Psychiatry plays a moralizing role for society by defining behavior in terms of normal and abnormal
- behavior that is inconvenient or annoying
Similar to religion, psychiatry assumes a powerful role in defining “right” or “wrong” in binary terms of “normal” vs “abnormal” behavior. The word “normal” has always been elusive, and the standardization of particular social norms is essential for creating categories of people defined in terms of their contribution to the collective success of society.
The ease and efficiency provided from a manual like the DSM means that we have to create a model for standardization. If a normal individual has an internal locus of control, for example, a person who feels like they have control of the events and outcome in his or her life, this is our standard we can say that a person who believes themselves to be at the mercy of external circumstances to be abnormal. Once we have a few characteristics that make up the abnormal individual, we can categorize these characteristics and label them as a particular mental disorder.
With psychology as a basis for analytically outlining ‘problems’ and suggesting “potential cures”, mass society becomes dependent on its authority for deciding who is “normal” and who isn’t. Certain behavioral characteristics unique to an individual become outlawed in order to maintain conformity. For example, homosexuality used to be considered a mental illness by psychiatry, as it was a deviation from what was standard, that being heterosexual relations this gave psychiatrists the ability to then correct the aberrant behavior. Medicalization within the biomedical field it is much easier to create a standard of normalcy in which we can compare deviations. This classification of a is totally dependent on social and cultural and economic criteria.
References
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Flower Bomb. (2020). Descending into Madness. The Anarchist Library: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/flower-bomb-descending-into-madness-an-anarchist-nihilist-diary-of-anti-psychiatry.
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Ideologue. (2022). Why Foucault Hated Modern Psychiatry (2:21). Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gl0LpzWt5IA.
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Its Not Just In Your Head. (2022). Who is more mentally ill, Bundy or Bezos?: https://www.airr.io/episode/63d179d3410eb7000e5e34da.
Metadata
Type:🔴 Tags: Politics / Psychiatry Status:☀️