How d'ya feel about The Fox guarding The Henhouse?

Great post, Copy_Cat!
Bravo!

CopperMoon wrote:I think that mental health is a field where corruption is a high risk, but I don't think all mental health workers are corrupt by default. It's sort of like with government, banking, pharmaceuticals (of all types), etc. The temptation for selfish and shady people is significantly greater than say, a career in the dairy industry.

I think what makes potential corruption especially risky in the mental health field is that people with genuine illness are unable to gauge and assess their own mental and emotional health accurately and clearly. This sets up a trump card of sorts, in that if a person does not have mental illness, or serious mental illness, professionals in the field can simply explain that the client/patient is unable to assess their own mental and emotional health, as that is part of the nature of mental illness.

The setup just makes it by default a situation where clients/patients are extremely vulnerable to corrupt professionals, and where corrupt professionals have an almost indefinite level of plausible deniability.

However, again, I don't believe that all mental health workers are corrupt by default. I also spent weeks homeless in southern California, and please believe me - some people really do need medical help. There was a very nice and intelligent woman in Venice who had Schizophrenia, and spent almost every night experiencing insects crawling out of her skin. She was in constant mental and emotional hell. If I had had the ability to do so, I would have had her medicated in a heartbeat, and there is no $$$ incentive for me in that plot. I just wanted to rescue her from perpetual torment. I don't consider myself a corrupt person. So I feel that it is possible for there to be mental health workers who are not just in it to win it, basically.

I'm not sure what the solution to it all is, though. It's complicated.

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Based on what evidence do you believe that such a person, as mentioned in your post, is suffering from a bona fide medical condition and, accordingly, is amenable to medical treatment? "Mental illness" is nothing more than an article of psychiatric faith.

On the basis only of our assumptions of perceptual infallibility regarding the people we view as "mentally ill", and the circular logic that attends these assumptions (and not scientific proof of the existence of what I am now convinced, both on logical and epistemological grounds, is not a real illness, though, given that belief in mental illness is held in the manner of an irrational prejudice, to question such idee recues is to court much animosity), and only on this empirically and philosophically fragile basis, do we exercise a variety of discriminatory practices, practices that aren't even countenanced, or at least only rarely, in bona fide medical professions, where a scientifically rigorous standard of evidence is upheld.

I guess Montaigne was right when he said that nothing is so firmly believed as that which is least known.

You confound necessity with desire when you say that such people need medical help. We don't need to intervene in that person's existence, it is just something that some people desire to do, because of the great store they set by certain values and the importance they put on certain ends, values and ends that the objects of your solicitude do not necessarily share, a problem circumvented by claiming, as proponents of forced psychiatry do, that the patient has no will of his own, or by asserting, in a variety of different wordings, that his will has ceded control of his mind to his disease, which is the dehumanizing logic of the proponent of forced psychiatry, dehumanizing because it denies man's fundamental essence, his will.

My main gripe with the mental health movement is the belief current amongst its members that they are in possession of some sort of infallible measuring-rod for determining what constitutes the rational ends of existence, of which I shall have more to say presently.

In proportion as a man desires to do something, the conviction that necessity dictates it takes hold. Man, instead of saying, "I wish/desire to do this", says, "I must do this", be it the person who desires to to take a drug he enjoys, or the person who desires to "treat" someone else's notional illness, or some such other example as the reader's imagination or experience may furnish.

Rarely is it for the purpose of righteousness, truth and justice that men set themselves up as the arbiters of the rational ends of existence.

In the age of communism, the values and ideals which men should respect, and the rational ends of existence, were determined along Marxist lines. To these ends, and at the altar of these ideals, millions of lives were sacrificed.

Likewise, in the age of Christianity's ascendancy, the values and ideals which men should respect, and the rational ends of existence, were determined along scriptural lines. To these ends, and at the altar of these ideals, many lives were also sacrificed.

In the age of institutional psychiatry's reign, the values and ideals which men should respect, and the rational ends of existence, were determined along the lines of psychiatric doctrine. To these ends, and at the altar of these ideals, many lives have been sacrificed.

Plus ca change....

Maybe it's about time that humanity showed greater scepticism regarding those who arbitrarily set themselves up as the arbiters of what are the rational ends of existence, and who on the basis of such a strong conviction impose their will on others, and yes I am referring to those who practice psychiatric coercion and those who support it. Instead, we should encourage a pluralism and diversity of ends which respects the will of others, even when that person's will seems "irrational" from our ultimately fallible perspective, a perspective whose fallibility is attested to by the fact that whenever men claim to know what is rational, and seek to impose their notions of "rational" thought and conduct on others, tragedy often ensues for the individual whose interests are supposedly served by such impositions.

-- Sun Dec 28, 2014 3:38 pm --

The problem is, because of the inverse relationship that usually obtains between a man's intelligence and confidence in one's own convictions, and as the theory of naive realism attests, assumptions of infallibility tend to extend their roots furthest into the minds of simple-minded people, and simple-mindedness is commonly encountered amongst adherents of the psychiatric faith, and it is no very great distance from the conviction that one possesses superior reasoning powers and insight into reality to the conviction that one must, if necessarily by force, share these gifts with others, so I fear there can be no reasoning with these people.

I also hate the stagnation factor in psych. It just goes round in circles. It's anal-compulsive about "forever": forever The King can do no wrong; forever the accused misfit is a pariah to us high muckety-mucks; forever the verbiage of the psych profession stands uncontested and forever the deranged Austrian cocaine-addict from the 1800's was God's Gift to The World. it's so very very stagnant, YEEEECCCCCCHHHHHHH