This week in Canada a government employee was convicted of  the theft of a quarter of a million dollars which he obtained by planning a siphoning operation from the tax accounts of deceased persons and others who no longer lived in the same province. Though he was convicted, his sentence was reduced to 'house arrest' for two years. The reason?
A psychiatrist says the convicted one did this because he is 'bi-polar.'  As the psychiatrized, do you believe this kind of 'diagnosis' is causing problems rather than solving them?

My own opinion is that this is fast becoming another slippery slope created by psychiatry for a number of reasons.

One of them is that criminals are now using 'mental illness' as an excuse for criminal behaviour and many lawyers now see no problem with this.

Another is that now everyone who get branded with the same label will be seen by the public as if they were criminals, or potential criminals, just waiting to flip out with the bad 'brain chemistry" and do the same sort of things.

But the other point that the public does not pay any attention to at all is the fact that psychiatry is gaining more and more concrete, uncontestable power all the time to define reality for everyone else and is including in this power grab more and more human traits, experiences and emotional reactions defined by them as ambiguous abstractions,  in absolute terms, which could be applied to anyone, anywhere, for any reason.

Does anyone else have any thoughts on this?