Psychiatry’s “Adjustment” Is No Ideal for Mental Health

     Bruce Levine published a poignantly thoughtful article this week on Mad in America in which he challenges the conventional psychiatric idea of what constitutes mental health. He points out that the idea of adjustment by a person to his or her personal, institutional, and environmental surroundings is part and parcel of their notion of mental health.

     Levine brightly notes that adjustment to an insane world and taking on its attributes is hardly a satisfactory description of “mental health,” let alone of an ideal state anyone should be shooting for. Levine is in good company, of course, and he appropriately cites Szasz, Fromm, Krishnamurti, Aldous Huxley, R.D. Laing and others who share that view.

     “Only a profoundly uncritical thinker would celebrate adjustment in of itself without a critical analysis of what one is adjusting to” Levine writes.

     That is true, but there is an underlying history to the whole idea of “adjustment” which also helps explain why psychiatry so thoroughly espouses the whole biological view of man, including the “chemical imbalance” theory.

     Adjustment is an idea born in the Darwinian biological theory of evolution. As such, it might effectively explain how one animal species after another came to survive longer and more robustly by “adjusting” to the threatening aspects of their environment. Adjustment is a concept that is pertinent to the field of evolutionary biology. 

     Adjustment, however, is not a concept that is the least bit pertinent to the ideal emotional and mental state of a human being. Adjustment is only pertinent for animals.

     Man has been successful not by adjusting to his environment, but by conquering it. Man is a composite identity of spirit, mind, and body, and it is the spirit that provides an individual human with the life force that conquers, overcomes, or out-creates adversity in his environment.

     Only animals “adjust” in order to survive. 

     Psychiatry’s claim that adjustment is an ideal state for human mental health shows how poorly they think of man. Seeing only an animal nature in man also allows them to perform electroconvulsive therapy and chemical lobotomies with this utterly misguided “animal” justification. Zapping somebody with 450 volts of electricity or turning them into a zombie with a cocktail of Xanax, Paxil, and Risperdal comes from the same theory of approach a veterinarian uses to put a dog out of his misery by euthanizing him.

     Psychiatry euthanizes the human spirit. They use the physical force of ECT and psychotropic medication to control humans, just as if they were trying to housetrain a puppy by continually beating his behind with the harsh blows of a newspaper every time he “makes a mistake.”

     Behavioral conditioning and adjustment are nineteenth century ideas about how to make animals behave as we want them to.

     They have no place in any field of true help from human therapy.