Friday, June 22, 2012

Psychiatrists as Gods



The reason that conventional psychiatry.
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Whether pharmaceutical or psychoanalytic.
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Is powerless to substantially help the vast majority of patients is that it does not.
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And cannot, recognize the wrongness of the world we live in.
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The psychiatrists have bought in along with the rest of us.
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Psychiatry operates on the assumption that we should be happy with the world we live in.
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The same assumption of the rightness, or at least the unalterability, of the world given to us underlies the quest to cope with stress.
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That modern life is inherently stressful is not questioned.
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Psychiatric treatment is infamously impotent to address serious mental conditions because the psychiatrists, as fully enculturated elite members of society, are constitutionally unable to call into question the cultural assumptions in which they are so deeply invested.
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Their investment blinds them to the underlying rightness and fundamental sanity of a patient's reaction to a world gone wrong.
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Conventional treatment, particularly pharmaceutical treatment.
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And this is often the most common kind today.
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Actually exacerbates the illness by saying, "actually, the life society offers is fine; the problem is with you.
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We have witnessed dramatic healing simply by affirming to someone, 'You are right, this isn't how life is supposed to be'.
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And this is the realization that empowers change.
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Not that psychiatry ignores the need for change altogether.
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It is just usually unable to carry the change deeply enough..
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In essence, it tells us that we need to adjust to the world and seeks to make us normal again, functioning members of society.
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No. 
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We are meant for more. 
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Everyone can sense the emptiness.
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The void underneath the forms and structures of modern society.
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Any psychiatry that seeks to adjust us to such a society is itself insane.
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You would be crazy to busily paint your apartment as it burnt down.
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Similarly, it is insane to live a normal life in today's world.
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Maybe if millions of children were not malnourished.
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Maybe if torture were not commonplace around the globe.
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Maybe if species and entire ecosystems were not dying.
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Maybe if genocide were forever gone.
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Maybe without all these injustices then the "normal" life presented us would be sane.
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Maybe then it would make sense to absorb ourselves in professional sports, soap operas, the stock market, material acquisition, and the lives of celebrities.
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Given the reality of the world today though.
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The only life that makes sense to live is an extraordinary life.
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Not only do we live today in a fraudulent, life-denying society into which nobody fits.
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But the incompatibility of that society with human fulfillment only grows with each passing year.
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Along with it grows the need for medicating expanding swaths of the population.
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We have seen this happening with the increasing ubiquity of SSRIs and similar drugs across every age group.
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The world grows more painful physically as an increasingly toxic environment gives rise to new diseases.
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As commerce and industry corrupt the food supply.
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And as the tempo and pressure of life-as-usual quickens.
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All of these factors accelerate the conversion of citizens into patients.
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Patients that are then treated as if they are the ones with a problem.
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What a world.
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C. Eisenstein

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