Coercion: Psychiatry’s Quintessential Tool

     Coercion is defined as the act of “forcing or pressuring someone to do something against their will by using threats, intimidation, or force to compel a desired response.” Coercion undermines a your will to choose and forces you to act in ways you otherwise would not.

     Coercion is psychiatry’s stock in trade.

     It starts as soon as a person walks into a psychiatrist’s office and says she has been feeling nervous lately. “Oh, you have Generalized Anxiety Disorder…GAD,” the psychiatrist tells her. If the psychiatrist feels it’s a particularly bad anxiety case, he’ll label the person with “Panic Disorder.” If the person says she’s uncomfortable in social situations, she’ll be told she has “Social Anxiety Disorder.”

     That initial proclamation by a psychiatrist has such a forcefully persuasive effect because a psychiatrist is a doctor and is supposedly an authority on the mind. All those certificates on the walls of psychiatrists’ offices show how much authority they have. You have to accept what they say as the truth. Their authority itself adds force to their pronouncements…covert and subtle, perhaps, but force.

     You are therefore “forced” to accept what the psychiatrist says about you and your condition, no matter what that condition is. That’s your entry point onto the spectrum of coercion which psychiatry uses to nullify individuals through force. Perhaps just for profit. Perhaps, for more malicious purposes.

     If you have a DSM designated diagnosis, of course, you are going to be prescribed a psychotropic drug to “handle” it. You’ll take Zoloft, Lexapro, Xanax, Ativan, Klonopin or any one of a number of other SSRIs or benzodiazepines that will force you into a partial stupor so you can’t feel that anxiety. Chemical force is used to make you not yourself. Soon you’ll find yourself acting in ways you would never have chosen to act.

     How much force is used? How many prescriptions do you end up on and what’s the size of your antidepressant cocktail? How severe is the chemical lobotomy the psychiatrist said you needed to numb you enough to the sporadic unpleasantness of life?

     When the psychiatrist tells you, after years of slowly increasing those prescriptions, that you’re really not doing any better, by his standards for “normal,” he labels you “treatment resistant.” Then he gets to apply his ultimate coercive force: electroshock therapy. 460 volts of electricity run through your brain after a full anesthetic and a body paralyzing drug are given so you won’t feel any of that…they say.

     Of course, if you have objected to receiving ECT, the psychiatrist just takes you to court and uses the force of his authority there to convince a judge that you’re too crazy to make good decisions yourself about ECT. The court then adds the force of the US justice system to court order you to that most vicious end of the spectrum of psychiatric coercion, ECT.

     That should force you, finally, into becoming a psychiatrically “normal” citizen.