Beyond Conflict, Peter Breggin
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Beyond Conflict
From Self-Help and Psychotherapy to Peacemaking
by Peter R. Breggin, M.D.
1992
page 107
"
Helplessness can be learned as an adult and also as a child. The strongest people can lapse into helplessness immediately after a severe physical or emotional trauma. An otherwise self-empowered individual abruptly becomes frightened, irrational, confused, overwhelmed, unable to make decisions, and simply unable to cope. I have worked with male rape victims who have been diagnosed "schizophrenic" as a result of one assault.
"
page 147
"
The most severe personal conflicts have been relegated to the mental health profession. If a person becomes despairing, suicidal, or seemingly mad, almost everyone agrees that psychiatry has the best answers. Many societal conflicts, like crime and homelessness, also lie within the province of psychiatry. Yet modern principles of conflict resolution, including concepts of liberty and love, have had almost no impact on the mental health profession.
As a pscychiatrist, I have been dismayed to watch modern psychiatry reduce psychological problems and conflicts between people to biochemical defects within one specific individual. While there is no scientific basis for the new biological psychiatry ( refs ), the ideology has gained widespread support. Ironically, psychiatry's growing reliance on genetic and biological theories comes at precisely the moment that clinical and empirical research is confirming the childhood origins of adult problems and emotional pain.
A child who rebels in a dysfunctional home or fights the burdensome routine of schools is labeled hyperactive and given Ritalin. An elderly woman becomes depressed over being ostracized and abandoned is labeled major depression and given shock treatment. A man who cannot find work or housing is labeled schizophrenic and forced into a state mental hospital.
To often, little or no effort is made by psychiatry to identify and satisfy the individual's basic needs. While the patient is seen as incompetent, no attempt is made to support his or her autonomy and independence. No attention is given to the conflicts between the individual and other people, such as his or her family, school, or community. Instead, psychiatry takes a short cut: It diagnoses the person as mentally ill, explains away the problem as genetic and biochemical in origin, and subdues the patient with drugs, elelectroshock, and hospitalization ( Breggin, "Toxic Psychiatry", 1991 ).
.
.
.
When psychiatrists treat a patient, they usually single out one member of an interpersonal conflict for their attention. Others involved in the conflict escape diagnosis and treatment but may in reality be more the source of the problem. The conflict is then suppressed by locking up, drugging, or shocking one of the members into a more submissive state.
When psychiatrists intervene in family conflict, they will single out one or another member of the family as "mentally ill." A chld, for example, is restless or rebellious at home and is labeled hyperactive. A wife is despairing about her marriage, stops doing the housework, won't get out of bed. She is diagnosed depressed. A husband is filled with rage, much of it stemming from childhood Basic Stress Paradigms, and tries to stifle his pain by drinking. He is labeled alcoholic.
Many individuals who become diagnosed by psychiatrists are in reality suffering from oppression. This is especially apparent in children because they are more obviously subjected to events outside their control. The psychiatrically labeled child is, in most cases, a victim of obvious family conflict, often including emotional, physical, or sexual abuse ( refs, including Alice Miller, "Thou Shalt Not Be Aware", 1984 ). Sometimes the child is directly reacting to marital discord. At other times, the child simply has too much energy and creativity to be contained within stultifying homes or classrooms. The family or the school should be helped to respond better to the child's basic needs for love, security, and stimulating education.
Childhood stresses eventually become internalized as Basic Stress Paradigms and psychological conflict, and many adults suffer from the result of experiences they can no longer recall. The adult who hallucinates voices talking to him through the walls of his house may be re-experiencing the dread of overhearing his parents speaking in a threatening manner though his bedroom wall when he was a small child. The grown woman who thinks her insides are rotting may be driven by the horror of incestuous abuse as a child.
.
.
.
More often than generally realized, women are driven to despair by physical, sexual, and emotional abuse in their ongoing marriages. Sometimes, men are pushed into severe depression when they cannot cope with the continuous verbal abuse from their wives.
In summary, when psychiatrists "treat mental illness," they are manipulating and controlling people who instead need someone to address their basic needs and conflicts. The psychiatric interventions tend to suppress conflict, often at great cost to the person labeled "patient". The conflict model is far more appropriate and effective than its psychiatric counterpart.
.
.
.
Psychiatrists also enter the arena of conflict resolution on a social and political scale. The profession originated during the industrial revolution as a method of bypassing legal restraints on che incarceration of homeless street people ( Michel Foucault, "Madness and Civilization", 1965 ). Civil commitment proceedings were instituted throughout the Western world permitting the idefinite incarceration of homeless, unemployed, and sometimes mad people. State mental hospitals, within which the profession originated, were lockups for the poor. Some became self-sustaining feudal systems in which the once homeless inmates now became completely self-supporting with their own dairies, farms, mechanics, tailors, and so on.
By the 1930s these giant lockups, which shoved the problem of pverty under the institutional rug, had become too large and unmanageable. Lobotomy and various shock "therapies" were developed for subduing the inmates ( refs ). In the 1950's drugs were developed that induce chemical lobotomies ( Breggin, "Toxic Psychiatry", 1991 ). These drugs, -- called neuroleptics, antipsychotics, or major tranquilizers -- remain in widespread use in institutions of all kinds, and in clinics and private practice as well.
Despite the new drugs, the hospitals remained overflowing. Then in 1963 the federal government's disability payment programs began to cover psychiatric diagnoses, and for the first time, patients declared psychiatrically disabled could receive a meager sum to help them live at home, in nursing homes, board-and-care homes, and sometimes on the streets. Thus began so-called deinstitutionalization, which was mostly a transfer of patients to private facilities, with the cost shifted from the state to the federal government. This series of events is better described by the term transinstitutionalization than by deinstitutionalization ( refs ).
The economic policies of the Reagan and Bush administrations resulted in a vast increase in the numbers of homeless. The real wages of the poor dropped, low-cost housing subsidies decreased, housing costs went up. The result was a massive escalation in people who could not afford housing.
Now psychiatry is attempting to reinstitute its old policies in what might be called reinstitutionalization. Here psychiatry moves into an area of societal conflict -- what to do about the poor and homeless -- and offers an easy political solution: lock them up against their will. That many of these people may show psychiatric "symptoms" is beside the point. First, being homeless can make a person seem crazy. Second, people who are more helpless or less competent ( including people who seem mad ) are the fist to suffer from adverse economic conditions. What these unfortunates need is not involuntary incarceration and drugs, but improved economic circumstances, including, if necessary, nonmedical forms of support from society.
.
.
.
"
BO
"The Hunting Ground": Film Exposes How Colleges Cover Up Sexual Assault and Fail to Protect Students
http://www.democracynow.org/2015/1/28/the_hunting_ground_film_exposes_how
From Self-Help and Psychotherapy to Peacemaking
by Peter R. Breggin, M.D.
1992
page 107
"
Helplessness can be learned as an adult and also as a child. The strongest people can lapse into helplessness immediately after a severe physical or emotional trauma. An otherwise self-empowered individual abruptly becomes frightened, irrational, confused, overwhelmed, unable to make decisions, and simply unable to cope. I have worked with male rape victims who have been diagnosed "schizophrenic" as a result of one assault.
"
page 147
"
The most severe personal conflicts have been relegated to the mental health profession. If a person becomes despairing, suicidal, or seemingly mad, almost everyone agrees that psychiatry has the best answers. Many societal conflicts, like crime and homelessness, also lie within the province of psychiatry. Yet modern principles of conflict resolution, including concepts of liberty and love, have had almost no impact on the mental health profession.
As a pscychiatrist, I have been dismayed to watch modern psychiatry reduce psychological problems and conflicts between people to biochemical defects within one specific individual. While there is no scientific basis for the new biological psychiatry ( refs ), the ideology has gained widespread support. Ironically, psychiatry's growing reliance on genetic and biological theories comes at precisely the moment that clinical and empirical research is confirming the childhood origins of adult problems and emotional pain.
A child who rebels in a dysfunctional home or fights the burdensome routine of schools is labeled hyperactive and given Ritalin. An elderly woman becomes depressed over being ostracized and abandoned is labeled major depression and given shock treatment. A man who cannot find work or housing is labeled schizophrenic and forced into a state mental hospital.
To often, little or no effort is made by psychiatry to identify and satisfy the individual's basic needs. While the patient is seen as incompetent, no attempt is made to support his or her autonomy and independence. No attention is given to the conflicts between the individual and other people, such as his or her family, school, or community. Instead, psychiatry takes a short cut: It diagnoses the person as mentally ill, explains away the problem as genetic and biochemical in origin, and subdues the patient with drugs, elelectroshock, and hospitalization ( Breggin, "Toxic Psychiatry", 1991 ).
.
.
.
When psychiatrists treat a patient, they usually single out one member of an interpersonal conflict for their attention. Others involved in the conflict escape diagnosis and treatment but may in reality be more the source of the problem. The conflict is then suppressed by locking up, drugging, or shocking one of the members into a more submissive state.
When psychiatrists intervene in family conflict, they will single out one or another member of the family as "mentally ill." A chld, for example, is restless or rebellious at home and is labeled hyperactive. A wife is despairing about her marriage, stops doing the housework, won't get out of bed. She is diagnosed depressed. A husband is filled with rage, much of it stemming from childhood Basic Stress Paradigms, and tries to stifle his pain by drinking. He is labeled alcoholic.
Many individuals who become diagnosed by psychiatrists are in reality suffering from oppression. This is especially apparent in children because they are more obviously subjected to events outside their control. The psychiatrically labeled child is, in most cases, a victim of obvious family conflict, often including emotional, physical, or sexual abuse ( refs, including Alice Miller, "Thou Shalt Not Be Aware", 1984 ). Sometimes the child is directly reacting to marital discord. At other times, the child simply has too much energy and creativity to be contained within stultifying homes or classrooms. The family or the school should be helped to respond better to the child's basic needs for love, security, and stimulating education.
Childhood stresses eventually become internalized as Basic Stress Paradigms and psychological conflict, and many adults suffer from the result of experiences they can no longer recall. The adult who hallucinates voices talking to him through the walls of his house may be re-experiencing the dread of overhearing his parents speaking in a threatening manner though his bedroom wall when he was a small child. The grown woman who thinks her insides are rotting may be driven by the horror of incestuous abuse as a child.
.
.
.
More often than generally realized, women are driven to despair by physical, sexual, and emotional abuse in their ongoing marriages. Sometimes, men are pushed into severe depression when they cannot cope with the continuous verbal abuse from their wives.
In summary, when psychiatrists "treat mental illness," they are manipulating and controlling people who instead need someone to address their basic needs and conflicts. The psychiatric interventions tend to suppress conflict, often at great cost to the person labeled "patient". The conflict model is far more appropriate and effective than its psychiatric counterpart.
.
.
.
Psychiatrists also enter the arena of conflict resolution on a social and political scale. The profession originated during the industrial revolution as a method of bypassing legal restraints on che incarceration of homeless street people ( Michel Foucault, "Madness and Civilization", 1965 ). Civil commitment proceedings were instituted throughout the Western world permitting the idefinite incarceration of homeless, unemployed, and sometimes mad people. State mental hospitals, within which the profession originated, were lockups for the poor. Some became self-sustaining feudal systems in which the once homeless inmates now became completely self-supporting with their own dairies, farms, mechanics, tailors, and so on.
By the 1930s these giant lockups, which shoved the problem of pverty under the institutional rug, had become too large and unmanageable. Lobotomy and various shock "therapies" were developed for subduing the inmates ( refs ). In the 1950's drugs were developed that induce chemical lobotomies ( Breggin, "Toxic Psychiatry", 1991 ). These drugs, -- called neuroleptics, antipsychotics, or major tranquilizers -- remain in widespread use in institutions of all kinds, and in clinics and private practice as well.
Despite the new drugs, the hospitals remained overflowing. Then in 1963 the federal government's disability payment programs began to cover psychiatric diagnoses, and for the first time, patients declared psychiatrically disabled could receive a meager sum to help them live at home, in nursing homes, board-and-care homes, and sometimes on the streets. Thus began so-called deinstitutionalization, which was mostly a transfer of patients to private facilities, with the cost shifted from the state to the federal government. This series of events is better described by the term transinstitutionalization than by deinstitutionalization ( refs ).
The economic policies of the Reagan and Bush administrations resulted in a vast increase in the numbers of homeless. The real wages of the poor dropped, low-cost housing subsidies decreased, housing costs went up. The result was a massive escalation in people who could not afford housing.
Now psychiatry is attempting to reinstitute its old policies in what might be called reinstitutionalization. Here psychiatry moves into an area of societal conflict -- what to do about the poor and homeless -- and offers an easy political solution: lock them up against their will. That many of these people may show psychiatric "symptoms" is beside the point. First, being homeless can make a person seem crazy. Second, people who are more helpless or less competent ( including people who seem mad ) are the fist to suffer from adverse economic conditions. What these unfortunates need is not involuntary incarceration and drugs, but improved economic circumstances, including, if necessary, nonmedical forms of support from society.
.
.
.
"
BO
"The Hunting Ground": Film Exposes How Colleges Cover Up Sexual Assault and Fail to Protect Students
http://www.democracynow.org/2015/1/28/the_hunting_ground_film_exposes_how
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