In AlterNet, Lisa Di Venuta recounts how a visit to a university counselor about her mild depression quickly got her onto a downward spiral with multiple psychiatric medications and increasing and ultimately severe disability over the course of five years. Once she’d stopped all of the drugs, she started asking how many more people this was happening to.
You Calling Me Crazy? The Perils of Misdiagnosis (AlterNet, June 10, 2015)
I always find it strange when people tell these stories about the horrible way they are treated by psychiatry, stories that are very typical, yet still feel compelled to say how of course so many many people have been helped by psychiatry. “Compelled” may be a literally accurate word too, as even AlterNet is a semi-mainstream media outlet and may have demanded this disclaimer. After all, we don’t want to be “anti-psychiatry,” do we? Psychiatrists like Lieberman and Torrey have succeeded in making the phrase into the equivalent of being a Muslim terrorist. Even on Mad In America we often see this (not the outside pressure though), and I really don’t understand it.
Just the same, though, this young woman deserves a lot of credit for coming out of the closet and talking about her bad– and typical– experience with psychiatry.
It’s social conditioning by the media not to look too “extreme”. As Chomsky puts it:
“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum….”
― Noam Chomsky, The Common Good
That is exactly what’s happening in this discussion too.
