Psychiatrist Dr. Arthur Perace (L), talking with a schizophrenic patient depressed & withdrawn sitting beside his ward bed, at Wayne County Hosp. Detroit, MI. May 1956. Photo Al Fenn
Adam Curtis describes this history in the first and second episodes of The Trap. In 1973 David Rosenhan staged what was later known as the Rosenhan experiment. Rosenhan and his friends went to 12 psychiatric hospitals in five states. They all were instructed to report “hearing noises” but otherwise act absolutely normal. Every single one was admitted, diagnosed with disorders and given drugs. What’s worse, they were not allowed to discharge from the hospitals till all agreed with the diagnoses. Rosenhan described this scandal to the press. After this story was reported in the press Psychiatric hospitals challenged David Rosenhan to send them more fakes. David agreed and the hospitals promptly discovered a large number of the mental imposters. David Rosenhan then announced that he actually never send anyone. So the hospital were turning away the “real psychiatric patients”. This experiment cast a shadow on the entire discipline. The human factor was questioned.
At the end of the 70s, as a response to the professional challenge and especially with the advent of computers, questionnaires and surveys were sent to hundreds of thousands of people, to determine the mental state of the nation, any human judgment was removed. New disorders are invented at that time, including ADHD, OCD, PDS (various personality disorders), panic disorders, etc. To the astonishment of everyone involved in the surveys, over 50% could be classified as suffering from some of the disorders.
The recognition and the discovered massive scale of problem required drugs. The pharmaceutical companies spent the 80s developing drugs such as Prozac, etc. The ideal model of the “human touch” personalized Psychiatric profession was no longer possible on the scale of the epidemic and the Psychiatry stripped off the “human factor” switched to medicating, on the scale unheard in history. While in the CCCP hundreds of dissidents where forcibly incarcerated into the Psychiatric prisons, in America millions of people were processed through the medication machines with the efficiency of the Auschwitz.
The human despair and sadness became depression. A child’s isolation and loneliness in the sterile suburbia, the anxiety in the face of divorce, the boredom and indoctrination in school, all of it reclassified as ADHD and the gateway to Ritalin. The thrust and the goal was to distribute the blame away from the dysfunctional civilization and onto the people, to confuse the cause and the effect, to reward the docile emotional numbness and induce the emotional numbness on people who refuse to submit to the machine of sameness. This approach and the drugs quickly spread globally. Welcome to the new brave world.
Hmmm, this is a pretty crazy post…
Psychiatrist with an emotionally disturbed student, in front of paintings by emotionally disturbed students at special school. November 1957. NY, NY. Photo by Fritz Goro
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http://journalismworksproject.org/psych_hosp01.html
you have to get your hand on books by Robert Whitaker.