Creating Mental Illness Out Of Thin Air

It always amazes me of how those in authority create mental illness out of thin air especially if the behaviors in question are those that it does not approve of.

In the modern era we have seen many sweeping new creations and definitions of mental illness stamped with the approval of the state.

If your heavily anti authority you are heavily defined as being clinically mentally ill.

If you are racist or prefer to be in the company of your own ethnic group only you are defined as being clinically mentally ill.

If you heavily question the government speaking about it’s constant conspiring against it’s own population it intervenes upon everybody you are defined as being clinically mentally ill.

If you are heavily patriarchal where you show behaviors unfriendly or unsympathetic to feminist perceptions you are defined as being clinically mentally ill.

These are just a couple of new creations and definitions of being described as mentally ill by the state in conjunction with psychiatric institutions.

What this really amounts to is if you are in power where you don’t approve of specific forms of behavior or types of people it is really easy to assign and categorize others as being mentally ill. Used in the hands of the state this has become the newer form of socio political ostracization.

There is a reason as to why the modern state works very closely with world health organizations especially if it can sway them to do some of it’s dirty work of curving the general population under it’s control some more.

I don’t see this.

Have you even read the DSM or the ICD, like ever?

You are blind then.

Are you addressing me or Stoic?

If mental illness or psychological disorders can be made up out of thin air makes you wonder what is real and what is not.

Still anything can be made to be real so long as you convince a great deal of many people to believe such.

In today’s world belief is what makes reality where believing is seeing.

Reality is whatever perception management says it is where the lone individual cannot define it for themselves.

Reality is not independently defined. It is completely dependent on perception management.

Welcome to the tyranny of those who decide what reality is for others.

Your getting really paranoid now. :-"

Coming from you that means nothing at all.

For me a person like you lacks common sense and all life affirming experiences.

How so?

Society will deem anything ‘un-normal’ if it grates against their sensibilities - I have often been accused of being aggressive when stating my case to a manager, and they soon change their tune when I calmly point out that stating one’s case is not an aggressive move but a given…

JLW is right… deeming a mind-set a mental illness will prohibit that mind-set from spreading amongst the revolting natives - a control tactic that is obviously working if people here don’t realise that such tactics exist.

I wanted so much to completely agree with this when I saw the thread, but it’s a mix. I do think pharma invents customers by inventing diseases. ADD, ADHD is a great example. Kids who might thrive in a different kind of educational environment get labelled and pathologized. A number of other ‘mental illnesses’ are set up like this

But maybe you can show me where people are being labelled mentally ill for being racist or antifeminist. Who are these people who are getting diagnoses for being racist? I can’t quite see how this is happening, how they end up in a psychiatrist’s office.

If you google xenophobia or racism as a mental illness you will get many accredited psychiatrists in conjunction with pharmaceutical companies leading the charge of declaring it as disease.

Regardless if you agree with the peculiarities of my examples I think what you can agree with is the state’s usage of psychiatry as a weapon to control the minds of the population.

I think how it goes is that government finds a target of people it does not like and the behaviors they exhibit that it wants to have less of by employing pharmaceutical or psychiatric institutions who then get customers by creating fictional mental abstractions of diseases which in conjunction does the government’s bidding where everybody profits.

The BBC documentary: Adam Curtis’ The Century of the Self

youtube.com/watch?v=Mojw7DIpu1k

If you haven’t watched this, I highly recommend it. All and all it’s probably one of the best documentary I’ve ever seen. On anything.

I have read the DSM. Well, a lot of it. That is why I present this to you. James is not far off.

Szasz revisited!!!

The first result I got for mental illness racism actually had the following quote…

Psychiatrists, like any other group of humans, have a wide range of beliefs, but any psychiatrist diagnosing someone as mentally ill because they prefer the company of their own race, is likely heading towards a malpractice suit.

I don’t really think it is the state, I think it is the corporate elites, specifically in pharma.

I don’t think it is as organized as this in the West. In fact it is less like this than it used to be. IOW I don’t think the government sits around deciding that certain kinds of behavior are a threat so they encourage psychiatrists and Pharma to come up with an illness and a pharmacological treatment. I think pharma wants to pathologize as much as it can because this makes them money. I think many authority figures out there - teachers, for example - like the control this gives them over behavior that bugs them. But I see the profit motive as primary here. It’s not like in the old soviety union where dissidents ended up with diagnoses and incarceration in mental hospitals. I see it more as shifting all thinking away from considered systematic problems towards pathologizing individuals. If you have a problem, you are the problem. Smile, deny, move on.

I would guess there are members of the elite that are instigating this on a generalized political level. But I see it as not so much a state thing. The state has much, much less power than it used to in diagnosing people or making them get diagnoses. It’s more of a worldwide subliminal/marketing manipulation of people to view any suffering they have as a result of their own bad genes/mental problems, rather than some systemic external problem.

if you feel anxiety, take zoloft, don’t start looking at the sources of your anxiety, connect with other people over common sources, make or demand changes at work, at home, in society as a whole, etc.

If you feel angry, take _____________ don’t start looking …etc.

We have eliminated a huge feedback system by pathologizing everyone who is having an negative reaction to the way things are.

And that is sick.

Definitely you.

Add is a serious disease. Is it over diagnosed? Absofuckinglutely. To the point that it is now cool to have it.
Of the cases diagnosed, probably around 5 per cent are “real”.
A good psychologist/psychiatrist knows when to diagnose it.

Then we have potentially only five percent of psychiatrists who are competent. Toss in the profit motive and a conspiracy claim would not be silly at all.

Does that surprise you?

I don’t think there is a conspiracy at all. Just dramatization by the media.

Me, no. I am surprised when other people notice this is the case.

The media are being fed information by pharma. They have huge pr/marketing machines, and these are effective. People’s urge to have magic bullets and quick solutions play into their hands, of course.

If both Pharma and psychiatrists were both responsible and competent, even if you were correct that it was merely hysterical media, this would mean they are quietly profiting, especially the former, while knowing that people are being medicated when they should not be. This would be almost as bad, ethically, as the actual situation. They would be aware of what was happening, but not saying anything. In the current situation most don’t want to notice what is really happening - which is a form of incompetence - but are active in creating more ‘customers.’

I suppose, on second thought, that is an ethical toss up. Both explanations leave them pretty reprehensible.