Wednesday, December 15, 2004

The Manufacturers of Madness, how they work.

The proposal that rape is a disease so upset feminists— fearing that the diagnosis would provide an instant insanity defense for men who sexually assault women—that they threatened to sue. So Spitzer backed down: “We probably will withdraw the diagnosis of rapism . . . ,“ he told The New York Times. It would be laboring the obvious to dwell on the fact that Spitzer and his colleagues are acting like legislators introducing new bills in Congress and supporting or withdrawing them, depending on how the political winds blow. This is not the way real doctors act: Medical research on AIDS has provoked violent responses of outrage from African authorities who feel their countries are stigmatized by the high incidence of the disease among their people; but these protests have not prompted western AIDS re searchers to withdraw their findings.

Moreover, according to the report in Time magazine, when the feminists threatened to sue over the invention/discovery of “masochism”— mainly afflicting women who stay in abusive marriages—the psychiatrists changed its name to “self-defeating personality disorder.” This surprised the feminists, who did not expect the meeting to descend “into the usual picturesque result of successful lobbying: a bit of old- fashioned horse-trading.”

Psychiatrists have, indeed, come a long way from the autocratic-Teutonic days of Kraepelin and Bleuler, when solitary, male, psychiatric investigators staked their reputations on claiming to have discovered new diseases. Now we have psychiatric democracy or mobocracy—that is, psychopathology by a consensus of charlatans, with women meticulously included among the mischief-makers, with a stake in expanding the business. One of the invited psychologists—naively expecting something scientific to happen—complained: “The low level of intellectual effort was shocking. Diagnoses were developed by majority vote on the level we would use to choose a restaurant. You feel like Italian, I feel like Chinese, so let’s go to a cafeteria. Then it’s typed into a computer. However, it does not seem to matter how openly political—how obviously nonmedical and unscientific—are the ways and means by which psychiatrists create categories of mental illness: the medical and scientific community, as well as the lay public, continue to view psychiatry as a bona fide medical specialty and mental illness as bona fide illness.

Carol Nadelson, the president of the APA (for 1985—1986), smugly asserts:
Thanks to the use of DSM-III, the diagnosis of mental disorders is now generally as reliable as the diagnosis of physical ills. . . . Psychiatry has emerged as a mature medical specialty whose methods of diagnosis and treatment are guided by a rational scientific approach. Psychiatry has proved itself in the laboratory.
Is that so?

(Insanity, the Idea and Its Consequences
By Thomas Szasz :80-81)

Note that it is the American judiciary that is coming to be reliant on "mental illness." They are corrupt and increasingly rely on a corrupt foundation. There are those who would make all your discriminations for you one day, if they could. So it is best to pay attention as to how they would.

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