ABOLITION!!

When Lincoln called the banners in 1861 there was no national consensus about abolition of slavery. Britain had abolished the Atlantic slave trade and was actively suppressing it. But the views of crazy people like John Brown were very far from generally accepted. Africans were believed to be naturally inferior, unassimilable into Anglo-American civilization; and the most advanced (by our modern moral perspective) solution to the problem of slavery in the southern states was a mass deportation scheme. 

It took several hyper-condensed years of brutal, destructive  military conflict and unparalleled political struggle to convince America's greatest President he could issue the Emancipation Proclamation, a purely military strategy disconnected from moral issues of slavery, and later succeed in passing the Thirteenth Amendment. He had to tear the USA to pieces and put the country back together again in a new form.

Abraham Lincoln had always found slavery repugnant, but by the time he took his oath of office he was uniquely destined to be a military leader with no opportunity to engage in moral disputes over race or human equality. He won the war before he was assassinated: the rest, for which the whole world remembers and honors him, was incidental to his real job. (The best history of this is McPherson's Tried By War.)

I have little or no idea what it might ultimately take to abolish involuntary psychiatry. When I tell my neighbors, or even my own family, that we simply must do so, their confused reaction is reminiscent of the American Colonization Society in the early 19th Century, i.e., "Well, all those people who really are mentally ill and dangerous obviously can't live with us, so where are we going to put them?"

I try to explain that the whole idea of putting those people somewhere is moral and scientific nonsense. They have to live with us. Medicine will never cure problems of human cognition, emotion and behavior. These are not, never were, and never will be issues of the body or brain. They are in the end, necessarily religious issues.

"Treating depression" or "mental illnesses" is a sick joke now, the biggest and most obvious failure of our science and our civilization. That failure threatens to discredit the very value of reason in human affairs. Psychiatry's current drastic resort to brutal psychedelic mental and neurological landscape-leveling, with a forlorn hope of "integrating non-ordinary states of consciousness," is equivalent to the artillery barrage on Sumter when we failed to solve slavery with Christianity.

Now we have failed to solve insanity with medicine. Will we have some new destructive war? What will the collateral damage be? Whatever happens, forced psychiatry will not survive.

We need a Lincoln, and I’m not it; but I can keep suing the bastards.