Here is my contention, the trouble with (hegemonic) psychiatry in the Late-60s, has to do with their latent ontology. So assume a nice conformist world, where everyone thinks the same, everybody is the same. There is little room for diversity, only normalizing 50s style conformism. (This is what Girl, Interrupted is criticizing): https://youtube/watch?v=U4-GD1VqdOA This is why the Rosenhan Experiment succeeded, assume this model, and youll be guaranteed to end up with a lot of false positives (assume someone non-conforming (if they make statements that contradict the psychiatrist definition of conformist normality, liable to be medicalized). So if you come from an upper-class family, and you dont want to go to university (as in Girl, interrupted), this is imagined as a symptom of mental illness (because it is expected/normal/natural (according to crypto-50s assumption that an upper-class person will go onto university). However, the problem that emerges in anti-psychiatry (e.g. Szasz exemplifies this problem) is to make the opposite mistake. It rejects conformist ontology, but it substitutes a radically relativist ontology. So it ends up with false negatives as its problem. I.e. people who have mental illnesses are deemed sane because it has a relativist ontology (i.e. people have certain experiences that psychiatry doesnt have the authority to declare a type of mental illness—this is why Szasz ends up as an ideologue for punitive thinking about mentally ill people and the criminal justice system (if mental illness doesnt exist, that means people are put in prison NOT mental hospitals......). Heres my middle-of-the-road position on these questions: I assume a pluralist ontology (i.e. people are different, thus non-conformity is not necessarily a mental illness), but I reject a relativist ontology. So there are diversity of legitimate forms of normal behavior (diversity of normalities to paraphrase an anarchist approach to tactics (diversity of tactics)), but there are also illegitimate, abnormal, problematic forms of behavior (because pluralism is not relativism!)
Posted on: Sun, 21 Dec 2014 20:38:24 +0000
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