From Mad in the Netherlands: The debate about the role of language, power, medical thinking and relational approach within mental health care is not new. Already in the 1960s, Thomas Szasz (1960) criticized the concept of ‘mental illness’ as a social construct that mainly served to control deviant behavior. Michel Foucault (1961/2006) showed in History of Madness how ‘madness’ is historically constructed by institutions as a form of exclusion and discipline.
Contemporary critics such as Robert Whitaker (2010), Peter Gøtzsche (2015), Trond Aarre (2020) and Jim van Os (2014, 2016) also show that the current disorder model falls short of human experience. Van Os argues that we should move away from diagnoses such as ‘schizophrenia’, in favor of personal diagnostics and recovery-oriented approach. He is supported by theorists such as Gabor Maté, Bessel van der Kolk and Peter Levine.
Read the full article here.
Again moving the chairs on the Titanic. Talk about health, not sickness. But to people who have the right to walk out or who are engaged in involuntary interactions? We’ve heard all this before, decades ago, and Szasz exposed it as just coercive psychiatry with a smiley face.
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I have had psychiatrists start thei answering machine message with “This is Doctor X answering by recording” No one says that anymore. Doc X assumes that patients are easily confused. I find it insulting.
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