Jeffrey Schaler o psychiatrii, přepis

Přepis známého projevu Jeffreyho Schalera o psychiatrii.

Jeffrey Schaler o psychiatrii, přepis

Ladies and gentlemen, it is a great honor to receive this award tonight, named for my dear friend and colleague, Thomas Szasz.

As Thomas Szasz wrote years ago: The only true political virtue is obedience to authority and the only true political sin is independence. Independence renders authority useless and that is what infuriates it so. You’ve undoubtedly been told, you’re mentally ill for daring to say that the emperor called psychiatry has no clothes, not to mention stupid and "unscientific". At least this is what some of my colleagues say about me at one university. So if this is something that has happened to you, I am here to say that you’re not alone.

The controversy regarding the myth of mental illness and psychiatry is not about science or medicine, it’s about power. When psychiatrists start agreeing with you, well then perhaps you ought to reconsider your position. Something may be wrong. So I’d like to say a few disobedient things, which is especially true, because I was trained as a psychologist and when a member of the profession criticizes its own it's considered especially sacrilegious.

What do we know that is true that the cult of psychiatry keeps telling us is false? First, the idea that there is a known brain lesion causing mental illness. The truth is, we cannot tell who is mentally ill and who is not by looking at pictures of their brains or analyzing their blood. Psychiatrists had to invent their own book of diseases, because pathologists would have nothing to do with them. It’s called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders, the DSM – a great work of fiction.

What’s the difference? What’s the difference between the DSM and a scientific book of disease? Every disorder in the DSM is invented. Every disease listed in a pathology textbook is discovered. Real disease is found in a cadaver at autopsy. Mental illness is not. Mental illness refers to something that a person does. Real disease refers to something that a person has. Consider this yet another way: It takes one person to have a real disease; it takes two people to have a mental illness. If you’re alone on an island you could develop a real disease like cancer or heart disease. But you cannot develop a mental illness such as hyperactivity or schizophrenia.

This is because mental illness is always diagnosed on a basis of some sort of social conflict. When people do something that others find objectionable, they can be diagnosed as mentally ill. If the person doing the diagnosing is more powerful then the person diagnosed then there is trouble. In this sense the diagnosis of mental illness is always a weapon. Not so when it comes to diagnosing real disease.

Think of how when people get angry with one another they inevitably resort to some kind of diagnosis; they say: You're crazy, you are mentally ill, you are paranoid. Can you imagine somebody getting angry with someone and saying: You have diabetes, you have Parkinson's disease?

Social conflict has nothing to do with developing a real disease. You don't develop diabetes because someone doesn't like the way you think, speak or behave. You have to have someone else present to judge that your behavior is morally good or bad in order to have a mental illness. So diagnosis is a weapon. A tool people use against one another, especially when there is some kind of power conflict present. And what of treatment? Treatment for mental illness is punishment. Look at our criminal justice system. When someone commits a crime and a psychiatrist is in the courtroom, a defendant may go to a mental institution instead of a prison. Can you imagine a judge saying: I sentence you to treatment for your cancer?

I submit to you, that psychiatric treatment is worse than prison. For in prison they don't judge how long people should be deprived of liberty on the basis what they think about themselves and the world. In mental institution of course this is the case.
If you don't think about yourself and the world correctly you'll be punished longer.
Psychiatrist love to say that mental illness is a real disease just like cancer; the analogy between mental illness and real disease is not reciprocal, it doesn't hold both ways. Having cancer is not like being depressed. We don't shocked people who have cancer to make them better – especially if they don't want to be shocked.

Consider how melanoma, a deadly form of skin cancer, is a disease here as well as in northern India. If you have melanoma does it cease to exist if you move to another country, another culture? Of course not. If you’re wandering the foothills of the Himalayas and meditating for fifteen hours a day, you may very well be called a holly man in India. Take that same person, have him walk across the grounds of the Washington Monument in Washington D.C. and he’s diagnosed a paranoid schizophrenic and committed to a mental hospital.

What do you think psychiatrist would do if Jesus were alive today? Or Buddha? Or Mohamed? Right into a mental hospital, injected with drugs to stop their crazy believes and speech. Psychiatrists today are the true great inquisitors. They would crucify the holly men and women of yesterday in an instant.

My father was sent from Nazi Germany to America in 1933 when he was about fifteen years old. From that time he was sent out of the Germany by his family because he was a Jew until his dying day five years ago he had nightmares that the Nazis were persecuting him. He fought against them his whole life: awake and asleep. I used to ask him: Dad, what were people thinking in Germany back then? What were they thinking when they saw the Nazis parading about? And he used to say: Nobody took them seriously. Nobody believed they could ever have the power to do what they did. We laughed at them.

Now while I encourage you to laugh it the face of those psychiatrists who argue that two plus two doesn't equal four no to (?) that we must also take them seriously – especially when it comes to the harm they have done to people in the name of helping them. For if we do not, history will repeat itself. We are building a resistance to the psychiatric Gestapo. The Citizens Commission on Human Rights is an important partner in a fight for liberty and justice. That is why we are here tonight and that is why we will be together tomorrow. Thank you.

 

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Projev je zde: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-iYngr6N60

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