Psychiatry-the middle-class Burden

Psychiatry: The middle-class burden

On "Future Tense" on RTE Radio One on the 1st October,  a journalist  introduced a magazine programme on scientific developments. Amongst the reports was one item on the latest research into "schizophrenia". It appears that medical researchers in the South are modifying their "theory" of the causes of schizophrenia. They now claim that the part of the brain which produces dopamine at the rear, receives its signal from an area at the front of the brain.  Their hypothesis that this signal from the front of the brain triggers the production of dopamine (the so-called  "anxiety transmitter").

Psychiatrists since the 1920's have based their "treatment" of "mental illness" on the unproven hypothesis that there is a chemical imbalance. This casting around for an excuse for medical "interventions" is a source of interest and income for middle class doctors, biochemists and their ilk. The lack of scientific proof that there is such an illness as "schizophrenia" is no barrier to murderous medical and police interventions in the lives of victims of malpractice.

The conservative, nationalist press regularly carries reports of the need to pay more money to doctors.   In the wild extrapolations of these hack journalists and scribblers, one fifth of the population shows "signs of mental illness" and on this "basis" are likely to suffer later in life. While socialists are in favour of more support for people who are in difficult straits there can be no justification for lavishing more money on medical supernumeraries.

The English satirist, Steve Bell, characterises the "treatment" of "schizophrenia" as taking the horns off a bull with a fence.   Treating social problems as the biochemical imbalance of a multitude of (usually) working class people is a bourgeois fallacy and should be a matter for systematic exposures.

Some previous variants on the schizophrenia theme were those of the "recessive gene".   The theory of a genetic predisposition to idiocy, lunacy and mental weakness were part of the cult of eugenics (or medical selective breeding) in the 1930's and held great influence over those club – footed supermen, the National Socialists and fascists.

In ancient times, depression was known to the Greeks as melancholia and was reported  in  traumatised soldiers  who had  returned  from Greece's wars.

The establishment of the first lunatic asylum in fourteenth century London coincided with the passing of a Law on Vagrancy (1349). Both- measures were aspects of the beginning of the breakdown of feudalism and the displacement of the rural poor who made their way to London.

In Russia, both before 1991 and since, the Serbsky Institute has done the bidding of its political masters in the degradation and stigmatisation of political dissidents.   In the case of General Grigorenko (Samidzat, Voices of the Soviet Opposition, Pathfinder, New York) the politically astute doctors painted a picture of a well- adjusted   soldier   who   became withdrawn and "schizophrenic" in that he voiced anti-Soviet opinions.  Only last June, the same gang helped a middle - ranking Army officer who served in  Chechnya  prepare  a 'defence' of Post - Traumatic Stress Order in relation to a charge of rape and murder.
 

Where do socialists stand on the cult of psychiatry and the degradation and imprisonment without the right of habeas corpus of thousands of the poor and beaten down?

The answer is not so difficult. Firstly we see people as the products of their upbringing and circumstances (after Marx, in his Theses on Feuerbach). Secondly, a revolution  creates  an upheaval in society and the conditions where "...the free development of each is   the   condition   for   the    free development of all" (Marx and Engels, The     Communist     Manifesto).

Therefore, there can be no socialism without personal freedom.   Finally mental distress is a social phenomenon and only  when  people realise themselves to be actors upon nature and society as well as being mentally the product of nature and society i.e. matter, can they bring an end to distress.

One of the cruellest forms of the crank doctors "diagnosis" of schizophrenia is the constant suggestion that the person is hearing voices. These "voices" are the mental reflection of sensory images, that characteristic which is the foundation of human consciousness.

(We learn this from Hegel, the German Enlightenment philosopher).  In this sense, every coherent human being hears voices.