the sort of weak example that brings much of what you way into question.

2. Are "joy" and "sorrw" simply metaphorical?

Sheldon Richman - 6/21/2004

You're committing a category mistake. What you see is behavior. Behavior is behavior, and disease is disease. "Mental illness" does not satisfy medicine's traditional criteria for disease, namely, a health-degrading abnormality in cells, tissues, or organs. The mind is a metaphorical organ, so its diseases must be metaphorical also (as the earliest psychiatrists understood). Pathologists never see bipolar disorder or schizophrenia in cadavers' brains at autopsy. These so-called diseases are not listed in the pathology textbooks either. If they are bona fide brain diseases they would be there, and neurologists, not psychiatrists, would treat them.

David Lion Salmanson - 6/21/2004

Look, the proposal is abominable but mental illness is real. If you have ever known somebody who is manic depressive who is involuntarily taken off meds because of another medical condition and then gone manic or suicidal depressive despite the fact that they don't want to you would know that mental illness is not a choice (didn't we go through this with the disasterous deinstitutionalization policy?) Someone doesn't choose to be diabetic just because their body produces the wrong amount of insulin. The problem isn't that medical psychiatry is bogus, it's that it is in its infancy, the leeches stages, if you will. But the thing is leeches did kind of help some things because the act as blood thinners.