Psychiatry is just social control

I do agree with you on that. I think the fact that half our countries people walk around drugged by psychiatry is the strongest sign you can get that something is quite wrong with society. People are declared crazy while their response is a normal response to an abnormal society or abnormal family circumstances.

Had to think about this one - Krishnamurti: “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”

That's kind of BS. The majority of people with mental health problems are probably on an antidepressant like prozac or seroxat. Been on the latter myself. The maximum recommended dose actually. I didn't get a dunt off it at all. If you could get stoned or high on that stuff it would have a street value like valium does but it's worthless and you couldn't give it away.

You may as well campaign for alcohol prohibition if you're going to take this line of argument. Name me a time in history when people didn't use drugs to cope with their miserable lives.

I was formulating it wrong/too bluntly. English is not my native language and sometimes I don't "feel" the exact meaning of a word right. What I meant was not "to be high", what I ment was "to need drugs to be able function". I have used antidepressants too and they did alter my personality and cover my real emotions and real problems. I am not a big fan of regular alcohol use and don't use it myself. I feel no need to forbid others the use of alcohol or legal or illegal drugs. I'm quite consistent when it comes to that. I just don't see the difference between using alcohol to cover up a problem or using seroxat (or benzo's, in my country) to do so.

FACT is:
- There has been an enormous rise in psychiatric problems since introduction of psychiatric drugs in 1955.
- People in more "natural" societies have less psychiatric problems, like depression.
- People in the country side are much less prone to develop disorders like schizophrenia.
- People in developping countries have much better outcomes for certain psychiatric disorders.

I personally believe there are several factors explaining the rise in disorders.

I believe our society has some traits that make it more difficult for some people to function in it. I don't believe other societies are always better...in some ways we have improved. But we have also lost important and protective things. I think if so many people use psychiatric drugs, and there is a rise in disorders, we should also look at what can be better in our society so that less people get sick.

I also think our health system doesn't treat people right. Covering problems up with drugs is in my opinion not a good way of solving problems. I believe the use of psychiatric drugs makes many temporary problems chronic (this is proven) and is partly to blame for the rise in disorders too and should be a last resort.

Of course, in other times and other societies some people have always used drugs. But well...about 20% of women and 25% of older women in the USA need antidepressant drugs to function, 10% need antianxiety meds and between 5-10% of children are prescribed ADHD meds (speed).

Do you think that is normal? I don't believe you can totally prevent drug use. It's just that such common and daily and accepted use of drugs...to me shows that we should look critically to our society and our health care system to see if we should change something.

Marian, I grew up during the heroin epidemic in what was the AIDS capitol of Europe. You don't need to tell me how messed up things are. They want to blame it on the drugs and the people that push them though because that's easier than saying that being on drugs is better than having to deal with all the crap.

Comp_Lex wrote:Well, I think that the existence of psychiatry is a symptom of a much larger problem, namely the lack of a functioning society.

Pretty much.

Riccola wrote:I agree. Have a child thats to bright? To playful? Doesn't fit into the standard one size fits all conformist education system? Well he is sick, and here are the legalized stimulants and abusive therapy to get him to conform. Its funny how just a few hundred years ago such was seen as a positive, not a negative. But in the eyes of classical psychiatry, everything is potential profit at the expense of human life.

That reminds me of how gifted children tend to have symptoms of ADHD and also tend to have a difficult time with the regular education system despite their brightness.

It can be seen as social control, but I disagree it is 'just' social control because it is toxicity as means of inflicting brain damage to healthy people. It is always without consent, against will, coercively with malice and deception.

I see it as a social control gone wrong, i.e. brain damage inflicted for no good reason, and nothing can be a good reason to get onto somebody else and inflict brain damage to him/her. This violates our basic human rights, and we would not have done that thing (whatever was complained about) if we have received a warning that if we do it again we get detained and forced to ingest toxic pills for toxicity-induced brain damage which removes our brain functions and makes it impossible to behave or misbehave as we will be disabled.

Social control is when you are in some way ordered not to do something, or ordered to do something, so by doing or not doing it you comply with societal rules.

But psychiatry is nothing but toxicity-induced brain damage to remove your brain functions. (If not toxicity, they damage your brain tissues some other way, lobotomy, electroshocks, drowning, you choose or they choose).

Social control is normal and appropriate in the society. Damaging anybody's brain is not!