Under a therapeutic disguise

Ken McLaughlin has an interesting CAPX post on the dangers of viewing the world through a psychological lens. Obvious dangers, but they don’t go away.

Over-diagnosed Britain has forgotten about freedom

• Being sick, once seen as unusual and temporary, has become a badge of identity
• Today’s mental health debate promotes the notion that we are all perpetually vulnerable
• Being forced to view the world through a psychological lens is a threat to our freedom

In 2004, I was asked to contribute to the Academy of Ideas Letters on Liberty series on the subject of mental health. Somewhat paradoxically, my argument was that while we must always err on the side of liberty, there are times when, due to mental disorder or incapacity, restricting someone’s freedom can be justified even if they have not committed a crime.

However, we must always be aware that the interplay between psychiatry and society often reveals the social and political prejudices of the time. For example, in 1851, Samuel Cartwright detailed a ‘mental disorder’ he named drapetomania, which was said to afflict black slaves who fled captivity. Cartwright’s theory was widely mocked by some but embraced by others as an explanation as to why slaves wanted their freedom. They couldn’t consider that they wanted to be free, so it must have been a disease causing them to abscond.

In the former Soviet Union, political dissidents were often labelled mentally ill – with one dissident being told ‘your disease is dissent’. It was not until 1973 that the American Psychiatric Association voted to declassify homosexuality as a mental disorder. It was 1992 before the WHO followed suit and removed it from the tenth edition of its International Classification of Diseases.

These examples, and there are many more, illustrate the societal prejudices of their time around race, political ideology and sexuality. For example, the dropping of homosexuality was less due to advances within psychiatry and more to do with the changing social and cultural climate and the work of gay activists.

The whole piece is well worth reading as a reminder that failure to err on the side of liberty is not a new problem. Here’s what D.H. Lawrence wrote about a fashion of his time – psychoanalysis.

First and foremost the issue is a moral issue. It is not here a matter of reform, new moral values. It is the life or death of all morality. The leaders among the psychoanalysts know what they have in hand. Probably most of their followers are ignorant, and therefore pseudo-innocent. But it all amounts to the same thing. Psychoanalysis is out, under a therapeutic disguise, to do away entirely with the moral faculty in man. Let us fling the challenge, and then we can take sides in all fairness.

D.H. Lawrence – Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (1921)