5.5 KiB
| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Anti-psychiatry | 7/13 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-psychiatry | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T09:08:59.919288+00:00 | kb-cron |
=== Civilization as a cause of distress === In recent years,psychotherapists David Smail and Bruce E. Levine, considered part of the anti-psychiatry movement, have written widely on how society, culture, politics and psychology intersect. They have written extensively of the "embodied nature" of the individual in society, and the unwillingness of even therapists to acknowledge the obvious part played by power and financial interest in modern Western society. They argue that feelings and emotions are not, as is commonly supposed, features of the individual, but rather responses of the individual to their situation in society. Even psychotherapy, they suggest, can only change feelings in as much as it helps a person to change the "proximal" and "distal" influences on their life, which range from family and friends, to the workplace, socio-economics, politics and culture. R. D. Laing emphasized family nexus as a mechanism by which individuals become victimized by those around them, and spoke about a dysfunctional society.
=== Inadequacy of clinical interviews used to diagnose 'diseases' === Psychiatrists have been trying to differentiate mental disorders based on clinical interviews since the era of Kraepelin, but now realize that their diagnostic criteria are imperfect. Tadafumi Kato writes, "We psychiatrists should be aware that we cannot identify 'diseases' only by interviews. What we are doing now is just like trying to diagnose diabetes mellitus without measuring blood sugar."
=== Normality and illness judgments ===
In 2013, psychiatrist Allen Frances said that "psychiatric diagnosis still relies exclusively on fallible subjective judgments rather than objective biological tests". Reasons have been put forward to doubt the ontic status of mental disorders. Mental disorders engender ontological skepticism on three levels:
Mental disorders are abstract entities that cannot be directly appreciated with the human senses or indirectly, as one might with macro- or microscopic objects. Mental disorders are not clearly natural processes whose detection is untarnished by the imposition of values, or human interpretation. It is unclear whether they should be conceived as abstractions that exist in the world apart from the individual persons who experience them, and thus instantiate them. In the scientific and academic literature on the definition or classification of mental disorder, one extreme argues that it is entirely a matter of value judgements (including of what is normal) while another proposes that it is or could be entirely objective and scientific (including by reference to statistical norms). Common hybrid views argue that the concept of mental disorder is objective but a "fuzzy prototype" that can never be precisely defined, or alternatively that it inevitably involves a mix of scientific facts and subjective value judgments. One remarkable example of psychiatric diagnosis being used to reinforce cultural bias and oppress dissidence is the diagnosis of drapetomania. In the US prior to the American Civil War, physicians such as Samuel A. Cartwright diagnosed some slaves with drapetomania, a mental illness in which the slave possessed an irrational desire for freedom and a tendency to try to escape. By classifying such a dissident mental trait as abnormal and a disease, psychiatry promoted cultural bias about normality, abnormality, health, and unhealth. This example indicates the probability for not only cultural bias but also confirmation bias and bias blind spot in psychiatric diagnosis and psychiatric beliefs. It has been argued by philosophers like Foucault that characterizations of "mental illness" are indeterminate and reflect the hierarchical structures of the societies from which they emerge rather than any precisely defined qualities that distinguish a "healthy" mind from a "sick" one. Furthermore, if a tendency toward self-harm is taken as an elementary symptom of mental illness, then humans, as a species, are arguably insane in that they have tended throughout recorded history to destroy their own environments, to make war with one another, etc.
=== Psychiatric labeling ===
Mental disorders were first included in the sixth revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-6) in 1949. Three years later, the American Psychiatric Association created its own classification system, DSM-I. The definitions of most psychiatric diagnoses consist of combinations of phenomenological criteria, such as symptoms and signs and their course over time. Expert committees combined them in variable ways into categories of mental disorders, defined and redefined them again and again over the last half century. The majority of these diagnostic categories are called disorders and are not validated by biological criteria, as most medical diseases are; although they purport to represent medical diseases and take the form of medical diagnoses. These diagnostic categories are actually embedded in top-down classifications, similar to the early botanic classifications of plants in the 17th and 18th centuries, when experts decided a priori about which classification criterion to use, for instance, whether the shape of leaves or fruiting bodies were the main criterion for classifying plants. Since the era of Kraepelin, psychiatrists have been trying to differentiate mental disorders by using clinical interviews.