How Psychiatrists Have Become “Insane”

     Up until the 1700s, the belief was that those who were “mad” had become that way through some supernatural providence or through some moral failure. It was a distortion in the “mind” – that entity that connected the body to the soul – that led to their mad behavior.

     For the most part, mad individuals were kept at home and cared for by their families, given minimal custodial care in “madhouses,” or were incarcerated and chained up in the bleak prisons of the day.

     The “doctors” who cared for these folks were known as alienists or “mad doctors,” and it was their branch of medicine that had then begun to move away from these earlier explanations for the insane and to move toward a more biological explanation for those conditions. At about this time, the early 1800s, asylums began to be built to house mad individuals, and it was because of them that the biological model of insanity could then take such firm hold of what was becoming modern psychiatry.

     Many of these early asylums were conceived as sanctuaries for this segment of society, and they provided “moral treatment” regimens by which their residents had a chance of recovering their sanity and of returning to society. The therapeutic protocol for these institutions included compassionate treatment, mild labor and occupational therapy, and rural settings with plenty of fresh air and exercise available. Today that philosophy can be seen in Soteria houses and other similar programs that often have a high rate of success.

     By the mid-1800’s laws such the Lunacy Act of 1845 in England required these asylums to be headed by qualified physicians, thus making the care of the “mad” a medical responsibility for the first time. The nineteenth century English scientific propensity to classify everything from insects to plant life moved into the field of the insane with so many “subjects” now available in one place for psychiatrists to study.

     The mad doctors, or alienists, had by now become known as psychiatrists, and they now sought to legitimize their standing within the medical field. They were put in charge of some asylums and they began classifying the mental aberrations they found there as medical conditions based on a biological pathology. One influential psychiatrist of the time, Wilhelm Griesinger wrote in his 1860’s book that psychiatry had undergone a transformation in its relation to the rest of medicine with “the realization that patients with so-called ‘mental
illnesses’ are really individuals with illnesses of the nerves and brain”.

     Today, of course, this method of classification is still all that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manuals really do. They contain a list of symptoms with no cause noted other than the bogus notion of some vague kind of biological or chemical imbalance.

     By the early 1900s these psychiatrist-run institutions had become cruel experimentation facilities for the brutal treatments psychiatrists were devising to “cure” insanity. Isolated from public scrutiny for too long, psychiatrists could perform cruel insulin coma therapy, electroshock therapy, and lobotomies with no fear of reprisal from a horrified public.
 
     When the public did become aware of these practices, just after WWII, they did become horrified, of course, and psychiatry had to resort to chemical incarceration with antidepressants and antipsychotics to control the mad. That’s still what they do today.

     Over these last two hundred years, judging by these practices today, psychiatrists have become as “insane’ as those they say they have been trying to cure.

     There’s a Taoist principle that you become what you resist. You can see it happen in children who have so strongly resisted an abusive parent while growing up that they then become abusive parents themselves when they have children. The chain of abuse just continues unbroken.

     Psychiatrists have been resisting the insane for so long and with so much force that they now have themselves become insane.