Psychiatry; a secular religion

Organized psychiatry constitutes a species of secular religion.

One of the characteristics of religions and secular religions throughout history up to the present day is the shedding of blood in the name of that religion. Adolfo Bioy Casares said;-

"When man believed that happiness was dependent upon God, he killed for religious reasons. When he believed that happiness was dependent upon the form of government, he killed for political reasons....After dreams that were too long, true nightmares.....we arrived at the present period of history. Man woke up, discovered that which we always knew, that happiness is dependent upon health, and began to kill for therapeutic reasons...It is medicine that has come to replace both religion and politics in our time."

Yet this worship of psychiatrc deities is itself a form of religion, and so, for example, was communism, notwithstanding the lack of any spiritual component.

Psychiatry has inherited the legacy of many of the religions and secular religions that have come before it in that sacrifices are made in propitiation of its deities.

One of its elements constitutive of its secular religious character is its prescription of an absolute code of conduct. People are inculcated from infancy to aspire to conform to an institutionally sponsored ideal of "mentally healthy" behaviour, deviation incurring extra-legal sanctions, at least among the lower socio-economic classes, from whence psychiatric slaves are conscripted.

Psychiatry also has its own bible, its own sacred document, riddled with prejudice, prescriptions on the right way to live etc. No evidence to support the contents is forthcoming, but the faithful accept its contents on faith and on the authority of those who proclaim its truth and wisdom, people who have gathered such an aura of mystique and mana about them that those who hear them are incapably of thinking critically about their utterances.

It has its own list of enemies, or demonology. Scientologists, heretical patients and practitioners, and civil rights lawyers are all to be found on this list, which is by no means exhaustive.

Which brings me neatly on to the persecution of heretics and the inquistorial impulses of organized psychiatry. In its merger with the state, dignitaries of the psychiatric church, practitioners of and believers in the faith, and people generally who make up the community of the psychiatrically blessed, have been able to avail themselves of the state's monopoly on legal violence and force in its desire to root out heresy and latitudinarianism, and thereby to insure its dominion on earth.

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Nothing like a chemical lobotomy known as Zyprexa

Another aspect is the sacerdotal function of psychiatrists. People no longer turn to priests for moral guidance, absolution and to unburden themselves. Psychiatrists now occupy this role, and they are the people to whom we've delegated the responsibility of determining what is right and wrong, good and evil, a responsibility they are likewise unfit to shoulder.

Another point of contact between psychiatry and religion is the fact that its belief system exists in a kind of state of what is perhaps erroneously described as epistemic closure, whereby entrenched beliefs are rendered impervious to correction by their being insulated against contradictory information and evidence. In the interests of fairness it must be stated that the psychological and social mechanisms underpinning this phenomenon are universal. Nevertheless, because of their economic, existential and emotional investment in the securing of these beliefs, and their role in legitimating their power and practice, there is a pertinacity among the psychiatry faithful of uncommon proportions. That all groups and individuals avoid contradictory information and seek instead only reinforcement does not preclude the attachment of blame when such wilful ignorance, distortion and studious avoidance of evidence causes so much harm, when the ostensible beneficiaries of psychiatry are made victims of the irrational thought processes of psychiatrists and the organization to which they belong.

Also, the prevalence of secular superstitions within the psychiatric community of the faithful is another parallel. The belief that the school shootings and other social and interpersonal calamities are literally caused by pathological thought processes is one, comparable to belief that witchraft or demons cause undesirable phenomena. Another is the belief in such processes themselves. Then there is the view that patients have brain diseases and that these diseases are susceptible of cure through the administration of established neurotoxic agents, hence the term neuroleptics. People with supposedly damaged parietal lobes that supposedly cause anosognosia are forced drugged with agents associated with shrinkage and damage in that very area of the brain, another example of the irrationality of these people, yet few question the stereotypes of the completely irrational patient and sane psychiatrist, including the critics, who are almost unanimous in their having bought into them.