Doc, for every 6-7 sadistic or uncaring shrinks or psych nurses, there is at least one totally devoted, compassionate psychiatric professional who does even MORE damage by trying to help, due to a failure to question the tenets of the medical model of mental illness.
I disagree with all of the parts in caps (in my post a bit up above): schizophrenia, if we are to speak of it as a thing that does exist, is not an illness; is not caused by structural or chemical differences in the brain (although differences may create a greater or lesser predisposition towards "schizophrenicity", if you will); and is not by any means entirely negative, at least not for all of us all of the time. (For most of us at least some of the time, yes; for some of us all of the time, also yes).
Insofar as it is a normative reaction or coping mechanism of the brain, the people who are (at any given moment) schizophrenic are schizophrenic at least in major part due to the context they are in, and that same context could cause a schizophrenic reaction in others so exposed.
For a variety of reasons--historical, financial, territorial (in the sense of academic and authoritative territory) and a slew of reasons pertaining to the social convenience of having a mechanism for removing inconvenient and disturbing people who haven't broken any laws--the psychiatric system's constituent professionals and contributing ancillary professions and industries are entrenched against change in the patterns we would need to change in order to have the system constitute a positive rather than a negative in our lives.
We would be happy to see the psychiatric profession drop its police powers (incarceration, forced treatment), divorce itself from the pharmaceutical industry, bite the proverbial bullet and discard the medical model of mental illness in favor of a holistic self/society interactive communication-and-coping model, focus on self-help and affirmative action and community building and group pride in identity politics, and cease to conceptualize the field as one ideally run by medical doctors. Even many of our opponents who DO believe fervently in the medical model and the wonders of forced treatment would love to see a huge influx of money sufficient to hire and keep competitively brilliant, dedicated, humanistic staff of sufficient size, create pleasant physical sites for community affairs and programming, facilitate individual job and social placement programming, pass laws protecting us from abuse and discrimination, and so forth.
None of that is gonna happen unless we--the folks so labeled--have and weild serious political clout. We are organized to that end as the beforementioned psychiatric inmates' liberation front.
Admittedly, my sense of "our" and "us" is heavily sculpted by my face-to-face conversations with other psychiatric inmates / ex-inmates who are opposed to forced treatment, opposed to lies and propaganda about the services and treatment psychiatry has to offer, and who have negative horror stories to tell about the "help" we personally have received. There is a large population of folks with psychiatric diagnoses who are users of the system and are dependent on it, either voluntarily or without the ability or opportunity to make the statement that they'd rather opt out. But most of them are not doing well and getting on with their lives and recovering with the aid and assistance of the treatments, therapies, and support of the psychiatric system, whereas those of us with far more critical perspectives on the Mental Health system tend to fall into one of these two categories:
a) Needed help, sought it or accepted it when it was offered, went through miseries of varying degree and duration at the hands of the psychiatric profession's "help", and ceased voluntarily accepting such "help". Often say that the "help" was significantly more traumatic than the original problem, whether the original problem persists or has been put behind them via other means; or
b) Wasn't seeking help, didn't consider themselves to have a problem (or at least did not agree with the psych profession that their problem lay within themselves and their ill brains), did not readily or completely accept the "help" but had it imposed on them anyway, to the detriment of their sense of self and personal liberty, and often much worse (including permanent brain damage, rape, bodily mutilation, and the creation of mood & thought disorders not present until after the psych profession's intervensions).
Original SDMB thread - The Role of Culture in Mental Illness
See my next post on this same thread
See my previous post on this same thread