It is in fact one of the main dilemmas in psychiatry. Who does it serve? Whose interests does it protect? Everything else largely follows from how we answer this question.

The official mental health propagandainformation keeps reassuring us that psychiatry only cares about the interests of the patients, that is the citizens. Being a part of medicine, it strives for relieving of human suffering for the benefit of the individual who suffers. Things are a little complicated by the fact that not every suffering individual (unlike in other medical specialties) asks for relief, and a lot of them actually try as hard as possible to evade being helped; but this inconvenience is dealt with by the habitual rhetoric that psychiatric patients, by virtue of their illness, forget how to tell suffering from pleasure, and require our help – and sometimes our brutal force – to sort things out for themselves. Read the rest of this entry »

No matter how hard mental health professionals try to convince themselves and their clients in the genetic and therefore impersonal origin of their problems, this may only be successful in the former case – that is to say, such therapists can only convince themselves.

Their clients may look like they believe it, especially because the so called “cooperation” of the client is essential for maintaining one’s sanity while in therapy, but deep inside they know, even if they supposedly do not “remember”, that matters are not that simple. Read the rest of this entry »