Sunday, May 19, 2013

What mental illness is

Mental illness is simply the problem of bad behavior, inseparable categorically from a continuum of crime.

Our attempts to distinguish mental illness from crime speak well of our human impulse to mercy. But often those efforts also point to our collective guilty conscience, and they present a terrible indictment of our organizational and logical evaluation life skills. Human nature and human society has not changed much in thousands of years, all triumphal pretenses to "science" aside.

This is an opinion which I come to from twelve years of legal representation and advocacy on behalf of involuntary mental patients (Tom Szasz called them psychiatric slaves). I have periodically had the same repeated realization: very few mental health professionals, lawyers, human rights activists or other critics of psychiatry, let alone all other people who pay bills and collect fees, are much oriented toward or even much conscious of, the issue of coercion in mental "treatment".

In the first article I ever wrote for this blog, I said everything starts and ends with the nuthouse. People who participate in the environment and operations of locked, maximum-security state institutions for psychotic killers and perverts have unassailable claims to citizenship. Anyone who has not been in a nuthouse has probably never had to confront certain questions... such as why we even try to separate so-called "mental illness" from crime.

The court says, "Hey, this guy did a terrible, disgusting thing. But maybe instead of just punishing him we can fix him."

Well, that's a good impulse. It's mercy.

Then we try to fix the murderer, or the child molester, with medicine. And these days we usually insist that he can be fixed only with medicine. If the criminal/patient doesn't agree with our medical approach, with the "diagnosis" and "treatment", then we fall back on a very complex and thorough system of enforcement.

This directly opposes our original impulse to mercy. We begin to remind ourselves of the Inquisition. We quickly become confused, start wasting blood and treasure, and look back at the continuing failure of humanity to progress or evolve.

(TO BE CONTINUED...)

8 comments:

  1. Whenever I would tell a newsman on the phone that I was calling him from a state madhouse I was inevitably asked "What did you do." This at first confused me and I'd say "What do you mean?" I eventually realized that the general consensus is that people become "mental patients" by bad behavior. I finally started answering that I was alleged to have done "mental illness". Of course this created more confusion as organizations like NAMI insist people "have" mental illness rather than "do" mental illness.

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    1. As I recall Rodney, your "bad behavior" was suing a warden - and winning. To the state, that just had to be madness.

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  2. A mental disorder or psychiatric disorder is a psychological pattern or anomaly, potentially reflected in behavior, that is generally associated with distress or disability, and which is not considered part of normal development in a person's culture. Mental disorders are generally defined by a combination of how a person feels, acts, thinks or perceives.

    Psychiatrists

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    1. A person's feelings, thoughts and perceptions are invisible to others if they do not manifest in behavior. The person might also lie convincingly about them. Only behavior can be objectively observed and evaluated as "mentally ill" or not.

      Distress, disability and development are all a continuum in life. They obviously cannot form any qualitative line to cross from normality to illness.

      All DSM and other criteria for "diagnosis" behavior, period.

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    2. I should add that when I say BAD behavior... I only mean it is disagreed with, or objected to, by whomever is "diagnosing" or paying for the "diagnosing".

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  4. Are you a complete moron or what?

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    1. Thank you for that comment! Excellent spirit!

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