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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Anti-psychiatry | 11/13 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-psychiatry | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T09:08:59.919288+00:00 | kb-cron |
=== Therapeutic state === The "therapeutic state" is a phrase coined by Szasz in 1963. The collaboration between psychiatry and government leads to what Szasz calls the "therapeutic state", a system in which disapproved actions, thoughts, and emotions are repressed ("cured") through pseudomedical interventions. Thus suicide, unconventional religious beliefs, racial bigotry, unhappiness, anxiety, shyness, sexual promiscuity, shoplifting, gambling, overeating, smoking, and illegal drug use are all considered symptoms or illnesses that need to be cured. When faced with demands for measures to curtail smoking in public, binge-drinking, gambling or obesity, ministers say that "we must guard against charges of nanny statism". The "nanny state" has turned into the "therapeutic state" where nanny has given way to counselor. Nanny just told people what to do; counselors also tell them what to think and what to feel. The "nanny state" was punitive, austere, and authoritarian, the therapeutic state is touchy-feely, supportive—and even more authoritarian. According to Szasz, "the therapeutic state swallows up everything human on the seemingly rational ground that nothing falls outside the province of health and medicine, just as the theological state had swallowed up everything human on the perfectly rational ground that nothing falls outside the province of God and religion". Faced with the problem of "madness", Western individualism proved to be ill-prepared to defend the rights of the individual: modern man has no more right to be a madman than medieval man had a right to be a heretic because if once people agree that they have identified the one true God, or Good, it brings about that they have to guard members and nonmembers of the group from the temptation to worship false gods or goods. A secularization of God and the medicalization of good resulted in the post-Enlightenment version of this view: once people agree that they have identified the one true reason, it brings about that they have to guard against the temptation to worship unreason—that is, madness. Civil libertarians warn that the marriage of the State with psychiatry could have catastrophic consequences for civilization. In the same vein as the separation of church and state, Szasz believes that a solid wall must exist between psychiatry and the State.
=== "Total institution" === In his book Asylums, Erving Goffman coined the term 'total institution' for mental hospitals and similar places which took over and confined a person's whole life. Goffman placed psychiatric hospitals in the same category as concentration camps, prisons, military organizations, orphanages, and monasteries. In Asylums Goffman describes how the institutionalization process socializes people into the role of a good patient, someone 'dull, harmless and inconspicuous'; it in turn reinforces notions of chronicity in severe mental illness.
== Law ==
In the US, critics of psychiatry contend that the intersection of the law and psychiatry create extra-legal entities. For example, the insanity defense, leading to detainment in a psychiatric institution versus a prison, can be worse than criminal imprisonment according to some critics, as it involves the risk of compulsory medication with neuroleptics or the use of electroshock treatment. While a criminal imprisonment has a predetermined and known time of duration, patients are typically committed to psychiatric hospitals for indefinite durations, an arguably outrageous imposition of fundamental uncertainty. It has been argued that such uncertainty risks aggravating mental instability, and that it substantially encourages a lapse into hopelessness and acceptance that precludes recovery.
=== Involuntary hospitalization ===
Critics see the use of legally sanctioned force in involuntary commitment as a violation of the fundamental principles of free or open societies. The political philosopher John Stuart Mill and others have argued that society has no right to use coercion to subdue an individual as long as they do not harm others. Research evidence regarding violent behavior by people with mental illness does not support a direct connection in most studies. The growing practice, in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, of Care in the Community was instituted partly in response to such concerns. Alternatives to involuntary hospitalization include the development of non-medical crisis care in the community. The American Soteria project was developed by psychiatrist Loren Mosher as an alternative model of care in a residential setting to support those experiencing psychiatric symptoms or extreme states. The Soteria houses closed in 1983 in the United States due to lack of financial support. Similar programs were established in Europe, including in Sweden and other North European countries. In 2015, a Soteria House opened in Vermont, US. The physician Giorgio Antonucci, during his activity as a director of the Ospedale Psichiatrico Osservanza of Imola in Italy from 1979 to 1996, refused any form of coercion and any violation of the fundamental principles of freedom, questioning the basis of psychiatry itself.
== Psychiatry as pseudoscience and failed enterprise == Many of the above issues lead to the claim that psychiatry is a pseudoscience. According to some philosophers of science, for a theory to qualify as science it needs to exhibit the following characteristics: