Word: mentalities
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...course, “mental illness” is a notoriously ill-defined ailment and subject to great manipulation by the psychiatric establishment and the state. Thomas S. Szasz, professor emeritus of psychiatry at the State University of New York in Syracuse, Michel Foucault, historian and philosopher, and others have shown that governments have frequently applied labels of “madness,” “insanity,” and “mental illness” to political and social dissidents...
...Foucault argues, governments initially began the practice of managing “lunacy” toward the end of the Middle Ages, creating asylums for those whose behavior was deemed abnormal. With little scientific understanding of mental illness, “lunatic” was a broadly defined label that too frequently included the deaf, the mute, and the intellectually slow. “Treatment” meant squalid living conditions and physical abuse. Beginning in the 18th century, some steps were taken to make treatment of the mentally ill more “humane,” but well...
...1960s, many states in the U.S. began reassessing hospitalized mental patients, releasing those not deemed to be a danger to themselves or others and passing laws making it more difficult to commit individuals without their consent. Many asylum patients were released, albeit with mixed results...
...some states are trying to bring the mentally ill back under state control. Kendra’s Laws, which force non-hospitalized individuals to take medication to control some condition defined by the government as mental illness, are just one more chapter in this long history of state-controlled psychiatry...
...temptation to misuse psychiatry is ever present. The practice of declaring dissidents insane in order to control their behavior did not end with Hitler or Stalin. Today, in Russia, as the Los Angeles Times reported on May 30, local governments quietly hustle off to mental asylums those individuals who get on the wrong side of local politicians. Considering the Russians’ track record under Soviet rule, perhaps that’s no surprise...