Friday, March 10, 2006

A Few Excerpts from the Book:


"And They Call It Help:
The Psychiatric Policing Of America's Children"
By Louise Armstrong"

..the majority opinion...represents a construction of the supposed reality...derived from idyllic notions of how the family and the mental health professions should be.
Once you enter the psy world, or once you are brought into it, the hypothesis is you are sick. In other words, the hypothesis in the psy world is the antithesis of the hypothesis in law.

What strikes me, as it has so often in listening to the kids, is that they seem to have such a more highly evolved sense of justice than do their keepers...

This is not the world as we expect it to be; in fact, it is the kind of mind controlling dictatorship...

The whole thing with that school (psychiatric institution) is the tighter you get with the faculty, the more power you get...

The biggest threat was the community would turn on you. (A parent) The school made you feel like shit. They would constantly remind you that they had complete control of your child and that it was none of your business.

The mental disorder is the object wrought by the objectifying gaze: it is not so much what the gaze sees, but what it constructs. It is not atheoretical to pin on Jimmy a label that does not validate and dignify his real life experience; it is cruel.

What seems in evidence here is an obsession with the mechanism of diagnosis that is overriding all interest in common sense.
If the behaviours are the leading determinant and play the dominant role in the diagnosis, the diagnoses have virtually no reliable relevance to experiential truth--even if enough psy practitioners have been similarly indoctrinated so that you can show the agree. Faced with this, any reasonable child may stand ready to shout that the emperor has no clothes. But, if given psy power, a kid does shout this out, it is less apt to result in a professional or public epiphany than in a prescription for psychotropic medication.

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