What do You Think the Question itself MEANS?

By Patricia Lefave, Monophrenic 

Am I asking you if everyone who is given a label is Ill?

Or

Am I asking if BEING psychiatrized can, in and of itself, MAKE someone Ill?

Or

Am I asking if being psychiatrized “proves” that the psychiatrized one MUST be Ill because those doing the psychiatrizing can't ever be wrong? 

Do you know a good way to determine that? Can’t think of anything?

How about this one?

Genuine direct communication in a two way attempt to make meaning clear? 

As I often say, language used for communication is an imperfect tool, even when people are TRYING to clarify what they mean. How much worse is it when someone is not “allowed” to talk? 

For starters, I am not accepting that this is always a problem located within the identified patient in the first place. Being “upset” can't be reduced to brain chemistry and called a “bad” thing anymore than failing to be upset by acting out on surrogates, while smiling sweetly, can be considered to be a 'good” thing.

I think the main problem is the reductionism and a view that continues to see the patient as a self contained problem without relationship to others, life events, or external reality. Seeing human beings that way is nonsensical from the start.

Is it nature or nurture, for example, that causes psychiatrists to go for a view of themselves as objective observers, outside the relationship rather than what they really are: imperfect participants who often fail to see the truth of situations... just like anyone else? The idea that there is a group of people who understand those “others” better than any of those “subjects” could possibly understand themselves, or life, is awfully stilted to me. It is also (ironically) not realistic.

The real problem, as I see it is up a level: that the question of “nature or nurture” is ALWAYS focused on, and directed AT, the identified patient and there is no consideration given at all, even for a moment, to applying the SAME standards to those doing the debating ABOUT those “subjects.” If you are defined as the “subject”, you can “admit” you are ill, or you can “deny” you are ill, which will only prove you are MORE “ill” since you are denying it...but , if you are the “objective observer” the question is never even suggested let alone answered. It is also never suggested to the observers that they could “admit” they are wrong or “deny” they are wrong[1]...since “objective observers” can't BE wrong in their own opinion. Some other objective observers just might diagnose THAT as “grandiosity.”

The instant the “subject” walks in the door, it is a forgone conclusion that the subject must be “ill”[2], in one way or another and the objective observer is the sanest human that ever lived and so the ONLY thing left to do is to categorize the “sick” one according to an abstract, ambiguous and marvellously malleable rule book called the DSM. In it, people who “think they have been harmed by others” are crazy because it says so in the book, written by those who consider themselves to be the sanest humans who ever lived, and who are therefore above all judgement to the contrary.

Yet we all know that some “people do harm others,” that some people do not so motivated by reason, or accidentally, but because it makes them feel powerful and “superior” to do so. That is what reality is really like and all anyone has to do to see that, is pick up a newspaper anywhere, on any day, and look. Yet psychiatrists ROUTINELY make judgements about people they do not even know, based on ambiguous abstractions, used in absolute terms.

This often happens in ten to fifteen cost effective minutes and once labelled, very, very few will remove it and admit that they were wrong. Even if someone does, they do NOT contact all the other people whom they previously told otherwise, when they originally defined the “subject” as insane. After all, how would that reflect on THEM?

So what I would like to do here is rise above the “nature or nurture' arguments about what is what, and look more at who is whom, and how relating as superiors to inferiors, rather than as equal human beings CHANGES the MEANING of everything that is going on. That happens BECAUSE of the premise used which goes unquestioned, or the put another way, because of the prefab filter THROUGH which the evaluators, of the identified patient's reality, are perceiving and hearing it.

I do think there are many perception/reaction problems, generally speaking, but I do not believe they all, or always, belong to the identified patient. Suggesting that of course usually gets answered with mocking and ridicule...which is then denied to exist...of course, since it would not be reasonable to people who are “normal” or above it all, to behave that way......

As far as automatic drugging goes..that may be “easy” for psychiatrists but what does it do for the “subject” who is telling the truth that is never believed, is trapped in the system, and has no escape.  Again, there is an assumption of “them and us” in this in absolute terms. I remember reading a case history[3] many years ago about a psychiatrist who tried taking the drugs himself that they were forcing into a patient who had said he felt like the drugs were going to kill him. So the psychiatrist took the drugs for just a short time and then told his colleagues. “He is telling the truth...I feel just AWFUL.

The response? “Well that is because those drugs weren't MEANT for YOU.”

That is the “them and us” split that allows the doctor to feel “just awful” while denying that the patient feels the same thing. When “we” (experts) say we feel just awful, “we” mean it, but when “they” (crazy people)  say the same thing, “they” are just “seeking attention.” The same group dynamic exists in dysfunctional families as well and is accepted as “normal”.

Also the patient's thinking may well have been DEFINED as “faulty” when in fact, all that he or she was doing in the first place was telling the truth about an  experience, but I can tell you, once the labelling is done, there is no looking back.

Many people learn to go along with their treatment and show others what they want to see and hear because the patient KNOWS there is no escape possible. But is that a “good” result for either the identified patient or society?

And let's get something else stated openly here. The identified patient does not have to have DONE anything. You can get to be “the patient” just by saying something someone does not understand or perhaps does not like. The idea that all psychiatrized people must be controlled because we are all sitting, precariously balanced on the edge of committing murder and mayhem out of complete irrationality, related to nothing at all, is inflammatory and fear based.

There are a lot of assumptions in that. I used to work inside a psychiatric hospital, B.C.E.[4] and frankly many of those labelled “schizophrenic” were a whole helluva lot nicer people than many of those who assumed themselves to be their “superiors,” and many of them had a lot more insight into their own lives and other people's motivations and experiences than those, charged with the job of taking care of them, had into their own. I used to say that some days you could not tell the patients from the staff without a program.