Psychiatry is a concerning problem for those who have witnessed the abuses of it's authoritarian system of judgements levied on behaviorist grounds towards the minority of souls who process and undertake experience differently than the multitude. Indeed, it is almost a swear-word among artists who's very success depends on the creation and mapping of new experience for the purposes of reflection. It is, in our modern era of scientific enlightenment, at best an entanglement within the scientific aura, a throwback to 19th century determinism used to describing the universe in terms of blind forces that obey Newtonian principals. It is from this viewpoint that we arrive at the bio-chemical model of mental illness, a kind of crude cause and effect explanation based on a a harrowing lack of real data outside of drug reaction analogies and questionable experimentation undertaken in the 1950s, in an era where the brutal procedure of the lobotomy was still a palatable exercise for persons who labeled themselves doctors.
Indeed, psychiatry is also a subject of labels. Obsessive-compulsive disorder, depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and borderline personality disorder come to mind as ills which psychiatry professes to understand and treat. Yet the DSM remains as crude as a computer punch card machine in terms of proffering diagnoses, and is itself a compendium of labels that rest on other labels of experience for its very definition. Prognosis and treatment of mental diseases remains as simple as glancing at a list of symptoms and treating them according to an appropriately marketed drug or set of drugs that are rife with effects which do not consider the whole organism, both mentally and physically. It seems often that the role of the psychiatrist merely exists to prevent death on the prescribed drugs, otherwise, a pharmacist could easily fulfil his function.
However, what is amiss in psychiatry is not regulated to its labeling propensity or even its insistence that reality as experienced by everyone must remain less exciting than a television show. Psychiatry's main criticism should be its lack of depth and its disconnection from the themes of life; whether physical, social, mental, spiritual, or moral.
The impact of the institution of psychiatry on the physiology of the individual is immense. Not only do modern neuroleptics such as Zyprexa cause weight gain to body distorting proportions of fifty pounds, they also cause involuntary muscle reactions in cases of prolonged exposure, diabetes, sexual dysfunction, stroke, and irregular heart rhythms. The physical symptoms alone should have been enough to ban the usage of atypical antipsychotics, however the political sway of the pharmaceutical companies insured that organizations such as the FDA wouldn't bat an eyelash. Outside of the horror show of bodily side effects, we have the physical dangers and debasements of psychiatric hospitals themselves. It is impossible to exercise in a mental institution where patients are provided with only a bed and a common area which induces sedentary activities such as television watching, on top of which patients are supplied low-grade food products cooked by quantity for the sake of efficiency and cost-effectiveness. Besides these common restrictions, the practices of the hospital often lead to forced drugging, abuse from staff and other patients, and the deprivation of any suitable environment that a human being would wish to reside in. Rather, the structure and operation of these institutions appear to be ran for the sake of the staff, where visibility of patients and efficiency in daily routines such as blood draws requires small and inadequately planned facilities for housing human beings.
Socially speaking, the influence of medications tested in the banality of a mental hospital during drug trials where external stimuli and participation is limited can act to create new crises in the patient who must consistently operate in the real world. In short, participants in clinical drug trials are not expected to hold down a job, much more a household, on pharmaceutical medications, while the real-world patient prescribed modern psychiatric drugs is required to undertake these things and more while experiencing extra-pyramidal side effects that not only damage real-world functioning but also lend to the patient's sense of despair when things such as fluidity of speech vanish along with social functioning. It is a huge mistake that studies of medications usually take place within a hospital setting and not in the world at large, that the social impacts of treatments may negatively impact husband and wife as well as mother and child. External social factors such as the level of functioning at work or happiness in social situations are of prime importance to consumers, and should be taken into account during clinical studies as the main factors of the patient's quality of life while on medications.
This quality of drug trials within the social sphere brings up a larger issue, which is the lack of connection that psychiatry maintains in regards to other disciplines. It manages to attack differing conceptions of ontology and epistemology through the bio-chemical model without offering any legitimate answers to deep philosophical questions. By suggesting that mental disorders are chemical imbalances in the brain, the implication is that a healthy brain is chemically balanced, fully ascribing to the 19th century determinist model of the universe as consisting of active and reactive forces. Not only does this void the spirituality of many patients, it sets up a grim portrait of human endeavors as being regulated by the result of different chemical combinations, which is a reductive debasement of human facilities and experiences, both those classified by psychiatrists as 'sane' and 'insane.' If we took human history in terms of the bio-chemical model, we could write off intense human struggles for freedom as 'just a bunch of chemicals,' completely forgoing free will and more transcendent matters of humanity such as the search for meaning in our actions, or the very spirit of existence itself. And currently, psychiatrists are making the entire life histories of their patients irrelevant in terms of treatment guidelines due to belief in the myth of the mind and experience as existing only chemically. Even in terms of their own argument, it has been proven that each person's brain chemistry is distinct, leading one to wonder what exactly among some six billion different brain chemistries could be defined as sanity.
Mentally speaking, the brain exists as a system of neural networks that maintains a complexity and mystery to the observer. The conception that a drug designed only to prevent the release of dopamine could make the brain healthy upon crude cause and effect lines is a ridiculous misnomer that belies the totality of psychiatric ignorance. A brain is not linear, it processes information and experience in multilateral ways that depend on the cooperation of the entire entity, and it still stands to be discussed what exactly consciousness consists of and furthermore, what the mind actually is. The reckless tampering that psychiatrists undertake with their patient's minds is not only amoral, but is also a scientific mistake. The data concerning human consciousness is basically infinite insofar as it is through consciousness that we experience the datum of the world. One should not dump manufactured chemicals into a series of infinite data, just as one should not medicate the developing brain of a seven year old who exhibits hyperactivity. It is a moral qualification that psychiatrists attack with their operation, as it is a substantially physical, social, mental, and spiritual one.
Foccault once said that one day in the future, we will look back with disgust at what was done to those labeled mentally ill in much the same manner as we look back on slavery. It is my hope that within the interests of scientific inquiry and humanism, our Western societies still mystified by their own myths abscond from the usage of psychiatry during a flash of insight which resonates not with the defenders of half-reasoned normalcy, but with the groups of people fighting for harmonious diversity and embracing of psychic difference. As with many things, it is only with tolerance and love that the labeled mentally ill should be treated, and not with the insult of a phrenology masquerading as scientific action.
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