Why Foucault Hated Modern Psychiatry
Author: Ideologue Publisher: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gl0LpzWt5IA Publish Date: 2020-2-2 Review Date: 2023-4-16 Status:🌐
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2:21
the ease and efficiency provided from a manual like this 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 then what 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 this process is called medicalization
3:00
medicalization within the biomedical field it is much easier to create a standard of normalcy in which we can compare deviations someone has a cyst growing on that leg we can compare it to various other control groups or perhaps even to the individuals of their leg and it makes sense that the psychiatric field once I am a this type of medicalization but this is a dangerous mistake the DSM 2 had a classification called paraphilia which according to dr. George Brown at ETSU involves sexual arousal to atypical objects situations and or targets children corpses animals was originally a case that homosexuality actually fell in this category as it was a deviation from what was standard that being heterosexual relations this gave psychiatrists the ability to then correct the aberrant behavior obviously to any progressive it should be clear that society was utilizing these psychiatric apparatus to regulate and no havior
4:02
but let’s take something a little more divisive say depression normally the depressed person’s outlook on life is viewed as inaccurate or negative thinking a cognitive distortion according to the Mayo Clinic some symptoms include feelings of sadness cheerfulness emptiness hopelessness anxiety agitation are this but who’s to say that these feelings are more inaccurate than happiness or optimism happiness or optimism dr. Lauren alloy and dr. Lynn Yvonne Abramson are two psychologists who argue for depressive realism and claim that depressed individuals have a more accurate outlook on life Kierkegaard is often noted for his view of a structural sort of depression and that despair underlies everything it goes beyond a feeling email see Ron perhaps one of the greatest romain writers in the twentieth century advocated for a philosophical pessimism and believed the essence of existence be sort of melancholy
5:05
but the question for Foucault is not one of arguing over the right position of depressive nihilism or naive optimism and has to do with why one particular position is picked over another why is it that society deems emptiness and hopelessness to be an inaccurate view of the world society operates on inconspicuous and penetrating systems of power then the psychiatric field is just a subject to scrutiny as any other institution what we find is that simultaneously plays a regulative role in regards to sane behaviors of patterns of thinking medications are given to reduce dispositions or increase them therapeutic methods used to limit certain beliefs and perceptions of create new ones diagnosis to standardize
5:59
our Delaine one of the main contributors to the anti psychiatric movement as a whole once said no one has schizophrenia like having a cold the patient has not got schizophrenia he is schizophrenic what he means by this is twofold one that there is a difference between how the process of medicalization is used within the context of say the body how it is used within the context of the psychiatric field and two that the medicalization of certain patterns of behavior is a point of subjectification wherein the person’s identity is formed by the man itself is applied to the patient