A critique of medical coercive psychiatry, and an invitation to dialogue.
The medical model is the dominant ideology of psychiatry. It is used to justify involuntary institutionalization, forced drugging, and electroshock. By medical model is meant the medicalization of human thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. The medical model is an ideology because it serves the interests of and justifies the public demand for a covert form of social control. Psychiatry, the government, and the pharmaceutical industry have formed a mutually compatible view of human problems and their solutions, a "gleichschalten"--a marching in step. In their common view, certain human problems are psychiatric illnesses which, like other medical illnesses, are biological but, unlike other medical illnesses, can be treated with confinement and coercion. This ideology is accepted and adopted by the public without critical examination or self-reflection. Critical examination of the medical model has been systematically repressed by academic and organized psychiatry and their supporters. Recently, however, an increasing number of people are questioning the medical model. They are doubtful about the validity and social utility of explaining an expanding category of human problems caused by errant brain chemistry for which persons bear no responsibility and for which the treatment is pharmaceutical drugs. They are rising in protest against psychiatric repression, oppression and abuse. This essay presents 10 points of criticism of medical coercive psychiatry. It was first presented as the accusation at the Foucault Tribunal in Berlin in 1998. It has been reframed in this essay as an invitation to medical coercive psychiatry to dialogue with its critics.
Leifer
R
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215 North Cayuga Street, Ithaca, NY 14850, USA.
D003068:Coercion; D003134:Commitment of Persons with Psychiatric Disorders; D004345:Drug Industry / Q000191:economics; D006076:Government; D006801:Humans; D001523:Mental Disorders / Q000188:drug therapy*; D008605:Mental Health Services; D010344:Patient Advocacy; D012922:Social Change