Sick in the head

Commentary and Analysis by Simon Millar

Introduction

In this crazy world of ours who
is sane, who is ‘mentally ill’ and who decides? Grief stricken Iraqi’s and US
soldiers are being driven mad by war as I write. A war started and orchestrated
by the supposedly sane rational men and women of the US administration.
Everywhere on our beautiful planet the vast majority are struggling to keep
body and mind together. We have been told for many years that we have a disease
in our midst, a disease that is now of plaque proportions. A growing army of
Psychiatrists proclaim to know its cause and after a healthy cash payment offer
us a cure. It’s time to take a fresh look at these claims.

This is a critique of Psychiatry
I cannot claim as my own because it rests on the hard work and research of
others who are professionals in the field. Much of this critique is based on
John Robinson’s book ‘The Failure of Psychiatry (A Marxist Critique). I picked
up this book by accident and it had a profound effect on my thinking. I had
originally planned to write a simple review. Instead I decided summarise
Robinson’s main arguments while adding material I felt either updated and/or
strengthened those arguments.

This critique aims to challenge
both the accepted ideas of mental health industry and the general public. Much
has been discovered about human behaviour and how the mind works. Pulling this
information together and placing it on a scientific foundation is vital. A
scientific view of human psychology can help us not only in our personal
efforts to rear children and engage with society; it can help ‘ordinary’
working-class people construct healthy collective organizations, from unions,
anti war groups to political parties.

‘Mental illness’ according to
surveys is spreading and deepening. Completely new disorders appear in
psychiatric journals every year. Australian surveys talk of 15-20% of the
population suffering from mental illness while roughly 60%, have and will
suffer some form of mental illness during there lives. In relatively recent
times we have seen the ‘mental illness’ industry spread to our children.

The above figures are often given
a comforting twist; you may feel depressed or suicidal but don’t feel bad
because there are millions more just like you. Hardly a week goes by without a
current affairs program or a news report covering one or another form of
‘mental illness’ from anorexia to drug addiction. Here in Victoria we have ex
Liberal Party premier Jeff Kennett as the head of ‘Beyond Blue’, an
organization that supports those suffering depression. The irony is enough to
make you very depressed indeed.

Psychiatry and its fellow travellers have become an
important part of Western culture. In America large numbers of the middle class
regularly go see their personal therapists. Here in Australia many people at
one stage or another have been to a see a psychiatrist. Many people do not know
the difference between psychiatrists and psychologists. Psychiatry is the study
and treatment of ‘mental disease’ while psychology deals with functions and
phenomena of the mind.

The various types of ‘mental
illness’ as defined by mainstream psychiatry have filtered through the mass
media into the common lexicon. Depression, schizophrenia, bi polar disorder,
ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder), manic depression are just a
few of the ‘mental illnesses’ that are well known. Then there is behaviour that
flows from ‘mental illness’ such as compulsive gambling, drug addiction,
industrial madness and suicide. It’s a huge problem that affects everyone; it
has offcourse also become a huge business.

Five basic premises

Robinson begins his Marxist
critique of psychiatry by outlining five basic premises. Many modern
psychologists accept some or all of these basic premises but do consider
themselves Marxist. What should be striking to non-Marxists is the fact that
all these premises are already expressed in Marx and Engel’s writing over fifty
years before Freud began publishing.

Naturally our first stop is the
mind. Here’s a quote from Robinson; ‘the mind is a form taken by the world
external to the brain…In other words it is not an awareness of the activity of
our brain cells. It is also the belief of Marxists, together with many
non-Marxists, that people change themselves in the course of, and as a result
of, their own activity. The most significant aspects of an individual’s
activity are determined by his or her social relationships, for example
parent/child, employer/employee and so on.’

Sounds fairly obvious but this premise is in direct
opposition to the outlook of psychiatry. Psychiatrists believe the mind is the
activity of the brain, or at least parts of the brain. In Robinson’s book he
repeatedly stresses the difference because the above seems to make sense as
well. The mind is not an awareness of
the activity of our brain cells. ‘Thus when we perceive an object, it is
perceived, not as the subjective excitation of the optic nerve, but as an
object having material existence outside our brains’. The activity of the brain
is form not the content of the mind.

Another challenging premise,
until you think it through, is that the brain as such cannot create thought.
Thought is created only through the individual’s activity the most important of
which are carried out within objective social relationships. Robinson quotes
Russian psychologist Luria, L.S. Vygotsky’s most well known student who states
‘The origin of thought is always the presence of a task’.

The next premise is the absence, in humans, of
genetically predetermined behaviour. This is now widely accepted, especially
amongst those studying early childhood development.

The final premise flows from the rest and deals with
how and to what extent human behaviour and thinking can be changed. Robinson
argues that any form of therapy can only have a limited effect unless it
includes a change in what the patient actually does. The extent of change is
tied to both the person’s age and the length of time they have changed their
behaviour. Robinson also states that capitalist society itself can and does
place strict limits to overcoming or fully resolving many cases of mental and
behavioural problems.

I was tempted to add my own sixth premise, that
capitalism cannot produce mentally healthy individuals. While I feel that this
is true in one sense it also contradicts itself in another. Mental health can
only ever be relative to the period of history and social system the individual
is born into. There is no absolute measure.

Behavioural psychiatrists
and genetic science

The most recent and important
challenge to all the above premises has sprung from genetic science.
Behavioural psychiatrists (popular amongst biologists like Richard Dawkins)
and scientists like Steve Pinker argue that it is our genetic code that guides
our actions.

Steve Pinker’s popular book ‘How
the mind works’ describes the mind as ‘what the brain does;
specifically, the brain processes information and thinking is a kind of
computation. The mind is organised into modules…The modules basic logic is
specified by our genetic program’. It is called the computational theory of
the mind and uses Darwin and modern genetic science to give credence to its
views. In Pinker’s work we have a new argument for the old idea that
fundamentally our thoughts and actions are embedded in our biology. Hence the
title of his previous book ‘The language instinct’. But is it science?

The only proof Pinker provides
for this conception of the mind comes from the findings of the ‘Minnesota
Twins Reared Apart’ study. This study claims that twins reared apart still
share much of the same personality and intelligence thus proving that these
human qualities are charted by our genes. Most of us will have encountered
various news headlines claiming that scientists have discovered a gambling
gene, a smoking gene, even a divorce gene, I kid you not. Offcourse the hunt is
still on for the ever illusive gay gene.

A terrific book challenging the
view that genes are the primary determinant of human behaviour is Oliver James
book ‘They F**K You Up’. As mentioned the case studies of separated twins is
the evidential foundation upon which Pinker and all other genetic determinant
theories are based. In the appendix to James’ book he exposes these twins
studies.

Since 1979, professor Thomas Bouchard
and colleagues based in Minnesota, have sought twins from across the USA who
had been separated in childhood. From this study he has produced a series of
papers that claim to show that twins, despite being separated, still largely
share the same personality traits.

The first fundamental concern
James raises with this study, is the fact that Bouchard is not willing to
release or allow for inspection by independent assessors the raw data on which
his scientific papers are based. This is compounded by the fact his research is
funded by the Pioneer Fund of New York, which has its roots in the eugenics
movement and backs projects that advocate racial segregation.

Basic and vital information is
largely absent from the published data such as the number of years the twins
spent together before being separated and what level of contact have they had
with each other since. Also the parameters used by Bouchard are ones that are
most likely to produce support for genetic theories, such as IQ, while he has
ignored the huge swath of psychology that deals with a person’s choice of mate,
violence or attachment patterns (areas of psychology generally agreed to
have shown no evidence of heritability).

What puts the nail in the coffin
of this supposedly scientific study is the fact that nearly all of the twins
are self selected. Here the subjective motivations of the twins themselves and
the likely possibility of them inventing similarities to achieve media
prominence and financial gain (several of the separated twins have signed
book and film deals) critically undermine the whole study.

Most modern books and courses dealing with child
behaviour point to the work of L.S. Vygotsky who pioneered Marxist psychology
at the Russian Institute of Psychology until his death by tuberculosis in 1934.
In fact I first came across his name in a popular book on child development as
I was preparing for the birth of my daughter.
Vygotsky was provided with the resources by the early Bolshevik government
to carry out full-scale experiments with children in order to observe and
understand how children come to develop perception, attention, memory and
thinking. Its aim to was assist in the revolutionising of children’s education.
Vygotsky describes the child’s transition from adaptive responses
(unconditioned and conditioned reflexes) to the complex systems of behaviour as
follows:

They (complex systems)
are characterized by a new integration and co-relation of their parts. The
whole and its parts develop parallel to each other and together. We shall call
the first structures elementary; they are psychological wholes, conditioned
chiefly by biological determinants (genes). The latter structures which
emerge in the process of cultural development (as determined by social and
historical period the individual is born into) are called higher
structures… The initial stage is followed by that first structure’s
destruction, reconstruction, and transition to structures of the higher type.
Unlike the direct, reactive processes, these latter structures are constructed
on the basis of the use of signs (language) and tools; these new
formations unite both the direct and indirect means of adaptation.

Note: the italics are my
additions

I would encourage any parent to read Vygotsky. While
I don’t have the space to outline the years scientific observation and
experimentation that lead Vygotsky to arrive at his conclusions, what he is
saying is clear. These biological determinants are broken down, destroyed then
reconstructed into higher structures through the process of the child’s
cultural development. (This is well before gene theory so he uses the term
biological determinates).

Without the child’s interaction with human society
(through tools, signs and play) then you don’t have the formation of
higher and more complex structures in the brain. One famous proof that
demonstrated the primacy of nurture was the recovery of a child who had been
raised by wolves. This child of course acted and behaved as if he was a wolf.
There have been several similar cases since and in everyone the child has shown
no development of basic human capabilities. No language instinct had kicked in
Mr Pinker!

The Human Genome Project expected
that there would be at least one hundred thousand different genes; in fact
humans have thirty to forty thousand at most, just twice the amount present in
the common fruit fly. How can so few genes specify the minutiae of differences in individual human
behaviour? Craig Venter, (the head of one of the two groups conducting the
study), concluded that genes cannot play but a minor role in determining
the differences between us. Here is a short extract from Venter’s published
conclusions. ‘The wonderful diversity of the human species is not hard-wired in
our genetic code. Our environments are critical.’ Marxist’s have been saying
this since the first half of the nineteenth century.

Is mental illness a disease ?

Lets move on and investigate
psychiatry’s basic premise that ‘mental illness’ is a disease. (Note: this
is also the basis of the self-help organizations Alcoholics Anonymous and
Narcotic Anonymous). First we must distinguish between behavioural problems
brought about by biological factors (brain tumours, head injuries, birth
defects etc) and those that have a purely social content. Of the latter
Marxists and non –Marxists argue that the term ‘mental illness’ is essentially
meaningless. Because the mind is the form taken by the world outside the brain
it is absurd to speak of the world as ill in the medico-pathological sense.
Instead Robinson agues that ‘mental illness’ can best be defined as a
psychological, behavioural and physiological response (or series of responses)
to certain social situations. This is exact opposite of modern psychiatry’s
stance that views ‘mental illness’ as a disease that originates from inside the
brain. Once you accept that ‘mental illness’ originates from outside the brain
then trying to understand what is going on inside a person’s brain becomes
secondary to investigating that person’s environmental/social situation.

Marxists like Robinson argue that
the majority of social situations which give rise to ‘mental illness’ are what
anthropologist Bateson termed double binds. A classic example is the case of
men conscripted to fight in a war. In the First World War British soldiers were
shot if they deserted. British conscripts were faced with an insurmountable
double bind. They knew they were likely to be shot and killed on the
battlefield, they also knew they would be shot if caught deserting. As a result
many men became mentally ill and it wasn’t malingering. Men literally shook
uncontrollably, started screaming and raving incoherently, were unable to move
when told jump out of the trench, became catatonic. These men would quickly
return to normal when taken out of the war zone.

That war sends many men crazy is
well documented. All the symptoms described as manifestations of a ‘mental
illness’ in psychiatric journals are in evidence from hallucinations to hearing
voices. That similar behaviour should occur outside the extraordinary stress of
war when individuals are subjected to severe stress over long periods, (often
beginning in early childhood) should be self-evident. The behavioural
responses by people to untenable situations are not a ‘mental illness’ but
rather a strategy for living.

While double binds (early
childhood sexual abuse is another example) typically produce the most
extreme expressions of mental distress many other ‘mental illnesses’ are caused
by situations that are simply difficult to endure. Such as persistent bullying,
prison or severe trauma. The effect of these unhealthy social situations can
and do lead to all sorts of bodily upsets. The most serious are called
psychosomatic disorders. Countless workers not considered ‘mentally ill’ have
suffered ulcers and the like as a result of work related stress.

Schizophrenia is considered by psychiatrists to be
most severe and important ‘mental illness’. It has often confused psychologists
who generally don’t view ‘mental illness’ as a disease. Oliver James for
instance, argues that schizophrenia must sometimes have a genetic component
because it is a world wide phenomenon. Understanding and diagnosing the various
forms of schizophrenia from simple to paranoid is considered the cornerstone of
psychiatric skill.

If Schizophrenia is a mental
illness (a biological disorder of the brain) then it must have a common
pathology and symptoms that can be diagnosed just like jaundice or leprosy. A
controlled study was set up in which four experienced board level psychiatrists
paired up to interview 153 outpatients. Prior to the interviews they had
conferred with each other and reach agreement on diagnostic criteria. Out of
153 out-patients 60 were diagnosed as ‘schizophrenic’. It was found that these
psychiatrists could not agree on who was ‘schizophrenic’. The percentage of
diagnostic agreement was as low as 53 per cent. This level of diagnostic
inaccuracy would never be tolerated when dealing with real physical illnesses.

Robinson’s book outlines three
examples from R.D. Laing and Aaron Esterson’s important study of
‘schizophrenia’ Sanity, Madness and the Family. Laing and Esterson went
to painstaking lengths over a five-year period to interview and observe
diagnosed female ‘schizophrenics’ both in the context of their family and
society. In every case these women had endured untenable social situations (double
binds), from early childhood due to extreme forms of parental behaviour.

You cannot even compare this
thorough method used by Laing with standard psychiatry that bases its diagnosis
of ‘schizophrenia’ on the basis of a short interview. In Britain today ‘schizophrenia’ can still be decided in half an
hour. Once a patient is diagnosed they are often committed to a mental hospital.
There they are lucky to get more than five minutes a month with the
psychiatrist who reviews their progress. If you want better treatment than this
you have to pay for it. Laing would famously say that ‘the standard
psychiatric patient is a function of the standard psychiatrist and the standard
mental hospital’.

Studies have shown
‘schizophrenic’ patients behaving one way towards their psychiatrist while
behaving close to normal when around fellow patients or friends. There are also
other inexplicable inconsistencies in ‘schizophrenic’ behaviour, on one hand
they can hear voices, hallucinate, suffer from incontinence yet when it comes
to most of the mundane tasks of life such as lining up for food they are fine.
Their overall behaviour is completely inconsistent with what one would expect from
a disease.

In Oliver James book he runs you
through the statistics. They show ‘schizophrenia’ is twice as common amongst
the poor, sixteen times more common among West Indian immigrants and so on.
This reveals that the environmental stresses associated with race and class are
key causes of ‘schizophrenic’ behaviour.

James highlights the example of
Rufus May who was told he suffered from the incurable illness ‘schizophrenia’
and would have to be on medication for the rest of his life. Not only did he
recover, he went on to train as a clinical psychologist now treating people in
a community project in a deprived part of London. May himself is able to
explain the situation and events that produced his own ‘schizophrenic’
behaviour. Roughly twenty percent of people diagnosed as ‘schizophrenic’ like
Rufus May recover and lead relatively normal lives. To quote James ‘if his
illness had been as genetically determined as say, the colour of his eyes, this
would have been impossible’.

If on the other hand you see ‘schizophrenic’
behaviour as a response to social situations such as acute double binds, then
the difficulty psychiatrists have in correctly diagnosing it is obvious;
because the person’s behaviour and accompanying symptoms are going to be as
diverse as those social situations themselves. The retreat into ‘mental
illness’ is a strategy for living which in the case of double binds removes the
persons mind from the enormous pain of confronting what seem like impossible
choices of action. Using this method Robinson and other psychologists have been
able, through long-term work with their patients, to explain their behaviour in
the context of their past and present social environment. It is the common
characteristics of these environmental circumstances combined with common
personality traits that produce similar mental disorders that psychiatrists
perceive as a variety of diseases.

While genuine mental disorders
are never voluntary they do often involve the manipulation of people by the
‘mentally ill’. There are many cases of people who have committed violent
crimes who have retreated into ‘mental illness’ rather than accept
responsibility for their behaviour. I had a past friend who was convicted of
stabbing his pregnant ex girl friend to death. It was so out of character that
many of his close friends believed him when vehemently denied he had done it.
The court case proved overwhelmingly that he was guilty, yet afterwards in jail
he still passionately insisted that he didn’t do it. Former close friends of
his were convinced he wasn’t deliberately lying. People suffering from addiction whether it is to drugs or
gambling often manipulate those around them to perpetuate their addiction.

Psychiatry’s Cures from drugs to ‘dreamwork’

Lets now look at Psychiatry’s methods
of treating the ‘mentally ill’. People who voluntarily seek the help of a
psychiatrist typically go to regular and expensive sessions where they talk
about their problems. From these discussions the psychiatrist then makes a
diagnosis. The typical cure involves a combination of more expensive talking
sessions combined with a course of prescription drugs. While Robinson and many
others agree that in some cases the limited use of anti depressants may help a
person by lifting their mood and thus enable them to start dealing with their
problems, he stresses that they are not a long-term solution.

This is not how drugs are used in
mainstream psychiatry. Psychiatry is driven by twin demons. A close financial
connection to drug companies and the notion that there is something
biologically wrong inside the patient’s brain that has to be either fixed or
suppressed. Many of these drugs have terrible side effects and unknown
long-term effects. I will not cover here what has been dealt with in other
books like ‘Prozac Nation’. But it is clear that over prescription, lack of
proper testing and the prescribing of these powerful drugs to children have
lead to terrible consequences up to and including suicide. (American courts
are full of parents trying to sue psychiatrists and drug companies for the
inexplicable suicide of their children).

Marxists like Robinson are not
saying that the chemistry in depressed persons brain is not different from a
relatively happy person’s. In fact it must be different as all our thoughts and
feelings must manifest themselves physically. What Marxists reject outright is
the idea that depression can be overcome by talk and happy pills alone. In fact
one of the reasons drug companies and psychiatrists make such a killing out of
the ‘mental illness’ business is their ongoing failures.

That said these drugs and
therapists have had mixed if limited success otherwise they could not maintain
their market. I wont go into an analysis of this here except to say that even
the basic step of someone seeking help and being able to talk about their
problems has beneficial results. It is the law of unintended consequences.
Alcoholics Anonymous is the classic example. They label alcoholism a disease
and direct people to seek a higher power to help them get clean. Yet these
misconceptions have not stopped AA from having significant success in helping
people stay clean. This is because the heart of AA’s twelve-step program gets
people to radically change both their behaviour and social environment. AA provides
a new circle of friends who don’t drink and who understand and empathize with
the recovering alcoholic.

Another cure unique to psychiatry
are the mental hospitals. To gain entry or exit if committed is policed by
professional psychiatrists. It is often a senior psychiatrist who runs the
hospital. Mental hospitals world wide are in general a living nightmare; a
place to discard people capitalist society doesn’t want to deal with. Inmates
are controlled with methods ranging from straight jackets to drug induced
coma’s.

Making a wide spread resurgence
in Bush’s America is shock therapy. Only psychiatry can rationalise the
absurdity of curing someone’s mental problems by running electricity through
their brains. Shock therapy, drug induced comas and other extreme forms of
psychiatry practised inside mental hospitals I believe are both criminal and
akin to torture.

While there are other psychiatric
cures like aversion therapy, I want to finish with a close look at cures based
on the idea of repressed memories. Many psychiatrists and therapists have made
a lot of money out of this idea. They argue that the root cause of their
patient’s current psychological condition, are the patients repressed memories
of past trauma, typically a sexual trauma. Once it has been retrieved and
remembered then the patient will be cured. This is called ‘feelings work’,
‘body work’, ‘dream work’, ‘trance work’ or ‘group work’. It has been used on a
wide range of individuals, often outside the category ‘mentally ill’ who just
wanted help with their personal problems.

The notion of repressed memory
has been around since Freud. It is linked with his concept of the unconscious.
I must admit until I had read Robinson’s book I had like many people accepted
the general idea of the unconscious part of the mind. I had read a rejection of
the idea many years before in Jacques Bouveresse’s book ‘Wittgenstein reads
Freud’. Wittgenstein argued that Freud hadn’t invented a new science but rather
a new language for describing the processes in the mind. He argued that Freud
did not have physical or scientific proof that the unconscious existed. At the
time I dismissed the argument. It seemed to me that dreams, hidden motivations
and simple phenomenon like at first forgetting a name only to have it pop into
your head later all proved the existence of the unconscious.

To fully critique Freud’s
conception of the unconscious would take much time and effort. It is also
beyond my current level of understanding so I will limit myself to outlining
briefly Freud’s idea of the unconscious and its use by modern therapists in the
practise of ‘dream work’. Freud argued that just as you have to infer
consciousness from a person’s words and action, psychoanalysts infer the
unconscious from the pathological material gained through consultations with
their patients. Evidence for the ‘unconscious consciousness’ expresses itself
in impulses, dreams and repression. All thought travels through the unconscious
before reaching the conscious mind. Freud then argued that by getting patients
to verbalise their repressed memories, motivations, desires the associated
trauma’s and neuroses could overtime with the help of a skilled analyst be
cured. The reason we repress traumatic memories Freud argues is because they
would play havoc with the normal peace of mind. These ideas form the basis of
modern psychiatric therapist’s ‘dream work’.

Robinson and many others point
firstly to fact that no genuinely scientific evidence for the unconscious
exists. While there are clearly are unconscious biological processes going on
such as digestive processes as well as unconscious cognitive processes going in
the way our memory works. These are a big step away from the Freud’s conscious
unconscious.

First up Robinson points out that
most early childhood memories are lost due to the natural process of
forgetting, they may include traumatic events. Events that are not remembered
cannot, by definition, be considered to be a part of memory. The therapists who
claim to be able to recover detailed repressed memories have a conception of
memory that equates it to a camera, able to take snapshots of childhood events
that can be reproduced several decades later. This contradicts everything that
is known about memory. One detailed study of memory demonstrated how twenty
people who were all present at a historic event produced twenty different
versions of the event some 25 years later. These memories directly contradicted
each other and the historical record. What was reflected in all these memories
were the individual’s current values, class and occupation. Memory is active
and past events are recalled from the standpoint of the present.

The most significant blow against
the conception of repressed sexual trauma, has been made recently by two
psychiatrists Pope and Hudson. Firstly they point to a number of thorough
studies made of children and young people who have been subjected to various
traumatic events of a non-sexual nature. These studies included 26 kidnap
victims, 13 who had seen a parent murdered, 100 Nazi concentration camp
survivors and so on. Not one person showed any signs of amnesia. They then did
an extensive worldwide computer search of every relevant study relating to
people who had been through traumatic events. Their report concluded with the
words

Laboratory studies over the past 60 years have
failed to demonstrate that individuals can ‘repress’ memories. Clinical
studies, which extrapolate from the laboratory to the study of real-live
traumas, must consequently start from the null hypothesis: that repression does
not occur…present evidence is insufficient to permit the conclusion that
individuals can ‘repress’ memories of childhood sexual abuse.

Despite
this, as Robinson notes, it is impossible to prove a negative. It remains
possible, in principle that a few cases of repressed memory may have occurred
or might occur.

This
leads us too what has be labelled ‘the false memory syndrome’. This is
the relatively widespread practise of implanting, through suggestion, a false
memory. This practise is carried out both by psychiatric and non-psychiatric
therapists. Their main targets have been females. Who through a variety of
techniques, principally hypnosis, are lead to falsely believe their fathers
sexually abused them as a child. In a world where the real sexual abuse of
women is widespread this perverse practise has duped many with good intentions.
Several women have successfully prosecuted their therapist in court and this
had lead to a decline in this rotten business. But not before a lot of terrible
damage had been done.

Therapists
who carried out this practise were interviewed for a number of studies. Their
statement’s ran from ‘American fathers regularly rape their daughters to make
them feel inferior’, to ‘if women feel different from other people’ incest is a
likely cause’. Another therapist believed that women were probably molested
when young if they spoke to softly, wore too many clothes, or had ‘no awareness
at all’ of being violated.

Hypnosis
has been used to implant false memories by psychiatrists employed by the state.
A well-known example of this can be seen in the documentary film ‘Capturing the
Friedmans’. The father and son were charged with hundreds of accounts of
sodomizing young boys who had come to their house for computer classes. The
father was originally arrested because the police found gay pornography in his
house. They then discovered he ran computer classes for the kids in the area.
The police then went and interviewed the local kids and brought them in for
questioning by psychiatrists employed by the justice department. Now before the
case began not one of over 50 boys, who had supposedly been repeatedly
sodomized, complained to their parents. Yet many of these boys would go on to
be key witnesses after some ‘dream work’ with the state employed psychiatrist.
As one key witness says in the film ‘I didn’t realise I had been sexually
abused until I was hypnotised’. Those boys who refused to testify recall the
immense pressure they were placed under to say they had been abused.

One
final example of false memory syndrome that psychiatrists have made a good
living out of are the poor alien abductees. I remember being astounded by Carl
Sagan’s book ‘The Demon Haunted World’ when he revealed that over 10,000
Americans believe that they have been abducted by aliens. When Carl Sagan
carried out a personal investigation of the poor victims of alien abduction (many
also claimed to have been probed in inappropriate places), he found nearly
all had come to believe they were abducted after having gone through hypnosis
and other ‘dream work’ with their therapist. I like others have laughed at
absurdity of this, but really this is an act of mass emotional vandalism.

Is psychiatry a science
?

So
despite its many and terrible failings, is psychiatry a legitimate science? Is
psychiatry like the early Wright brothers, ultimately on the right path but
still unable to get off the ground? Before answering lets look at an important
experiment carried out in the USA by psychologists lead by Professor Rosenhan.

Professor
Rosenhan and seven psychologists obtained admission into various mental
hospitals by pretending to hear disembodied voices. Once inside they all behaved as normally as they could. They
continue to be treated as mentally ill by both doctors and nurses. Further
observation of the patients by psychiatrists did not change their initial
diagnosis that they were ‘mentally ill’. As a follow up to the above, a certain
hospital was warned to expect that other ‘pseudo patients’ would be presenting
themselves for admission. Faced with a threat to their professional reputation
the psychiatrists became far more conservative in their diagnosis. Out of 193
patients one doctor suspected 41 were frauds, another doctor 23. As Robinson
says ‘it would be hard to conceive that this utterly disgraceful state of
affairs could occur in any other branch of medicine.

The
foundation of modern psychiatry is based on the idea that ‘mental illness’ is a
disease. This has no scientific validity whatsoever. This becomes even clearer
when you look at the methods psychiatrists use to cure people. I am sure many
psychiatrists have good intentions and have unintentionally helped some people,
but most are simply misguided parasites and others sadists. In a recent documentary
on America’s treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay it showed the practise of
sense deprivation, where prisoners have bags over their heads, earmuffs and
gloves. This documentary reveals that behavioural psychiatrists whose research
was paid for by the CIA first discovered the terrible effects of sense
deprivation. The terrible irony here is that this is just another proof that
‘mental illness’ is not a disease. It is my firm belief that Psychiatry is not
a science and has no legitimacy whatsoever.

It is
important to keep in mind that the above conclusions are based on people who
have no physical problems with their brain. Though I believe psychiatry has and
does harm people with genetically or physically damaged brains. This must be
tempered with the fact that there have been important drugs developed that have
helped people with head injuries.

Conclusion

So if
psychiatry is not a science does psychology provide a scientific alternative
and if so what do it look like? Psychology has and does have many schools of
thought with dubious scientific foundations ranging from Freud, Jung, Lacan to
Reich and his Orgone Accumulator. Nevertheless both the flawed practices
and theories of psychiatry and psychology have provided steps towards a
scientific psychology. Books like Wilhelm Reich’s Mass Psychology of Fascism
still provides fascinating insights. Also Reich’s SexPol movement that
conducted mass sex education amongst the working class way before it was part
of the school curriculum showed what progressive psychology could achieve. Psychology unlike psychiatry has the
possibility of becoming a fully-fledged science.

Marxist
psychologists like Robinson stress that the ability to help individuals has
very real limits. Capitalist society with its drive for profit, private
ownership, division of labour and classes naturally produces countless
situations that lead to mental disorders. Capitalism’s most extreme political
expression modern warfare drives many people insane through bombing, being
forced to kill and grief. At the other end of capitalisms brutal spectrum is
the madness of millions whose minds are starved of food. Even in the supposedly
wealthy western societies the minds of the working class are being placed under
greater and greater stress. People struggle to pay their mortgage and keep
their relationships intact while their working hours are steadily increasing.
Capitalism provides constant insecurity. You never know when you could loose
you job or house or both. Even the best psychologists can only help a small
number. Marxist psychologists argue that capitalism must be replaced with a
socialist society before we will ever see ‘mental illness’ decline and possibly
disappear.

Robinson in his conclusion writes ‘It is these (capitalist)
relations of production which form the basis of any given form of society.
Further, it is these relations of production that must, ultimately and however
indirectly, determine the ideological, political and social superstructure of
society. The social relationships found in the superstructure of society. The
social relationships found in the superstructure must necessarily include a
form of the family, the educational system and child rearing. It must follow
that the double-bind situations that lead to ‘mental illness’ can now exist
only within the framework of the relations of production of capitalism together
with its superstructural aspects. In other words once capitalism has been
completely eliminated so will double-bind situations, or at least those that
lead to mental illness.

Robinson
also stresses that a psychologist must first be as aware as possible of their
own psychology and mental problems before being able to help others. While past
pain and the world in general can and does depress people, severe behavioural
problems are chiefly related to a person’s situation, as it exists here and
now. A Marxist psychologist helps a person take responsibility for their own
behaviour and gets them (if possible) to change their existing situation and
daily practise.

Marxists
also recognise the powerful psychological effects of politics itself. From to
twisted psychology of Fascism, to the joyous psychology of those who afters
years of brutal struggle finally oust a hated dictator.

Irrational thinking is reaching new heights.
It still amazes me that supposedly intelligent, well-educated westerners can
think that some old man from India or Tibet who has isolated himself up on a
mountain is somehow a source of great wisdom. Smug pseudo rationalists like
Richard Dawkins are amazed that average Britains can still believe in astrology
or spiritualism. Yet Dawkins like so many public intellectuals is so deeply
irrational himself that he cannot apply basic science to society he lives in.
If he did perhaps then he would see that capitalism’s division of labour means
only a tiny minority like himself ever gets to understand, apply and marvel at
the wonders of science while the great mass are reduce to menial cogs pumping
out a myriad of largely useless commodities.
When the working classes, the great masses of ‘mentally ill’, mobilise
to smash the double-binds of capitalism and in the process liberate themselves
and their children, you can bet the rationalists like Dawkins and the world
psychiatrists will be screaming that we have finally gone completely mad.

References:

1.
The
failure of Psychiatry (a Marxist Critique) by John Robinson

2.
They
F**K you up by Oliver James

3.
How
the Mind works by Steve Pinker

4.
The
Demon Haunted World by Carl Sagan

5.
The
Cambridge Companion to Freud edited by Jerome Neu

6.
Mind
in Society by L.S. Vygotsky

7.
Wittgenstein
reads Freud (The Myth of the Unconscious) by Jacques Bouveresse

8.
Sanity,
Madness and the Family by R.D. Laing and Esterson

9.
Beck,
AT et al.,’Reliability of Psychiatric Diagnosis, A Study of Consistency in
Clinical Judgements and Ratings’. American Journal of Psychiatry

10.
Can Meromories of Childhood Abuse be Repressed? Study by H.G. Pope and J.I.
Hudson published in Psychological Medicine. January 1995. Cambridge University
Press.