The New Psychiatry
 

The Campaign for Sanity in Psychiatry

E-mail us to register your support for the Campaign for Sanity in Psychiatry

 There is not much difference whether a human being is looked on as a ‘case’ or as a number to be tattooed on the arm.

These are but two aspects of an age without mercy…This is the alchemy of the modern age, the transmutation of subject into object, or man into thing.
                         From ‘Doctors of Infamy’ (report on abuses of medicine and psychiatry in the Third Reich)

We wish to register our dissent with all aspects of mental health care which have been, are being or are about to be subordinated to official psychiatry – an unhealthy and essentially insane psychiatry which:

 ·    reduces the individual to a case to be ‘managed’ and ‘processed’ or to an anonymous service ‘user’.

 ·    reduces the human being to the human brain or body, or to a set of cognitive or social behaviours.

 ·     reduces individual carers to an orderable standing reserve of pre-defined professional skills and resources to be deployed in ‘managing’ and ‘processing’ cases.

 ·     reduces the aim of mental health care to maximising the client’s capacity for independent economic functionality at minimum ‘unit cost’. 

·      reduces caring to calculation — the ordered allocation of material and human resources in the service of maximum efficiency in achieving this aim.

·      reduces health care planners to human calculating machines servicing this aim.

·      reduces the meaning of a client’s symptoms to a psychiatrically labelled ‘disorder’ or ‘deficit’, and in this way denies them all meaning.

·     reduces healing to suppressing the symptoms of an individual’s inner dis-ease through psychiatric drugs
    or cognitive reprogramming. 

·      reduces the ‘causes’ of depression and psychoses to neuro-chemical disturbances of the brain — as if it were brains rather than beings that  think, feel and act in different ways.

·      reduces psychiatry to a market for the corporate pharmaceutical giants and psychiatric patients to guinea pigs for its products. 

·     reduces ‘success’ in psychiatric drug treatment to the successful suppression of feeling through the dulling and distortion of brain functioning. 

·      reduces the human relationship of carer and client to a relationship to some ‘thing’ — a disease, disorder, deficit or dependency — rather than a relationship between human beings.

·      reduces all immeasurable, qualitative dimensions of health, health care and the human relationship of carer and client to a set of measurable, quantitative indices.  

·     reduces ‘quality’ in health care to a set of quantitative targets based on the calculated disregard of all the human qualities of the carer and all qualitative dimensions of care not susceptible to measurement.  

·    reduces both users and providers of mental health services to unthinking servants of an institutionalised conceptual and professional framework which serves neither.