In the
early nineties, an epidemic of mental disorder was sweeping America
and Britain. It had been uncovered by a new system for identifying
disorders. Psychiatry had been attacked for relying on the personal
and fallible judgement of psychiatrists.
But
instead, a new objective method based on checklists had been
invented. These listed only the objective symptoms, and deliberately
did not enquire into why the individuals felt an anxiety. In the late
80s, nationwide surveys had revealed an incredible picture: more than
50% of Americans suffered from mental disorders.
But at
the very same, the drug companies had announced that they had created
a new type of drug, called an SSRI, which they claimed, targeted the
circuits inside the brain that were causing these malfunctions. The
SSRIs were marketed under names like "Prozac". What they
did was alter the amounts of serotonin that flowed across the circuit
connections within the brain, and they readjusted the chemicals to
normal levels.
What now
began to happen, was that millions of people who had been diagnosed
by the checklist as disordered, went to psychiatrists to be
medicated. The result was liberation from anxiety on a wide scale.
But in the process, the checklist became a powerful, and seemingly
objective guide for people, as to what should be their normal
feelings, and what was abnormal.
And a
number of leading psychiatrists began to argue that what they were
actually doing was creating a static society, in which human beings
were adjusted by the medication, so that they fitted to an agreed
normal type, defined by the checklist.
But
then, the man who had created the checklists admitted that it might
actually be leading millions of people to believe that they were
disordered when they were not. The checklist added up only observable
symptoms. They deliberately excluded any understanding of the
patient’s life. Because of this, he said, it confused genuine
psychological disorder with normal human feelings of sadness and
anxiety, and that this was happening on a wide scale.
All this
was being said by one of America's most powerful psychiatrists, Dr.
Robert Spitzer:
What
happened is that we made estimates of prevalence of mental disorders
totally descriptively, without considering that many of these
conditions might be normal reactions which are not really disorders.
That's the problem. Because we were not looking at the context within
which those conditions developed.
What was
happening was that large parts of normal human experience - grief,
disappointment, loneliness, were all being reclassified as medical
disorders.
From the
documentary TheTrap:
What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom
by Adam
Curtis.
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