Psychiatry itself - Looking at its Social Control

Psychiatry itself - Looking at its Social Control

In society today the amount of anti-depressant medication prescribed is massive amongst I guess many other medications. 

Where and who does the “checks & balances” on how long a person needs to be on them?  It can sometimes appear that people have been on them for years, what is that somehow an open-ended prescription?

I might complain of tiredness to my G.P and he says, perhaps you need anti-depressants?  Yes, just patch me up and place me back into the battlefield of modern day commercialism.  Let’s not ask questions of how this modern day system has an impact on the well-being – just prescribe!

 

As Thomas Szasz notes of his profession:

 
"Inasmuch as we have words to describe medicine as a healing art, but have none to describe it as a method of social control or political rule, we must first give it a name. I propose that we call it pharmacracy, from the Greek roots pharmakon, for ‘medicine' or ‘drug,' and kratein, for ‘to rule' or ‘to control.' ... As theocracy is rule by God or priests, and democracy is rule by the people or the majority, so pharmacracy is rule by medicine or physicians."

--Ceremonial Chemistry: The Ritual Persecution of Drugs, Addicts, and Pushers, by Thomas Szasz, (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1974), p. 139.)

  

"If you talk to God, you are praying;
If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.
If the dead talk to you, you are a spiritualist;
If God talks to you, you are a schizophrenic."

--The Second Sin, by Thomas Szasz, (Anchor/Doubleday, Garden City, NY. 1973, Page 113.)

(Source: http://www.szasz.com/quotes.html)