Force Supplants Mercy in Today’s Corporal Psychiatry

     Through the eighteen hundreds, man’s treatment of the disturbed – known then as the “mad” — consisted mostly of locking them up in dark institutional asylums. No one pretended that cured them, but it at least removed them from the world of “normal” people.

     Toward the end of the nineteenth century, however, the thought of helping these poor souls began to unfold, and  alienists – the doctors who treated those alienated from themselves and society – began to look for cures for “madness.” Two divergent schools of “help” immediately formed, one which believed the source of alienation was in the mind, the other thought the problem was with body.

     Freud was the first “mind guy” and his talk therapy began a school of treatment that continued through Jung down to modern talk therapists such as Adler, Maslow and Rogers. Emil Kraepelin was one of the first “body guys” and was an early proponent of what became the biological  psychiatry school that treats mental disorders as body based phenomena.

     In the late nineteen sixties a study was done in Chicago in which Rogers, Maslow, and another half dozen of the leading talk therapists of the time were filmed as they conducted their therapy sessions. Although each had different theoretical views of the mind and its ways of handling the difficulties of life, it was discovered that each of them practiced the same validating communication skills with their patients.

     They didn’t contradict their patients, they made sure they knew they were being heard, and they kept the focus on the patient speaking, not being spoken to. Compassionate silence that invited the patient to talk openly seemed to be the key to improving the condition of these “disturbed” folks, no matter the individual theoretical background of each practitioner.

     The body guys evolved a starkly different approach. They used physical force to “cure” their patients. Insulin coma therapy, trans-orbital leukotomies, frontal lobotomies, and electroshock therapy became the tools of their trade. They were able to experiment with these  brutal techniques because most of their patients were still locked away, out of sight, in the world’s mental institutions.

     It wasn’t until after World War II that these horrors began to be exposed exposed, and most of those horrific practices were ended. In the early nineteen-fifties, though, the FDA approved the first mind-numbing psychotropic medication, such as Thorazine, and suddenly the body guys had chemical force on their side to treat the “mad” with new prescriptions that psychiatrists, as medical doctors, could dole out.

     After the vast marketing effort of Big Pharma over the last four decades to brainwash the public into believing the false, body guy idea of chemical imbalance, more than 43 million Americans are prescribed antidepressants today.

     The body guys’ cruel force has won out over the mind guys’ compassionate  listening. Today corporal medication has supplanted merciful care as psychiatry’s way to help people.