Psychiatrists Have Become Our Jailers

     Three hundred years ago, as commerce drove the Western world to abandon farms and populate cities, more and more “lunatics” appeared on the streets. Poverty, malnutrition, and probably just plain isolation spurred an increasingly larger group of people who had suddenly became a “problem” for the rest of “civilized” society.

     The asylum was born. The early institutions that housed these poor souls were for the most part cruel jails for those who had committed no crime. The “insane” were warehoused in away from society and were often starved while chained to walls and left to rot far way from the easily offended eyes of a new urban middle class.

     By the early nineteenth century an effort was made to rehabilitate the “mad” through moral treatment sanctuaries that offered a kinder treatment with the goal of returning these “deviants” to productive lives. That movement did not last long, however, perhaps given the huge growth of urban metropolises and the need for confining these abnormal folks in larger and larger, more and more punitive, and less and less rehabilitative institutions.

     It was at this time that psychiatrists found their niche. These newly evolved “doctors of the mind” had for some reason set their sights on analyzing the insane – not the mentally healthy – to develop their practice. These dark madhouses, hidden from society, provided them with perfect laboratories to develop their cruel “treatments” of insulin coma therapy, electroshock, and lobotomies.

     All those treatments the World Health Organization now lists as torture. Behind he alls of these jail-like institutions, out of the public eye, psychiatrists could destroy one body after another in their mad efforts to cure insanity. Instead, they ended up jailing thousands of unfortunate souls in their own damaged bodies.

     Once the extent of these institutional horrors were exposed to the public in the early 1950s – – and lobotomies were made illegal and ECT was at least curtailed — psychiatrists had to find another means of jailing those they considered insane.

     Bingo. Thorazine was created, and three quarters of a century of debilitating psychotropic drugs have followed in its path. Any “unhappy” soul can now be imprisoned in a body poisoned by these toxic chemicals prescribed by a psychiatrist who’s chosen the right DSM label for someone’s “lunacy.”

     Today eighty million American souls on antidepressants have become incarcerated in their own body jails. With the help of Big Pharma’s bogus marketing, they have come to believe they are now somehow free from life’s tribulations.

     There’s only one tribulation in any kind in a jail, though…the tribulation of not being free.