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While the physical treatments outlined above attempted to offer psychiatry a veneer of biomedical progress to legitimate their activities, they can be more accurately understood as instruments of torture and oppression to more efficiently control those considered as problematic and troublesome to capitalist society. Yet Whitaker (2010b: 127–130) also notes that there were important economic motives for the state and the psychiatric profession to continue experimenting on inmates in search of a more efficient way of managing deviant populations. This included the need for a cheaper form of “care” that could be performed outside the hospital system—an intervention which would address the mounting fiscal crisis caused by the continued funding of large psychiatric hospitals. Mythologised as yet another miracle cure for those labelled as “mentally ill,” this would eventuate in the popular promotion of drugs (or “psychopharmaceuticals”) within the mental health system, which will be discussed in the next section. | While the physical treatments outlined above attempted to offer psychiatry a veneer of biomedical progress to legitimate their activities, they can be more accurately understood as instruments of torture and oppression to more efficiently control those considered as problematic and troublesome to capitalist society. Yet Whitaker (2010b: 127–130) also notes that there were important economic motives for the state and the psychiatric profession to continue experimenting on inmates in search of a more efficient way of managing deviant populations. This included the need for a cheaper form of “care” that could be performed outside the hospital system—an intervention which would address the mounting fiscal crisis caused by the continued funding of large psychiatric hospitals. Mythologised as yet another miracle cure for those labelled as “mentally ill,” this would eventuate in the popular promotion of drugs (or “psychopharmaceuticals”) within the mental health system, which will be discussed in the next section. | ||
==The Drugs “Revolution”== | |||
Through the maximisation of profits for pharmaceutical corporations, the contemporary popularity for prescribing drugs is perhaps the most obvious and salient example of psychiatry serving the economic base of capitalism. However, this phenomenon can also be understood as the profession performing its ideological role as a part of the superstructure of capitalism, through the continued individualisation of political discontent and management of the population through chemical agents. The past few decades have witnessed a substantial increase in the consumption of psychiatric drugs across western society. For example, in America, the number of children medicated with ADHD-related drugs (chiefly Ritalin) grew from 150,000 at the end of the 1970s to 3.5 million in 2012 (Whitaker and Cosgrove 2015: 91–92). Similarly in the UK, Moncrieff (2009: 3) notes that the prescriptions for antidepressants increased “by 243 % in the ten years up to 2002.” The explosion in profits for pharmaceutical companies over this period has been summated by Whitaker (2010a: 320–321): | |||
<blockquote>In 1985, outpatient sales of antidepressants and antipsychotics in the United States amounted to $503 million. Twenty-three years later, U.S. sales of antidepressants and antipsychotics reached $24.2 billion, nearly a fiftyfold increase. Antipsychotics—a class of drugs previously seen as extremely problematic in kind, useful only in severely ill patients—were the top revenue-producing class of drugs in 2008, ahead even of the cholesterol-lowering agents. Total sales of all psychotropic drugs in 2008 topped $40 billion. Today—and this shows how crowded the drugstore has become—one in every eight Americans takes a psychiatric drug on a regular basis.</blockquote> | |||
As a result of what Burstow (2015: 167) has termed psychiatry’s “march to Pharmageddon,” there have been concerns from scholars both inside and outside the psy-professions that drug prescribing is getting out of hand. Specific critiques have suggested that mental health experts may be medicalising evermore aspects of our everyday behaviour as mental illnesses (e.g., our “hoarding,” drinking, gaming, grieving, gambling, and so on) so as to prescribe us more drugs; that the professional bodies are far too cosy with pharmaceutical companies and have consequently lost sight of their duty of care to their clients; that the potential health harms of long-term drug taking have been neglected in the hype around the latest “miracle pill” appearing on the market (e.g., Whitaker (2010a: 354) notes that those labelled as “mentally ill” are “now dying twenty-five years earlier than their peers”); and that other therapies are being ignored in favour of the quick-fix chemical cure. | |||
This section demythologises the idea of the “chemical cure” for mental illness by concentrating on the changing economic and political goals of capitalism since the mid-twentieth century. This analysis demonstrates that there can never be a “magic bullet” for mental disorder when aetiology has not been established, thus we have to understand drug treatments as a continuation of the biomedical technologies of control I have discussed so far in this chapter. As with other physical interventions, psychopharmaceuticals can also be understood as a further attempt to legitimise the psychiatric profession as a relevant branch of medicine. A critical evaluation of psychotropic interventions then should not focus on their effectiveness in “treating” or “curing” mental disorders, but rather analyse how this metaphorical placebo aids the survival and expansion of the psychiatric profession beyond the asylum walls. This discussion will break with much of the previous scholarship in the area by arguing that the profit-making ventures of biomedical psychiatry—as reflected in the growth of the new psycho-drugs culture—are in fact secondary to capitalism’s desire for the closer surveillance, monitoring, and moral management of the general population in neoliberal society, a function that the psy-professions are most suited for. | |||
Official historians of psychiatry view the introduction of the drug chlorpromazine (marketed as thorazine in America) in the 1950s as a turning point of revolutionary proportions in the treatment and care of the mentally ill. Shorter (1997: 246) calls it “the first drug that worked,” while in a chapter titled—in the now familiar irony-free fashion of such writers—“Mother’s Little Helper: Medicine At Last,” Lieberman (2015 : 175, emphasis original) argues that chlorpromazine was “the first ''psychopharmaceutical'' ... a drug providing true therapeutic benefits for a troubled mind.” According to such scholars, this is a breakthrough in psychiatric medicine which can be equated “to the introduction of penicillin in general medicine” (Shorter 1997 : 255). It is the beginning of “the era of psychopharmacology” (Shorter 1997: 255) which, as biomedical knowledge on the workings of the brain has progressed, we continue to reap the rewards of today. For Lieberman (2015: 178), chlorpromazine is the first drug to specially target and reduce the symptoms of psychoses (such as hallucinations and disorganised thinking). As he explains, the effect of the drug on institutionalised patients was dramatic and lasting: “[n]ow they could return home,” he states, “and incredibly, begin to live stable and even purposeful lives. They had a chance to work, to love, and—possibly—to have a family” (Lieberman 2015 : 180). Chlorpromazine was also a significant improvement on previous physical therapies (such as ECT and lobotomy) in terms of being “much less dangerous, and easily tolerated by the patients.” Just over a year after the drug was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1954, Scull (2015: 367) notes that two million people were taking chlorpromazine in America alone. On this basis, the official history of psychiatry suggests that the introduction of chlorpromazine leads to the slow but inevitable end of the asylum era. In the words of Lieberman (2015 : 180), “[i]t is no coincidence that the asylum population began to decline from its peak in the United States in the same year Thorazine was released.” For Shorter (1997), the triumph of chlorpromazine as the first “antipsychotic” drug represents a breakthrough for the psychiatric profession as important as Pinel unchaining the mad 150 years before—it was proof of the biological causation of mental disease and, just as importantly, a safe treatment modularity with which to control, if not cure, the symptoms of severe mental disorder. | |||
Unfortunately, the above picture of the psychopharmaceutical “revolution” does not stand up to closer scrutiny. The available evidence demonstrates that the drugs were—and continue to be—no more useful than previous physical treatments, either in the sense of proving an underlying biological aetiology for mental illness or in terms of the potential harm posed to patients (see, e.g., Breggin and Cohen 1999 ; Burstow 2015; Davies 2013; Kirsch 2009 ; Moncrieff 2009 ; Whitaker 2010a). As Moncrieff (2009 : 1) has outlined, | |||
<blockquote>there is no real demarcation between previous eras’ psychiatric treatments, and the theories that justified them, and our own; that the need to believe in a cure for psychiatric conditions that drove and sustained people’s faith in insulin coma therapy, ECT, radical surgery, sex hormone therapy and many other bizarre interventions is the strongest impetus behind the use of modern-day psychiatric drugs.</blockquote> | |||
I argue here that the drugs revolution can be understood as a significant success for welfare capitalism, where institutional costs are transformed into profits for pharmaceutical corporations. At the same time, the decline of the welfare state and rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s eventuate in chemical forms of social control largely replacing the institution and other forms of physical constraint as the more subtle and preferred technology for managing deviance in capitalist society. Initially suspicious of drug therapy, the evidence also suggests that psychiatric professionals in fact remained for some time wedded to the institution as their traditional power base and only belatedly turned to drugs as a technique of legitimating their expansion beyond the asylum walls. Thus, the idea of a “drugs revolution” in the twentieth century can be understood as a myth used to retrospectively legitimate the current, dominant treatment modality within the mental health system and the continuance of the psychiatric profession as the dominant group of experts responsible for defining and “treating” mental illness. | |||
Contrary to psychiatric mythology, the introduction of chlorpromazine to the mental health system happened by accident rather than design, the term “antipsychotic” being later added by pharmaceutical companies to more effectively market the drug to institutional psychiatry and state authorities. Hypothesised as a beneficial anaesthetic for major operations, the drug was originally used by Henri Laborit, a French naval surgeon, for its antihistaminic properties in 1949. The surgeon (cited in Whitaker 2010a: 48) noted that the results of the drug appeared positive in that the patient “felt no pain, no anxiety, and often did not remember his operation.” Thus, Laborit felt chlorpromazine offered a potential improvement on barbiturates and morphine, popularly used as pre-operation anaesthetics at the time. At a medical conference in 1951, he further stated that the drug appeared to produce “a veritable medicinal lobotomy,” and for this reason might also be of use to psychiatry (Laborit, cited in Whitaker 2010a: 49). The following year, Jean Delay and Pierre Deniker, two prominent French psychiatrists, put the drug to the test on patients they had labelled as “psychotic” at St. Anne’s Hospital in Paris (Whitaker 2010a: 49–50). The first patient to be given the drug was a 57-year-old male labourer who had been admitted for “making improvised political speeches in cafes, becoming involved in fights with strangers, and for ... walking around the street with a pot of flowers on his head preaching his love of liberty” (Delay, cited in Shorter 1997: 250). After three weeks of chlorpromazine the psychiatrists discharged the patient, observing a new calmness within him. The authorities were impressed with the results of the drug on the asylum population; while still conscious and responsive to the ward staff, the inmates were much more subdued and quiet. As with ECT and pre-frontal lobotomy, the drug produced a more manageable and compliant patient. The psychiatrists wrote triumphantly of the chlorpromazine-drugged patient in 1952 that “he rarely takes the initiative of asking a question” and, further, “does not express his preoccupations, desires, or preference” (Delay and Deniker, cited in Whitaker 2010a: 50). | |||
As a quick and cheap substitute for lobotomy, the drug quickly became popular across asylums in Europe. Hans Lehmann, the physician who is often cited as responsible for the introduction of chlorpromazine to North America, admitted he was intrigued by the claim of the research papers and drugs marketing literature that the drug acted “like a chemical lobotomy” (Shorter 1997 : 252). After the implementation of the drug regimen at his Verdun Hospital in Montreal, Lehmann felt chlorpromazine achieved roughly the same results as insulin treatment and ECT but was an improvement on psychosurgery (of which he was an avid supporter) (Moncrieff 2009 : 45). The drug, announced Lehmann, was most useful in managing the psychiatric patient in that it produced an “emotional indifference” in the inmate (cited in Breggin 1991: 55). As Breggin (1991: 55) notes, chlorpromazine was not conceptualised by the profession and business promoters as a cure for mental illness or even an alleviator of symptoms, but rather a pacifier of one’s character. “We have to remember,” stated the psychiatrist E. H. Parsons (cited in Whitaker 2010a: 50–51) in 1955, “that we are not treating diseases with this drug ... We are using a neuropharmacologic agent to produce a specific effect.” That effect has been summated by Breggin (1991: 55, emphasis original) as, “[p]atient’s don’t lose their symptoms, they lose interest in them.” | |||
Thus, chlorpromazine’s success in sedating patients on the ward was hardly a “revolution” in psychiatric practice. Prior to the 1950s, notes Moncrieff (2009 : 41), other psychotropics were used extensively by the profession both inside and outside the institution; “[i]npatients were frequently prescribed several different drugs simultaneously,” she comments, “and outpatients were also frequently prescribed drugs, mostly barbiturates and stimulants.” Unlike today, this drugging of patients was viewed by the profession as something of an embarrassment; psychiatry was all too aware that such chemical interventions were a form of physical control rather than anything that could be considered as “therapeutic” (Moncrieff 2009: 41). At the time, drugs were not seen by the majority of psychiatrists as central to the future of their practice. For this reason, psychiatrists in America remained, for a time, reticent to use chlorpromazine in their institutions for the simple reason that they already had other physical and chemical treatments which acted in roughly the same manner. Further proof that the drug was no “miracle” pill for mental disorder (as the ''New York Times'' would go on to describe it in the mid1950s) (Whitaker 2010a: 58) is provided by Scull (2015: 367–368), who observes both that the numbers of patients in asylums were falling in many parts of America prior to the introduction of chlorpromazine in the 1950s and that many European countries witnessed no such reductions in patient numbers until the 1970s—many years after the drug had been introduced there. The impreciseness of the correlation between chlorpromazine and deinstitutionalisation has led Scull and other commentators (see, e.g., Whitaker 2010a: 206–207) to a different conclusion—that fiscal considerations of state legislatures took precedent over any claims to effective treatment or the “curability” of those labelled as mentally disordered. The psychiatric institution was no longer economically viable as a holding place for problematic populations, so the hype created around new “neuroleptic” drugs such as chlorpromazine and the possibility of returning patients to “the community” were used in a way which “allowed governments to save money while simultaneously giving their policy a humanitarian gloss” (Scull 1984: 139). As Lieberman (2015: 179) notes, the American success of chlorpromazine was achieved by the pharmaceutical company Smith, Kline & French, who focused their efforts on state governments through the fiscal arguments of “health economics” and “cost-cutting,” rather than promising psychiatry a miraculous cure for mental illness. Together with a successful media campaign (see Whitaker 2010a: 58–61) claiming that chlorpromazine symbolised a “new era of psychiatry,” this tactic worked; within a year of launching the drug, Smith, Kline & French’s total sales increased by over a third (Moncrieff 2009 : 42). | |||
The success of chlorpromazine was therefore not the result of scientific endeavour and the development of ever-more sophisticated psychiatric practice, but instead social and economic forces beyond the profession— namely, institutions as economically unviable forms of social control, the marketing of drugs by pharmaceutical companies, and the eventual need for the expansion of psychiatry as moral managers of the general population. The success was economic not therapeutic; while no disease had been identified or treated with chlorpromazine, pharmaceutical companies recognised that, with deinstitutionalisation, there was now substantial rewards to be made from the business of community-based mental health care. Meanwhile, governments could justify cuts and closures of the asylums and instead fund outpatients and drug treatments as both cheaper and more “effective” public health interventions. In time, the crisis of deinstitutionalisation facilitated the psychiatric profession’s increased commitment to the biomedical model and the use of drugs as a primary source of medical legitimation for their continued practice and expansion into other arenas of economic and social life. Drugs aided the professional legitimation of mental health work outside the institution (Moncrieff 2009: 49), and a revised history of the “drugs revolution” was constructed to suggest the natural progression of psychiatry as a branch of scientific medicine. | |||
At first, the post-war expansion of outpatient clinics and community-based mental health teams (often comprising of a variety of social and medical practitioners) appeared to threaten psychiatry’s natural position as the ultimate authority on mental illness. Yet the post-institutional turn to biomedicine and drugs became a useful justification for reinforcing the power of the psychiatrists in these new settings. Only the psychiatrist had the power to prescribe and alter the medications of the patient, and with the growing mythology that the drugs were actually effective, it meant that all other treatment options were given secondary importance, subservient to chemical interventions in the community (for an example of this dynamic, see Samson 1995 ). Thus, Moncrieff (2009: 44) suggests that by the mid-twentieth century psychiatry had become a “sitting duck” for a new treatment with which they could legitimately justify a disengagement from the asylum and an expansion into the world outside. Drugs provided that justification and fitted well with the popular view from other branches of medicine. As Breggin (1991: 55) states of the benefits of drug interventions for psychiatrists, | |||
<blockquote>the dose could be “titrated”—that is, it could be raised and lowered to obtain the desired effect. As an ostensibly more humane intervention, drug therapy both salved the consciences of psychiatrists and made them feel more like legitimate doctors.</blockquote> | |||
With the development of successive generations of neuroleptics and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) such as Prozac, Zoloft, and Paxil, sales have skyrocketed as psychiatric practice has expanded into new arenas of public and private life. The evidence, however, has repeatedly shown that the drugs do not work. For example, an extensive review of both the published and unpublished clinical trials of the “wonder drug” Prozac by the clinical psychologist Irving Kirsch (2009 ) concluded that it was no more effective than placebo (i.e., dummy pills with no active ingredients) (see also Whitaker 2010a; Whitaker and Cosgrove 2015). Similar findings have been outlined by Moncrieff (2009) in a review of research on various antidepressants and stimulants. “[P]sychiatric drug treatment,” she concludes, “is currently administered on the basis of a huge collective myth; the myth that psychiatric drugs act by correcting the biological basis of psychiatric symptoms or diseases” (Moncrieff 2009: 237). It is therefore an impressive success for biomedical psychiatry that, despite the lack of evidence, the idea of “chemical imbalances” in the brains of those diagnosed as “mentally ill”—and psychopharmaceuticals as the “chemical cure”—has gained such traction in both popular and scientific discourse. In the words of Breggin and Cohen (1999 : 35), “[n]o psychiatric drug has ever been tailored to a known biochemical derangement,” and, “no biochemical imbalances have ever been documented with certainty in association with any psychiatric diagnosis.” This is something that psychiatrists have only recently owned up to, with Ronald Pies (cited in Whitaker and Cosgrove 2015: 186), editor-in-chief of the Psychiatric Times, admitting in 2011 that “[i]n truth, the ‘chemical imbalance’ notion was always a kind of urban legend—never a theory seriously propounded by well-informed psychiatrists.” An urban legend may be, but nevertheless a biomedical rhetoric that can justify psychiatric intervention and drug treatment as valid medical practice. The psychiatrist Daniel Carlat has freely acknowledged that using the language of “chemical imbalances” at least suggests to patients that psychiatrists know what they are doing. In 2010, Carlat (cited in Whitaker and Cosgrove 2015: 187, emphasis added) declared, | |||
<blockquote>I say that [“chemical imbalances in the brain”] not because I really believe it, because I know that the evidence isn’t really there for us to understand the mechanism. I think I say that because patients want to know something, and they want to know that we as physicians have some basic understanding of what we’re doing when we’re prescribing medications. ''And they certainly don’t want to hear that a psychiatrist essentially has no idea how these medications work.''</blockquote> | |||
Whitaker and Cosgrove (2015: 87) have discussed the significant benefits for both big pharma and the psychiatric profession in promoting drug use in the current mental health system. For the drug companies, psychiatry can medically legitimate their products as well as facilitate the expansion of the potential population for their products. In turn, the drug companies legitimate the institution of psychiatry as a “real” (meaning biomedically-based) part of medicine and facilitate the expansion of its areas of research and expertise through various funding and revenue streams. The outcome of this relationship has been fairly predictable—both parties have benefited enormously over time. Pharmaceutical companies continue to maximise their profits while psychiatry’s (and, by extension, other psy-professionals’) power—as signified by the proliferation of its discourse among the general population—has significantly expanded over the past 35 years. | |||
That said, the expansion of the psy-professions in general and the proliferation of the psychiatric discourse to hegemonic status in neoliberal society cannot be explained by the success of the drug industry alone. This requires further analysis of the ideological role of psy-disciplines, which will be outlined in the next chapter. Suffice here to say that a Marxist analysis of psychiatric power always needs to consider the benefits to capitalism inferred by their changing discourse and practices. And while every part of civil society can serve the economic base, it is the value of such institutions as part of the superstructure which distinguishes them as ultimately relevant and useful to the ruling classes. So whereas we may think of the drugs issue only in terms of the economic prerogatives of capitalism, it is in fact their value as a means of social and ideological control of the population which should be given particular importance here. As Moncrieff (2009: 238) has rightly stated of the dominant biomedical view of psychopharmaceutical interventions as effective treatment for mental illnesses, | |||
<blockquote>this knowledge has itself become an instrument of psychiatric power. It has facilitated the particular form of social control that is embodied in psychiatric practice, by construing psychiatric constraint as the medical cure of mental disease. It has helped to disperse psychiatric power throughout the population by concealing the moral nature of psychiatric judgements</blockquote> | |||
From moral treatment to drug treatment, psychiatry’s project remains unchanged: their goal is the moral management and behavioural adjustment of populations considered socially deviant, whether unemployed, underproductive, or politically suspect. The intervention of pharmaceutical companies in the process of psychiatric medicalisation needs to be understood as a rather insignificant factor in the general production of the psychiatric discourse. As Horwitz and Wakefield (2007: 182, emphasis original) have commented on biomedical psychiatry’s takeover of the DSM in the 1970s, “[t]here is no evidence that pharmaceutical companies had a role in developing DSM-III diagnostic criteria.” While this statement might be challenged by the DSM-III research of Lane (2007 ) and others, it is still accurate to conclude that pharmaceutical companies have never been the ''originators'' of diagnostic categories; this has remained the responsibility of psychiatry (regardless of how far the profession may sometimes appear to be in big pharma’s pockets). Thus, while SSRIs and other contemporary psychoactive drugs can be seen as interventions of social control performed by mental health workers, “to restrain individuals from behavior and experience that are not complementary to the requirements of the dominant value system” (Lennard, cited in Conrad 1975: 19), the specific form of behaviour and experience which is considered in need of reform or restraint is still dictated by the psychiatric profession. | |||
[[Category:Library works]] | [[Category:Library works]] | ||
Revision as of 17:49, 4 September 2022
Psychiatric Hegemony: A Marxist Theory of Mental Illness | |
|---|---|
| Written in | 2016 |
| ISBN | 978-1-137-46051-6 |
Dedication
Stanley Cohen (1942–2013)
Stuart Hall (1932–2014)
Jock Young (1942–2013)
&
An old friend and revolutionary footballer: Hafty (d. 2014)
Es geht voran!Preface
This book exists for two main reasons. First, to fill a gap in the current sociology of mental health scholarship. This omission was brought to my attention by my postgraduate students; though I was initially very sceptical of their research capabilities, it turned out that they were basically cor- rect. Granted, there are bits and pieces of Marxist analysis out there, but compared with the other mainstream areas of sociological investigation such as education, youth, crime, and the family, the use of the big man’s work to make sense of the continuing power of the mental health system is nearly non-existent. Second, this book offers a radical challenge to the conservative and theory-free scholarship which is currently infecting my area of sociology. I believe we need to bring critical scholarship back to the heart of the sociology of mental health; we desperately need to have the theoretical as well as the empirical debates.
The book title may suggest radical polemic, but at the same time, I think the argument is relatively simple and straightforward, and also, I think there is plenty of evidence to support it. Under capitalism, we live in a society of fundamental inequalities defined by our relation to the means of economic production. Public or private, every institution in capitalist society is framed by these same power disparities. The dominant understandings of who we are, what is expected of us, and the limits of our behaviour are constructed and defined by the capitalist class, then reproduced through the state and institutions of civil society (e.g., the systems of education, criminal justice, and health). This is necessary for the progression and survival of capitalism. For example, we are socialised by the family, the school, and the mass media to accept social and eco- nomic disparities as natural and common sense; as the inevitable result of differential talent and competition within the marketplace, rather than class privilege and the exploitation of the majority of the population. In this respect, the mental health system is no exception. Led by the insti- tution of psychiatry as the ultimate experts on the mind, mental health professionals are far from immune to the needs of capital. In fact, I will demonstrate in this book that the mental health system has been impres- sively compliant to the wishes of the ruling classes and, for that reason, has gained more power, authority, and professional jurisdiction as indus- trial society has developed. While this book is centrally a theoretical interrogation of psychiat- ric discourse and professional power, I have also attempted to make it accessible to practitioners and non-theoreticians. I think theory is vitally important to achieving a broader understanding of human existence within this world, but I appreciate that many put more faith in the “prac- tical solution,” in being “pragmatic,” and in changing the world through “doing.” I think mental health practitioners—and I have met plenty over the years—are particularly prone to this view. For this reason, there are four substantive chapters in the book (on the issues of work, youth, women, and political protest) which are written with the pragmatists in mind. These apply Marxist ideas to specific issues within the field and highlight the many dangers of simply “doing” mental health work with- out any thought to the wider structures in which they carry out such activities. Often performed by professionals who similarly believed that they were “acting in the best interests of the patient,” the history of psy- chiatry and its allies is littered with too many acts of violence, torture, and death to be able to write them off as aberrations or exceptions in a “progressive” and “scientific” system of health care. It can instead be seen as a regular service performed by the mental health system in support of the ruling elites.
What follows is my version of a Marxist theory of mental illness. It is only one contribution within the sociology of mental health, but nevertheless, I hope it inspires others to follow my analysis in equally challenging and critical directions. And if you want to continue the dis- cussion, you can email me at b.cohen@auckland.ac.nz or @BmzCohen on twitter.
Acknowledgements
This book could not have happened without the emphatic support of Palgrave Macmillan; I am eternally grateful for their faith and trust in this project. In particular I would like to thank my Editors, Nicola Jones and Sharla Plant, as well as the ever-helpful Assistant Editors, Eleanor Christie, Laura Aldridge and Cecilia Ghidotti. The idea for the book originated from my postgraduate “Sociology of Mental Health” class. I thank all of the students that I have had the pleasure to teach on that course over the years, in particular Dhakshi Gamage (a student who articulated the specific connection between neoliberal values and the construction of shyness as a mental disorder long before I did). In 2015 I had the chance to meet with a number of international colleagues working on critical issues in mental health and I would like to thank them all for their kind words of support and advice. They include Suman Fernando, China Mills, and Peter Morrall. My good friend Jeff Masson has become something of a mentor, what a guy! I would like to thank both him and his family for being such warm and generous people on the many occasions that we have visited them and outstayed our welcome. The Department of Sociology at the University of Auckland continues to be the home of a vibrant crowd of collegial people who understand how important it is to have the time and resources to complete a major research project like this one—many thanks to you all. Of particular note, hello to my friend and colleague Colin Cremin, with whom I have shared some really useful conversations on the slippery subject of academic writing. And he lets me win when we play PES 2016, result! Thanks also to Helen Sword for the conversation on the ferry about scholarly writing and her very useful book Stylish Academic Writing (I tried, Helen!). This would be an appropriate point to add that all the ideas and attempts at style in this book are my fault alone. My thanks and appreciation to the Faculty of Arts, who approved my research and study leave in 2015; this allowed me to complete most of the writing for the book. The Faculty also funded a summer scholar, Rearna Hartmann, for three months (from November 2014 to February 2015) to undertake some additional analysis of each edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. This work appears in Chaps. 3–7 of the book. Rearna should get a special mention here as she proved to be such an incredibly talented and efficient scholar-in-training; it was a real pleasure to work with you on this project.
For inspiration, support, and temporary escape from the book writing, I would like to thank my football team, Tripzville/University-Mt Wellington (the 2015 Division Three (Seniors) Over-35s champions!), especially the boss, Mark Rossi, and my left-back partner in the crime, Tony Westmoreland. The music from the Killers kept me reasonably buoyant throughout the writing phase. Thanks also to friends and family in England, Germany, Australia, and New Zealand for all the good times, including the constant flow of alcohol, much needed. Maeby and Milo constantly interrupted my writing to show me wildlife they had “found” in the garden; on reflection, probably useful exercise for me. Finally, from the east to the west, the north to the south, she is the love of my life and the brains of the operation, Dr Jessica Terruhn—thanks for all the feedback on the drafts and, you know, everything else. I love you, honey!
Contents
| 1 Introduction: Thinking Critically About Mental Illness | 1 |
| 2 Marxist Theory and Mental Illness: A Critique of Political Economy | 27 |
| 3 Psychiatric Hegemony: Mental Illness in Neoliberal Society | 69 |
| 4 Work: Enforcing Compliance | 97 |
| 5 Youth: Medicalising Deviance | 113 |
| 6 Women: Reproducing Patriarchal Relations | 139 |
| 7 Resistance: Pathologising Dissent | 169 |
| 8 Conclusion: Challenging the Psychiatric Hegemon | 205 |
| Appendix A: Methodology for Textual Analysis of the DSMs | 213 |
| Appendix B: Youth-Related Diagnostic Categories in the DSM, 1952–2013 | 215 |
| Appendix C: “Feminised” Diagnostic Categories in the DSM, 1952–2013 | 221 |
| Index | 225 |
List of Abbreviations
ADD Attention Deficit Disorder ADHD Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder APA American Psychiatric Association* APD Antisocial Personality Disorder BPD Borderline Personality Disorder CTO Community Treatment Order DSM Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders ECT Electroconvulsive Therapy EL Encephalitis Lethargica FDA Food and Drug Administration GD Gender Dysphoria GID Gender Identity Disorder HPD Histrionic Personality Disorder ISA Ideological State Apparatus LLPDD Late Luteal Phase Dysphoric Disorder NIMH National Institute of Mental Health OSDD Other Specified Dissociative Disorder PENS Psychological Ethics and National Security PMDD Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder PMS Premenstrual Syndrome PMT Premenstrual Tension PTSD Posttraumatic Stress Disorder xvi List of Abbreviations SAD Social Anxiety Disorder SSRI Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors UK United Kingdom US United States WHO World Health Organization (*to distinguish the American Psychiatric Association from the American Psychological Association, the full name for the latter is always given in the text)
List of Figures and Tables
| Figures | ||
| Fig. 2.1 | Reasons for Admission to the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, 1864–1889 | 39 |
| Tables | ||
| Table 3.1 | Increase in the use of work, home, and school phrasings in the DSM, 1952–2013 | 79 |
| Table 4.1 | Number of work-related words/phrases in the DSM, 1952–2013 | 104 |
| Table 5.1 | Number of youth-related diagnostic categories in the DSM, 1952–2013 | 121 |
| Table 5.2 | Number of youth-related words/phrases in the DSM, 1952–2013 | 122 |
| Table 6.1 | Number of “feminised” diagnostic categories in the DSM, 1952–2013 | 152 |
| Table 6.2 | Number of gender-related words/phrases in the DSM, 1952–2013 | 155 |
| Table 7.1 | Number of protest-related words/phrases in the DSM, 1952–2013 | 194 |
1: Introduction: Thinking Critically About Mental Illness
This book is a critical reflection on the current global epidemic of mental disease, and with that, the global proliferation of mental health professionals and the expanding discourse on mental illness. Over the past 35 years, scientific ideas on mental pathology from the designated experts on the mind have seeped outwards from the psychiatric institution into many spheres of public and private life. It is part of my role as a sociologist to explain how this epidemic has come about and the extent to which it is a valid reflection of real medical progress in the area. I am not alone in undertaking such a project; other social scientists—as well as psychiatrists and psychologists themselves—have investigated the recent expansion in the varieties of mental disorder and their usage among western populations, and have voiced similar concerns to the ones that I will articulate in this book. However, as the title suggests, this work goes further than most other scholars and mental health experts appear able to. This is because I frame the business of mental health within its wider structural context, within a system of power relations of which economic exploitation is the determinant one. Ignoring the development and current dynamics of capitalist society has been a significant omission of most other scholarship in the area; this is my contribution to getting critical social theory back to the heart of research and scholarship in the sociology of mental health.
“We are,” according to the psychotherapist James Davies (2013: 1), “a population on the brink.” The figures for mental disease suggest that not only are we currently in the grip of an illness epidemic but we are nearing a tipping point towards catastrophe: out of a global population of seven billion inhabitants, 450 million people are estimated to be currently affected by a mental or behavioural disorder (World Health Organization 2003: 4), with 100 million of them taking psychotropic drugs (Chalasani 2016: 1184). The projected rates in developed countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom are even higher with one in four people suffering from a mental disorder each year (Davies 2013: 1). The World Health Organization (WHO) (2003: 5) estimates that the expenditure on mental health problems in western society amounts to between 3 and 4 per cent of gross national product; the cost in the United States alone is over $100 billion per year (Wilkinson and Pickett 2010: 65). By 2020, according to the WHO, depression—a disease which will affect one-fifth of all Americans at some point in their life (Horwitz and Wakefield 2007: 4)—will be “the second leading cause of worldwide disability, behind only heart disease” (Horwitz and Wakefield 2007: 5).
Consequently, the WHO (2003: 3) states of this mental illness epidemic that “[t]he magnitude, suffering and burden in terms of disability and costs for individuals, families and societies are staggering.” From being a relatively rare affliction just 60 years ago, mental illness is now everybody’s concern. Whitaker (2010a: 6–7) has noted of this change that the rates of debilitating mental illness among US adults has increased sixfold between 1955 and 2007. However, the “plague of disabling mental illness” as he calls it has fallen particularly hard on young people in the country, with an incredible 35-fold increase between 1997 and 2007. This makes mental disease the “leading cause of disability in children” in the United States (Whitaker 2010a: 8). The varieties of known mental illnesses have also increased over time, with the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) identifying 106 mental disorders in 1952, yet 374 today (Davies 2013: 2).
In the current milieu it is no surprise that the power and influence of the mental health professionals are—like the above statistics—“growing at a remarkable rate” (Davies 2013: 2). However, as every critical scholar on the topic is aware, very serious problems remain with the current science and practice within the mental health system. These concerns inevitably lead us to questioning the reality of the claims to a mental illness “epidemic” made by health organisations such as the APA and the WHO, and to ask who really benefits from the global expansion of the psychiatric discourse. An essential issue here is the continuing contested nature of “mental illness,” for there remains no proof that any “mental disorder” is a real, observable disease. Consequently, the “experts” still cannot distinguish the mentally ill from the mentally healthy. In fact, a recent attempt by the APA—the most powerful psychiatric body in the world—to define mental illness was bluntly described by one of their most senior figures as “bullshit” (see discussion below). Accordingly, it also follows that no “treatment” has been shown to work on any specific “mental illness” and that there is no known causation for any disorder. Of course, these issues are highly disputed by many mental health professionals, so the evidence and debates are outlined in detail in the chapters that follow. I appreciate that questioning the validity of mental illness comes as little comfort to those people who are currently experiencing stress, trauma, or behaviour which causes what Thomas Szasz (1974) has previously referred to as “problems in living.” Let me clarify briefly here that this book is not denying such experience; rather it is questioning the discourse of “mental illness” which is produced by groups of professionals who claim an expert knowledge over this experience. Therefore, the current discussion is a critique of professional power not of personal experience and behaviour which may have been labelled (or self-labelled) as a “mental illness.” Though my previous work has investigated the multifaceted meanings of illness and recovery for those so labelled (see, e.g., Cohen 2015), this is not the focus of the current book. Instead, the issue at hand is how to explain the incredible expansion of what we might 1 Introduction: Thinking Critically About Mental Illness 3 4 call the “mental health industry”—that is, the entirety of the professionals, businesses, and discourse surrounding the area of mental health and illness—without a concurrent progression in the scientific evidence on mental pathology. The next section briefly explores some of the main explanations given for the dominance of the current mental health system and the gaps in this work.
Critical Scholarship on Mental Illness
Most commonly, critical scholars focus on one major reason for the current expansion in the numbers and categories of mental illness in western society—namely, the influence of pharmaceutical corporations (colloquially referred to as “big pharma”) on the construction of new categories of disorder and the promotion of drug solutions for those disorders (see, e.g., Davies 2013 ; Healy 2004 ; Moncrieff 2009 ; Moynihan and Cassels 2005; Whitaker 2010a; Whitaker and Cosgrove 2015 ). The institution of psychiatry is the ultimate authority responsible for defining and treating mental pathologies, yet commentators argue that the profession has been steadily compromised by forming close relationships with big pharma, who are now effectively setting the mental health agenda. For example, critics point to the 69 per cent of psychiatrists responsible for the development of the latest edition of the DSM (DSM-5, see American Psychiatric Association 2013) who have financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry (Cosgrove and Wheeler 2013 : 95). Research has also demonstrated the close involvement of big pharma in the development of current mental illness categories including social anxiety disorder (SAD) (Lane 2007) and premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD) (Cosgrove and Wheeler 2013). The more behaviour and experience that can be successfully medicalised—that is, reconceptualised as in need of medical intervention—through this medico-industrial partnership, the more drugs can be potentially sold to the public. Thus it is argued that the expansion of the mental illness discourse is the result of a market takeover of health care; corporations rather than medical practitioners are now designating what mental pathology is and, as a result, dictating treatment. The obvious solution to this situation involves the de-coupling of mental health services from the influence of big business. Tighter government regulation and oversight of pharmaceutical corporations is required, as is transparency within the relevant professional organisations.
While this critique of big pharma’s intervention in the production and promotion of the contemporary psychiatric discourse is relevant, it is perhaps the least surprising aspect of the operation of the mental health system within capitalist society. Scholars of medical history such as Andrew Scull (1989, 1993, 2015), for example, have profiled a continuing “trade in lunacy” which can be traced back to the beginnings of industrial society and witnessed throughout the development of modern mental health work. That the market is part of the workings of psychiatry and related professions should be self-evident to any scholar aware of the history of the mental health system in western society. Such critics would also acknowledge that while psychiatry legitimates the products of big pharma, pushing psychopharmaceuticals in turn helps legitimate the psychiatric profession. The prescribing of drugs is a key symbol of modern doctoring which serves to align psychiatric practice with other branches of medicine through a shared biomedical understanding of health and illness.
The medico-industrial relationship described above has raised an associated criticism from critical scholars as to the efficacy of the biomedical approach in understanding mental health problems more generally. Biomedicine conceptualises disease as a physical pathology of the body. Thus, biomedical psychiatry theorises mental disorder as having a physical aetiology (causation) that can be observed, measured, and treated. Modern psychiatry focuses on the brain as the organ that causes such “disease,” and most often regards mental illness as the result of faulty neurotransmitters or “chemical imbalances” in the brain. The biomedical approach to understanding mental illness have been a part of psychiatry since its emergence over 200 years ago, yet has become increasingly dominant within the mental health system since the 1980s (Chap. 2). According to critics, however, despite its current “hegemonic” moment (Cosgrove and Wheeler 2013: 100), bio-psychiatry lacks the legitimacy of scientific evidence. The scholars blame corrupt individuals and powerful interests both inside and outside of psychiatry for reiterating biomedical myths regarding the “normal” and “abnormal” workings of the brain so as to be able to promote physical interventions such as drugs and electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) as potential “cures” for mental illness. Such writers note the continuing lack of proof of biological causation for any mental disorder, the potential for corruption at the hands of big pharma, the perversion of the psychiatric profession by particular selfinterested, powerful parties and individuals, and the reductionist nature of the biomedical model which is seen to have damaged the founding aims of the profession to improve the care and treatment of people who suffer from mental disorders and to always perform their duties in the best interests of the patient (see, e.g., Bentall 2009; Breggin 1991 ; Davies 2013; Greenberg 2013 ; Whitaker and Cosgrove 2015).
Critics call for an understanding of mental disorder which goes beyond biological reductionism to consider psychological, social, and environmental factors which correlate with mental illness. Often conceptualised as the “psychosocial model” (or simply, the “social model”) of mental illness, scholars and experts highlight a range of evidence from socioeconomic data which demonstrates that such factors as family income, educational level, ethnic group, geographical location, and social class are all closely related to the chances of developing a mental health problem. While the social model suggests that we all have the potential to suffer mental disorders if exposed to traumatic situations, some groups are particularly vulnerable to mental illness due to experiencing comparatively more stressful life conditions and, at the same time, having less access to cultural and economic resources which can alleviate the threat of mental problems. As the WHO’s (2013) recent Mental Health Action Plan 2013–2020 has emphasised,
Depending on the local context, certain individuals and groups in society may be placed at a significantly higher risk of experiencing mental health problems. These vulnerable groups may (but do not necessarily) include members of households living in poverty, people with chronic health conditions, infants and children exposed to maltreatment and neglect, adolescents first exposed to substance use, minority groups, indigenous populations, older people, people experiencing discrimination and human rights violations, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender persons, prisoners, and people exposed to conflict, natural disasters or other humanitarian emergencies.
Interventions are then aimed at the personal and the social; therapy and counselling allows individuals to work through their disorder with trained professionals, while community health services target certain deprived communities for mental health promotions and the additional resourcing of mental illness prevention teams.
Explanations for the increase in rates of mental illness given by socially orientated models of mental health, therefore, draw attention to the widening social inequalities experienced in neoliberal society which impact levels of well-being in vulnerable populations. For example, Wilkinson and Pickett (2010: 67) draw on WHO data to claim that people suffer more mental illness in countries with wider inequalities (as measured by income distribution and the disparities between the richest and the poorest in that society). Their comparison of twelve advanced industrial nations shows the United States as having the highest rates of mental illness and, correspondingly, the highest rate of income inequalities. In comparison, Japan experiences the lowest rate of mental health problems and has a relatively equal distribution of income. It is a popular piece of sociologically orientated accounting in which society has the potential to make us sick; particularly those societies with higher levels of social and economic inequality appear to make us sicker. Thus, some Marxists have similarly argued that capitalism is ultimately responsible for causing mental illness (see, e.g., Robinson 1997 ; Rosenthal and Campbell 2016 ). However, as with most epidemiological work on mental illness, this analysis is weak and inconclusive. The research ultimately suffers from the same fundamental deficit as the biomedical model in that, while speculative correlations are made, there remains no proof of causation for any mental disorder.
As with psychiatrists, the many mental health workers in allied professions—such as the psychotherapists, psychologists, counsellors, and psychiatric social workers—who promote the more socially orientated approaches to mental illness, continue to stand by the validity of psychiatry’s knowledge base and for good reason: it is a discourse which furthers their own professional interests and legitimates their own “mental health” practices in a currently expanding market. Many scholars make the same mistake in arguing for such socially oriented approaches—they reinforce the psychiatric discourse as having validity where none has been established. Thus, what may first appear as serious critical scholarship on psychiatric knowledge production and the mental health system is often quite conservative and reformist in nature. These attempts at “critical” literature on the mental health system are most likely written by those inside the mental health profession, especially psychiatrists and psychologists (see, e.g., Bentall 2009; Davies 2013; Paris 2008). Unless they wish to give up their high-paid jobs—some escape into academia, others retire early—these writers continue to be complicit in supporting the mental health system that has produced them. For this reason their arguments go no further than pleas for reform (fewer drugs, more therapy, and so on) which allow their profession to continue to expand their operations relatively unhindered by serious critique.
To firmly ground the mental health system as a moral and political project, the following section discusses the continuing lack of validity of psychiatric knowledge. This deconstruction of the “science” of psychiatry is purposely undertaken here to highlight both the limits of previous critical scholarship—which has often failed to engage with the fundamental problems of mental health work—and the need to frame such institutions within structural systems of power and social control. Before this however, a brief note on a couple of key terms I will use in this discussion and subsequently throughout the book.
Psy-professions: my argument in this book implicates not only the psychiatric profession, but also allied groups such as psychologists, counsellors, psychiatric social workers, psychoanalysts, and the many other “talk therapy” professionals (for full critiques, see, e.g., Masson 1994; Morrall 2008). Collectively, I follow Rose (1999: viii) in understanding these groups as the “psy-professions”: “experts” who have over time acquired an authority on the supposed “real nature of humans as psychological subjects.” As medically trained practitioners, psychiatrists have the ultimate authority to define and police abnormal behaviour—which is why the book focuses primarily on this profession—yet they are ably assisted by other groups which have subsequently emerged and have vested interests in continuing to align themselves with the same knowledge base. The discussion in this book will demonstrate, for example, that psychologists, therapists, and counsellors can all be implicated in systematically serving the interests of the powerful.
Psychiatric discourse: I use this term to differentiate scientific evidence on “mental illness” (what some might call “psychiatric knowledge,” although this is also a highly problematic phrase) from psy-professional claims-making in the area. Psychiatric discourse is the totality of the propositions to expertise on “mental illness” and “mental health” (including the language, practices, and treatments) that psychiatric and allied professions have circulated to the public over the past 200 years. The term signifies the socially constructed nature of what is claimed to be expert knowledge in the area. For this reason, general terminology produced by the mental health system should be treated with caution. For example, in this book I refer to various labels of “mental illness,” to mental health “experts,” to “patients” and “users” of services, and so on; this does not, however, signal my acceptance of any such terminology as accurate or the truth of the matter.
Deconstructing the “Science” of Psychiatry
In his recent book Shrinks: The Untold Story of Psychiatry, former president of the APA, Jeffrey Lieberman (2015: 288–289), summarises the progress that psychiatry has made over the past 200 years in its knowledge and understanding of mental pathology. “We know that mental disorders exhibit consistent clusters of symptoms,” he declares,
We know that many disorders feature distinctive neural signatures in the brain. We know that many disorders express distinctive patterns of brain activity. We have gained some insight into the genetic underpinnings of mental disorders. We can treat persons with mental disorders using medications and somatic therapies that act uniquely on their symptoms but exert no effects in healthy people. We know that specific types of psychotherapy lead to clear improvements in patients suffering from specific types of disorders. And we know that, left untreated, these disorders cause anguish, misery, disability, violence, even death. Thus, mental disorders are abnormal, enduring, harmful, treatable, feature a biological component, and can be reliably diagnosed.
Underscoring psychiatry’s worth as a medical enterprise, Lieberman (2015: 289) concludes by stating of the above summary that “I believe this should satisfy anyone’s definition of medical illness.” Likewise, Shorter (1997: 325) concurs with Lieberman on the ascendancy of the psychiatric discipline to a valid branch of medical science when he reflects that
[i]n two hundred years ... psychiatrists [have] progressed from being the healers of the therapeutic asylum to serving as gatekeepers for Prozac. Psychiatric illness has passed from a feared sign of bad blood—a genetic curse—to an easily treatable condition not essentially different from any other medical problem, and possessing roughly the same affective valence.
Such positive appraisal of the knowledge and treatment of mental disorders by the official historians of psychiatry necessarily rationalises the jurisdictional exclusivity of the profession as based on a progressive narrative of medical science and discovery. Nevertheless, it is a successfully cultivated rhetoric of truth claims which crucially lacks evidence to sustain the desired picture of medical advancement in the field. This section surveys the main issues with the current state of psychiatric knowledge— namely, the disagreements over aetiology and treatment of mental illness, the lack of agreement on what “mental illness” is, and consequently the lack of validity to any category of mental disorder. This deconstruction of psychiatric knowledge claims will lead us to question what the purpose of the psy-professions in capitalist society actually is.
A recent review of the science behind the psychiatric discourse concluded that “no biological sign has ever been found for any ‘mental disorder.’ Correspondingly, there is no known physiological etiology” (Burstow 2015 : 75). This conclusion also became clear to the APA’s own DSM-5 task force when they began work on the new manual in 2002. As Whitaker and Cosgrove (2015: 60) record, in reviewing the available research evidence it was plain to the committee members that “[t] he etiology of mental disorders remained unknown. The field [of mental health] still did not have a biological marker or genetic test that could be used for diagnostic purposes.” Furthermore, the research also showed that psychiatrists could still not distinguish between mentally healthy and mentally sick people, and consequently had failed to define their area of supposed expertise. This issue was recently highlighted with reference to comments made by Allen Frances, the chair of the previous DSM-IV task force. When the DSM-IV (American Psychiatric Association 1994 : xxi) was published in 1994, it stated that “mental disorder” was
conceptualized as a clinically significant behavioral or psychological syndrome or pattern that occurs in an individual and that is associated with present distress (e.g., a painful symptom) or disability (i.e., impairment in one or more important areas of functioning) or with a significantly increased risk of suffering death, pain, disability, or an important loss of freedom.
However, as the architect of the DSM-IV, Frances was later quoted by Greenberg (2013: 35–36) as stating of the above definition, “[h]ere’s the problem ... There is no definition of a mental disorder ... it’s bullshit ... I mean you can’t define it.” The lack of knowledge on mental health and illness has haunted the entire history of psychiatry. Some have dismissed critics who highlight this fundamental hole in the science of psychiatry as “antipsychiatry” or “mental illness deniers.” Such attacks on scholars who attempt to investigate the accuracy of the central pillars of psychiatric knowledge should further concern us, as it perhaps signals that plenty in the profession are already aware of the flimsy nature on which their “expertise” continues to rest. Together with an understanding of the history of the psychiatric profession—summed up by Scull (1989 : 8) as “dismal and depressing”—I would argue that it should be the duty of all social scientists concerned with the mental health field that, in good conscience and putting the needs of the public first, they remain highly sceptical of a psychiatric discourse that poses as expert knowledge on the mind but produces little actual evidence to back up the assertions made.
Though at first glance historical mental disorders such as masturbatory insanity (Chap. 2), drapetomania (Chap. 7), hysteria (Chap. 5), and homosexuality may appear as evidence of the profession reflecting the dominant norms and values of wider society, they are argued by the official historians of psychiatry to be examples of the false starts, early experimentations, and theoretical innovations of an emerging scientific discipline. It is suggested that this history is evidence of medical and scientific progress within the area of mental health to the current point where we know more about mental distress than ever before. Yet problems in the legitimacy of psychiatry’s vocation have remained, and reached crisis point at the cusp of deinstitutionalisation in the 1970s. At the time, a number of significant studies demonstrated the profession’s inherent tendency to label people as “mentally ill,” to stigmatise everyday aspects of a person’s behaviour as signs of pathology, and to make judgements on a person’s mental health status based on subjective judgements rather than objective criteria.
The study that had the most direct impact on the psychiatric profession— as well as public consciousness—at this time was David Rosenhan’s (1973) classic research On Being Sane in Insane Places which found that psychiatrists could not distinguish between “real” and “pseudo” patients presenting at psychiatric hospitals in the United States. All of Rosenhan’s “pseudo” patients (college students/researchers involved in the experiment) were admitted and given a psychotic label, and all the subsequent behaviour of the researchers—including their note-taking—was labelled by staff as further symptoms of their disorder (for a summary, see Burstow 2015: 75–76). This research was a culmination of earlier studies on labelling and mental illness which had begun in the 1960s with Irving Goffman (1961) and Thomas Scheff (1966). Goffman’s (1961) ethnographic study of psychiatric incarceration demonstrated many of the features which Rosenhan’s study would later succinctly outline, including the arbitrary nature of psychiatric assessment, the labelling of patient behaviour as further evidence of “mental illness,” and the processes of institutional conformity by which the inmates learned to accept such labels if they wanted to have any chance of being released from the institution at a later date. Scheff’s (1966) work on diagnostic decision making in psychiatry formulated a general labelling theory for the sociology of mental health. Again, his research found that psychiatrists made arbitrary and subjective decisions on those designated as “mentally ill,” sometimes retaining people in institutions even when there was no evidence to support such a decision. Psychiatrists, he argued, relied on a common sense set of beliefs and practices rather than observable, scientific evidence. Scheff (1966) concluded that the labelling of a person with a “mental illness” was contingent on the violation of social norms by low-status rule-breakers who are judged by higher status agents of social control (in this case, the psychiatric profession). Thus, according to these studies, the nature of “mental illness” is not a fixed object of medical study but rather a form of “social deviance”—a moral marker of societal infraction by the powerful inflicted on the powerless. This situation is summated in Becker’s (1963: 9, emphasis original) general theory of social deviance which stated that
deviance is not a quality of the act the person commits, but rather a consequence of the application by others of rules and sanctions to an “offender.” The deviant is one to whom that label has successfully been applied; deviant behavior is behavior that people so label.
The growing perception that psychiatric work was “unscientific” and, in turn, “mental illness” was a label of social deviance was further amplified in the 1970s by the APA’s very public battle over the continuation of homosexuality as a classification of mental disorder in the DSM (for a full discussion, see Kutchins and Kirk 1997: 55–99). As with the rationale for the profession labelling this sexual orientation as a mental illness in both the DSM-I (American Psychiatric Association 1952: 38–39) and the DSM-II (American Psychiatric Association 1968: 44), the successful decision to subsequently remove the label from the manual in 1973 was anything but scientific. On the contrary, Burstow (2015: 80) records how a mix of disruptive protests by gay rights campaigners, along with an internal power struggle between psychoanalysts and biomedical-orientated psychiatrists, brought about the change in APA policy. The end result was a decision based not on research evidence but rather a simple postal vote of APA members (Burstow 2015: 80). With institutional psychiatry in decline, community alternatives developing, and related mental health disciplines encroaching on traditional psychiatric territory, the profession entered a period of political and epistemological crisis. To regain credibility, the APA needed to prove the robustness of its knowledge base and convince the public as well as policy makers of their continuing usefulness and expertise.
The solution was to boost the scientific credibility of the field through improving the reliability of mental illness categories—that is, the identification and agreement among different practitioners of patients presenting with a specific disorder—which would then aid in validating such pathologies as real disease rather than professionally produced constructions. As Whitaker and Cosgrove (2015: 45–46) state of the importance of the reliability and validity concepts,
In infectious medicine, a diagnostic manual needs to be both reliable and valid in order to be truly useful. A classification system that is reliable enables physicians to distinguish between different diseases, and to then prescribe a treatment specific to a disease, which has been validated— through studies of its clinical course and, if possible, an understanding of its pathology—as real.
Under the leadership of Robert Spitzer, the APA carried out extensive field trials with the aim of testing the reliability of different diagnostic categories towards the creation of a more robust and scientifically sound DSM (to be released in 1980 as the DSM-III). Spitzer and Fleiss’ (cited in Kirk and Kutchins 1994: 75) own assessment of the reliability of categories of mental disorder in the DSM-I and the DSM-II was that none of them were more than “satisfactory,” frankly admitting that
[t]here are no diagnostic categories for which reliability is uniformly high. Reliability appears only satisfactory for three categories: mental deficiency, organic brain syndrome (but not its subtypes), and alcoholism. The level of reliability is no better than fair for psychosis and schizophrenia and is poor for the remaining categories.
To rectify this situation, Spitzer’s team coordinated a number of largescale pieces of research on psychiatric classification, including “the largest reliability study in history” (Burstow 2015: 77; for full details, see Williams et al. 1992) involving 592 people—both psychiatric patients and those without a previous history of mental health problems— being interviewed by pairs of psychiatrists spread over six sites in the United States and one in Germany. Kirk and Kutchins (1994: 83) have described the time, planning, and resourcing that went into this study as “the envy of researchers who attempt to conduct rigorous studies in clinical settings.” Subsequently, the data was claimed by the developers of the DSM-III to be of “far greater reliability” for most classes of mental disorder than that utilised in previous DSMs; the results showed a generally “quite good” level of agreement between psychiatrists, especially on the classic categories of schizophrenia and major affective disorders (American Psychiatric Association, cited in Kirk and Kutchins 1994: 79). On its release in 1980, the DSM-III was hailed as a great success for the discipline—a document which would finally silence detractors through accurately demonstrating the effective scientific progress of the discipline in the twentieth century. Consequently, the DSM-III has come to mark a “revolution” within the discipline (Decker 2013: xv). For western psychiatry, the manual was the “book that changed everything” (Lieberman 2015: 134).
It was, however, a revolution based on a scientific lie. The DSM-III field trials were “[b]latently rigged” (Burstow 2015: 77) by Spitzer’s task force to produce higher rates of reliability. A summary of the research biases in the construction of the studies—including the non- representative nature of the samples—has been noted by Whitaker and Cosgrove (2015 : 48–49), following extensive meta-analysis of the original field trial data by Kirk and Kutchins (1992). However, Kirk and Kutchins’ own evaluation of the DSM-III research revealed something even more surprising— namely, that there was no improvement in the previous poor levels of diagnostic reliability. In fact, in some categories of mental disorder, there were even greater levels of disagreement between psychiatrists than there had been with previous DSMs (Kirk and Kutchins 1994: 82–83). In large part, the claimed success of the DSM-III was due to a “linguistic sleight of hand” (Whitaker and Cosgrove 2015: 49) in which Spitzer and his task force re-phrased the same statistical levels of agreement between psychiatric professions (in this case, defined by kappa mean values between 0 and 1, where 1 is complete agreement and 0 complete disagreement) in different ways when comparing the DSM-I and the DSM-II with the DSM-III. For example, a mental disorder in the previous DSMs with a kappa score of .7 had been presented as “only satisfactory,” but was then redefined in the DSM-III as a “good” level of inter-rater agreement (Whitaker and Cosgrove 2015: 49). Thus, Kirk and Kutchins (1994 : 83) concluded that “despite the scientific claims of great success, reliability appears to have improved very little in three decades.” The DSM-III can therefore be seen as the success of the rhetoric of psychiatry rather than the result of any actual scientific progress within the discipline (Kirk and Kutchins 1992 ).
Predictably, subsequent research has shown no improvement in inter-rater reliability and, in many cases, has produced kappa scores below those reported in the original DSM-III field trials (Whitaker and Cosgrove 2015 : 50). The implications for the DSM on which psychiatry bases its claims to scientific rigour are clear—“the latest versions of DSM as a clinical tool,” state Kirk and Kutchins (1994: 84), “are unreliable and therefore of questionable validity as a classification system.” As the authors proceeded to document with the DSM-IV, rather than attempt to tighten mental illness classifications, the APA actually loosened them further, thereby increasing the potential number of people who could be labelled under each mental disorder (Kutchins and Kirk 1997 ). Following the DSM-III field trials, subsequent DSM task forces have abandoned the reliability issue, believing it to have been solved despite ongoing criticisms from health researchers and social scientists. And, lest we forget, even if psychiatry did one day solve the reliability problem, it still does not solve the validity issue for mental disorder classifications. After all, “[t]he fact that people can be trained to apply a label in a consistent way,” Burstow (2015 : 78) reminds us, “does not mean that the label points to anything real.”
Psychiatric insiders have openly admitted the lack of science to their area of operations. Allen Frances (cited in Whitaker and Cosgrove 2015 : 61), for example, has recently stated that the mental disorders given in the DSM are “better understood as no more than currently convenient constructs or heuristics that allow [psychiatrists] to communicate with one another.” This has included the classic constructs of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder (formerly manic-depression), of which the mental health researcher Joel Paris at the Department of Psychiatry, McGill University, has admitted “[i]n reality, we do not know whether [such] conditions ... are true diseases” (cited in Whitaker and Cosgrove 2015: 61). Even National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) director and strong advocate of biomedical psychiatry, Thomas Insel (cited in Masson 2015 : xii), announced on the release of the DSM-5 in 2013 that the categories of mental disorder lacked validity and NIMH would no longer be using such diagnoses for research purposes.
Despite the claims to “progress” made by official historians of psychiatry such as Lieberman and Shorter, there is no evidence for the supposed “science” of psychiatry. There is no test for any mental illness, no proof of causation, no evidence of successful “treatment” that relates specifically to an individual disorder, and no accurate prediction of future cases. Thus, the claim that psychiatric constructs are real disease has not been proven. Consequently, it is necessary to utilise the existing evidence to more accurately theorise the real vocation of the psy-professions in capitalist society. As the faulty knowledge claims of the DSM are summarised by Burstow (2015: 78, emphasis original), “reliability cannot legitimately function as a validity claim and no studies have established validity”; therefore, “it follows that ... no foundation of any sort exists for the DSM categories. This is a serious issue that calls into question the power vested in psychiatry.” It necessarily leads us to consider such institutions as moral and political enterprises rather than medical ones (Szasz 1974: xii) because psy-professionals make historically and culturally bound judgements on the “correct” and “appropriate” behaviour of society’s members. This is a point summated by Ingelby (1980: 55, emphasis added) when he states that
what one thinks psychiatrists are up to depends crucially on what one thinks their patients are up to; and the latter question cannot be answered without taking an essentially political stand on what constitutes a “reasonable” response to a social situation.
In the same manner, British psychiatrist Joanna Moncrieff (2010 : 371) agrees that a “psychiatric diagnosis can be understood as functioning as a political device, in the sense that it legitimates a particular social response to aberrant behaviour of various sorts, but protects that response from any democratic challenge.” Even Shorter (1997: viii) accepts that the profession is responsible for policing social deviance when he remarks that “[p]sychiatry is, to be sure, the ultimate rulemaker of acceptable behaviour through its ability to specify what counts as ‘crazy.’” Likewise, the concept of “health” within the mental health system is understood as whatever counts as “normal” within a specific historical epoch and cultural setting. Sayers (cited in Christian 1997: 33–34) states of this relative concept of “health” that
[t]he society and the individual’s role within it are assumed to be normal (that is to say, “healthy”: “normality” is a common synonym for “health” in psychiatry as in other areas of medicine). Indeed, the prevailing social environment is made the very criterion of normality, and the individual is judged ill insofar as he or she fails to “adjust” to it.
The Urgency for Marxist Theory
Despite the lack of validity to the “science” of psychiatry, most “critical” texts fail to adequately explain the expansion of mental health work because they lack sustained theoretical engagement. Most commentators refuse to conceptualise the mental health business beyond what they can see with their own eyes, and this in turn hides the wider structural forces which can shape, inhabit, and direct the institutional priorities of the mental health experts. For instance, if Wilkinson and Pickett (2010 : 67) had spent more time critically investigating the production of psychiatric knowledge, they might have come to the conclusion that the more unequal the society, the more likely it is that people will be labelled with a mental disorder. Stated in a slightly different manner, countries that have faced the brunt of neoliberal polices are more likely to apply labels of “mental disorder” onto the population.
This is not, however, to suggest that there has been a complete absence of critical social theorising on the activities of the psy-professionals within capitalist society. On the contrary, from labelling and social constructionist accounts to critical realism, post-psychiatry, and mad studies, there has been a considerable tradition of engagement with the issues of societal inequalities, institutional power, and psychiatric mechanisms of social control since the 1960s (see Cohen, forthcoming). Such literature has been highly valuable to the sociology of mental health and is utilised throughout this book. Nevertheless, this scholarship still fails to fully contextualise the political project of psychiatry in relation to the fundamental conditions of economic exploitation under capitalism. The critical analysis lacks either a full understanding of the dynamics of capitalist society or an adequate historical and contemporary contextualisation of the institution of psychiatry. Without attending to both of these issues, the scholarship will remain piecemeal and theoretically incomplete. It is my contention that an inherently political institution such as psychiatry can only be fully understood through an appropriate framing of the profession within wider socio-historical processes and with the aid of Marxist theory. This allows us to make sense of the emergence and development of the psy-professions within industrial society, their changing practices and priorities, points of internal and external competition and conflict, as well as their current period of expansion in neoliberal society.
It has been left to a small handful of Marxist scholars to outline a fundamental truth of the mental health system: that its priorities and practices are fundamentally shaped by the goals of capitalism (see, e.g., Brown 1974; Nahem 1981; Parker 2007; Roberts 2015; Robinson 1997 ; Rosenthal and Campbell 2016). As Brown (1974: 1) has remarked of psychology, it is “more than just a professional field of work. It is also a codified ideology and practice that arises from the nature of our capitalist society and functions to bolster that society.” This is less surprising, states Nahem (1981 : 7), when it is understood that, as with psychiatry, “[p]sychology arose and developed in capitalist society, a class society. In all class societies, the dominant social, cultural and political views are those of the dominant class.” And more so, with the continuing expansion of the psy-professions, Parker (2007 : 1–2) argues that psychology has become
an increasingly powerful component of ideology, ruling ideas that endorse exploitation and sabotage struggles against oppression. This psychology circulates way beyond colleges and clinics, and different versions of psychology as ideology are now to be found nearly everywhere in capitalist society.
The dominant norms and values of the ruling classes are reflected in the psychiatric discourse on human behaviour and the workings of the mind. Consequently, the psy-professions are responsible for facilitating the maximisation of profit for the ruling classes while individualising the social and economic conditions of the workers. The mental health system seeks to normalise the fundamentally oppressive relations of capitalism by focusing on the individual—rather than the society—as pathological and in need of adjustment through “treatment” options such as drugs, ECT, and therapy. These arguments will be discussed in further detail in the chapters that follow. To end this section, however, I briefly want to highlight a key problem with previous Marxist literature.
Almost all of the Marxist scholars cited above come from inside the psy-professions (usually psychology), and for that reason most attempt to still rescue their discipline from capitalism. For example, Nahem (1981 : 7) speaks of the mental health system as being “co-opted” by capitalism, a situation in which the true evidence-based practice of psychiatry and psychology has been replaced by the ideology of the ruling classes. Similarly, Robinson (1997) and Rosenthal and Campbell (2016 ) argue that the psy-professions have been tainted by capitalism, and that, consequently, a socialist society would have “a genuinely scientific psychology [which] will constitute an essential part of human culture” (Robinson 1997: 77). However, the idea of a “new psychiatry” or “new psychology” based on Marxist principles (as suggested in Brown 1974) is fundamentally incompatible with the socio-historical reality of these institutions (Chap. 2). As I argue throughout this book, the psy-professions are a product of capitalism; they were created to police dissent and reinforce conformity, not to emancipate people. Thus, they cannot be reformed or rescued from capitalism; they are and will always be institutions of social control, and for that reason they have no positive role to play in a socialist society (Chap. 8). As important as the previous Marxist scholarship on mental health has been, this book avoids the potential biases of the reformed therapist, psychologist, or psychiatrist in assessing the history and current expansion of the psy-professionals.
Summary
Twenty years ago, Thomas Harris (1995: xv), the bestselling author of I’m OK-You’re OK—one of the first “popular psychology” texts on the market—stated that “[t]he question [for psychiatry] has always been how to get Freud off the couch and to the masses.” This book explains how and why the psychiatric discourse has proliferated over the past few decades and achieved its current hegemonic status in neoliberal society. The following chapter appropriately grounds the discussion in Marx’s classic theory of historical materialism. This is contextualised within a socio-historical analysis of the philosophies and treatments of the psychiatric profession over the past 200 years. The discussion demonstrates how the mental health system has served both the economic and ideological needs of capitalist society. With reference to the work of neo-Marxist scholarship, the specific linkage of neoliberalism to the expansion of the psychiatric discourse is explained in Chap. 3. The “crisis” of psychiatry in the mid-1970s and the construction of the DSM-III in 1980 need to be understood within the wider political framework of a declining welfare state and an increasing focus on individualism. To explore how the psyprofessionals serve capitalist society in specific areas of private and public life, Chaps. 4–7 analyse the impingement of psychiatric hegemony on young people and women, as well as in work lives and with forms of social and political protest. Each of these chapters includes textual research on the DSM, demonstrating how categories and symptoms of mental disorder have come to increasingly mirror the dominant norms and values of neoliberal society. Chapter 4 investigates the psychological sciences’ engagement with the world of work, including a case study of social anxiety disorder—the construction of which can only be fully understood in the context of neoliberal demands for “employability” and “sellable selves” within the labour force. As part of the future workforce, Chap. 5 investigates the growth in mental disorders aimed specifically at young people. Including a socio-historical analysis of the most commonly diagnosed childhood mental illness (attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)), the discussion demonstrates that the contemporary moment of labelling children with mental disorders is strongly related to the requirements of late capitalism for compliant, disciplined, and higherskilled workers. In comparison to the mental health system’s relatively recent focus on young people, women have been an ongoing obsession for the psy-professions since the beginning of industrial society. From hysteria to borderline personality disorder (BPD), Chap. 6 recounts the systematic pathologisation of female emotions and experiences by psyprofessionals, showing how these activities have primarily functioned to reinforce the division of labour, traditional gender roles, and patriarchal power. Chapter 7 explores some of the darkest moments in the history of the mental health system including their support for slavery, the central role they played in the Nazi holocaust, and their recent involvement in torturing prisoners of the “war on terror.” This discussion will demonstrate that, rather than being isolated events carried out by rogue elements, these activities achieved widespread support among the mental health experts and were fundamentally considered to be “in the best interests of the patient.” Further, the analysis will also show that the post-9/11 “culture of fear” in western society has only served to further enforce psychiatry hegemony, a situation achieved through the closer surveillance of social and political dissent as reflected in the DSM-5. Chapter 8 concludes the discussion in this book by briefly offering a few practical ways in which we can begin to challenge the psychiatric hegemon. These include challenging the academic apologists for the psy-professions, campaigning for the outlawing of psychiatric violence and compulsory treatment, and the forming of alliances with fellow radical scholars, psychiatric survivors, and left-wing activists.
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2: Marxist Theory and Mental Illness: A Critique of Political Economy
Over the past 35 years, social theory has largely disappeared from scholarship on mental illness. In sociology and related disciplines, critical thinking has been sacrificed in the face of a neoliberal agenda which prioritises “pragmatic” scholarship relevant to current social policy. Consequently, dominant approaches to mental health research do little more than support the contemporary political agenda. Whether big-data epidemiological studies on the levels of “mental illness” within the general population or small in-depth analysis of psychiatric experiences, contemporary research is usually bereft of any problematising of the mental health system, the psy-professions, or the psychiatric discourse on which such professions lay claims to expertise. Shamefully, we have left it largely to those within these professions to raise the most awkward questions on the mental health business including the lack of validity of current mental disorders, the increasing medicalisation of everyday behaviour, the close ties to pharmaceutical companies, and the role of these groups as agents of social control. Too many sociologists are scared of engaging with the critical issues—they fear being labelled as “antipsychiatry” or of denying survivor/user experience, and they worry about being excluded from funding streams if they raise serious issues about the nature and purpose of the mental health system in capitalist society. Yet if sociologists of medicine are truly serious about accurately researching issues of health and illness, if we still “care” about our subject area, then there is an urgent need to contextualise our work in a set of historical and contemporary power relations. As Vincente Navarro (1980 : 200) has previously made clear,
The actual way of studying disease in any society is by analyzing its historical presence within the political, economic, and ideological power relations in that specific social formation. And by this, I do not mean the analysis of the natural history of disease but rather the political, economic, and ideological determinants of that disease, determinants resulting from the overall power relations which are primarily based on the social relations of production. These power relations are the ones which determine the nature and definition of disease, medical knowledge, and medical practice.
This book is my contribution to reigniting critical thinking within the sociology of mental health.
This chapter begins by outlining the Marxist theory of “materialism,” a critique of the political economy of capitalist society which aims to explain economic and social disparities as a historical process. An understanding of Marxist theory allows us to view capitalism as an economic system of fundamental inequalities which are reproduced not only in activities specifically related to the exchange of labour and commodities but rather in all aspects of social, cultural, and political life. In other words, capitalism frames institutional, group, and personal understandings of the world and responses to it. This includes the structure, practices, and priorities of the mental health system itself—an issue which is discussed with reference to those scholars who have previously applied Marxist theory to medicine and psychiatry including Navarro, Waitzkin, Brown, and Parker. Following these scholars, I spend the remainder of the chapter performing a Marxist assessment of the political economy of the mental health system. This is done through analysing a range of colourful and horrific socio-historical examples—including tranquilizer chairs, masturbation, lobotomies, vibrators, shock treatment, and a lot of drugs—to demonstrate how psychiatry and allied professions have served the needs of capitalism both economically and ideologically.
Historical Materialism
Karl Marx’s analysis of capitalism is recognised by scholars on both the right and the left as highly significant in explaining the formation and continuance of the fundamental economic and social inequalities witnessed within advanced industrial societies. His theory of historical materialism states that the source of human progress and historical change is not to be found in “legal relations” or “political forms,” but rather “in the material conditions of life” (cited in Howard and King 1985: 4). By this Marx means that the economic relations of human beings determine all other relations in that society. Material survival rather than the development of rationality and spiritual thinking forms the fundamental basis of human endeavour in each historical epoch (Palumbo and Scott 2005: 42). In challenging the individualist, liberal theorising of many of his contemporaries, Marx argued that industrial society had not created a radically new society of rational individuals endowed with free will, but instead introduced a new form of industrial slavery which in many ways replicated the medieval serfdom of feudal society. “Freedom” in industrial society is thus an illusion created by a more complex set of societal relations in which political and legal institutions—designated by Marx as part of the “superstructure” of capitalism—reproduced and reinforced these economic relations as appropriate and just. In explaining this contention, Marx (cited in Howard and King 1985: 5, emphasis added) argues,
In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.
For Marx, the mode of production in any given epoch consists of the forces of production (technologies, raw materials, and so on) and the relations of production entailing “forms of social organized labour based on the laws of ownership” (Palumbo and Scott 2005: 44). The relations of production determine the status and social-class position of the population dependent on whether they are the owners—the ruling classes, or “bourgeoisie”—or the workers—the working classes, or “proletariat”—of the means of production (in this case, factories, offices, businesses, and so on). Unique to capitalist society, the means of production are privately owned, with the goal of the ruling classes to accumulate and maximise profit through a competitive and expanding market for commodities (Palumbo and Scott 2005 : 45). Capitalist society is therefore marked by a fundamental disparity in the distribution of economic resources between the majority of the population—the working classes—who are only “free” to sell their labour to the bourgeoisie, and the small elite who own and control the economic base. It is a system of exploitation in which the workers generate “surplus value” for the ruling classes from their labour, are alienated from what they produce, and in turn are commodified by this process (Palumbo and Scott 2005: 46). The workers are kept at subsistence wages, while the elite accumulate greater wealth— the rich will get richer, prophesied Marx, while the poor will get poorer. Though this has not precisely been the case as industrial capitalism has progressed, there is still plenty of evidence for the continuance of huge inequalities in income and wealth in western society, as well as increasing of gaps between the rich and the poor since the emergence of neoliberalism 35 years ago (see, e.g., Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development 2015).
On this basis, Marx conceptualises capitalist society as chaotic, anarchic, and riddled with contradictions. Ultimately, it is a system defined by the permanent struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie over the means of production—a conflict which the workers are destined to win through uprising and revolution, eventually creating a new socialist or communist society defined by common ownership and an equal distribution of resources based on need (Crossley 2005: 291). It is “one of the contradictions of capitalism,” Brown (1974 : 17) notes, “that as capitalism creates a working class that it then exploits, the development 30 Psychiatric Hegemony of that class seals the fate of the capitalist system, for the working class will overthrow the bourgeois class.” Within capitalist society lies the seed of its own destruction. The conflict between the social classes will come to a conclusion when the working classes reach “class consciousness”— that is, a recognition of their true social and economic existence under capitalism. However, in the meantime, Marx argued that the exploitative conditions of capitalism led to the alienation of workers from their social environment. The natural sociability and communality of the people is displaced by the brutality of lived conditions under capitalism (Palumbo and Scott 2005: 47). Marx theorised that the workers had exchanged “relations between persons into relations between things,” a “commodity fetishism” in which objects instead of social relations embody worth and value (Palumbo and Scott 2005: 47). This was one form of “false consciousness” of the working classes, a process of exchanging awareness of the true nature of capitalism for the false values of commodities, a part of ruling class ideology. This ideology of capitalism is perpetuated by the superstructure and institutions of civil society such as the church, the state, the criminal justice system, the education system, the media, and the health system.
The next section draws on the Marxist understandings of historical materialism to explore how these ideas can be applied to the field of medicine and psychiatry. My contention is that the priorities and practices of the western health care system facilitate capitalist goals in two distinct ways: first, through direct and indirect profit accumulation, and second, through the social control of deviant populations and the ideological reproduction of dominant norms and values of the ruling classes.
Marxism, Medicine, and Mental Health
Many years ago when the Channel Tunnel—connecting England and France—was being built (1986–1992), I got the chance to talk to a nurse working on the project on the English side. The project was big, deadlines were tight, and the workers, she told me, were suffering terrible conditions in the tunnel (a total of ten workers died during the construction (Smith 2015 )). I wondered how complicated her job was as part of the onsite health personnel for such a large project. Not very. “The men mostly come to me complaining of terrible headaches,” she explained, “my job is to give them two aspirin and get them back down the tunnel as quickly as possible.”
Speaking of medicine under capitalism, Waitzkin (2000: 37) notes the fundamental contradiction between the perception of health as the ultimate “caring profession” and a society which establishes obstacles to the goal of alleviating “needless suffering and death,” for “[t]he social organization of medicine also fosters patterns of oppression that are antithetical to medicine’s more humane purposes. These patterns within medicine mirror and reproduce oppressive features of the wider society as well.” Marxist scholars of medicine have theorised this replication of the wider class struggle within the health system in a number of ways. First, the priorities of the institution favour those of capitalism and the ruling class. For example, the modern system of health care emerged out of the need for a healthier and more reliable industrial workforce (Waitzkin 2000 : 48); concern for the health of the working classes has tended to peak when there are imperialist wars to be fought, while the majority of current medical research prioritises lifestyle and “me too” cosmetic treatments for the global market rather than research on life-saving treatments for cancer and infectious diseases (see, e.g., Rapaport 2015). Second, the exploitative work relations within capitalist societies are replicated within the rigid hierarchy of medicine, with high-waged, upper middle-class consultants holding a great amount of decision-making power at the top, the lower middle-class nursing managers administering consultants’ needs in the middle, and—holding no power whatsoever and subject to the whims of health managers—the low-earning working-class orderlies and auxiliary staff at the bottom of the pyramid. Navarro (1976 : 446) also notes the tendency of the medical profession to maintain and reinforce these class relations through “both the distribution of skills and knowledge and the control of technology” within the health service. Third, the health system functions as an institution of social control. That is, it reinforces the dominant values and norms of capitalism through its surveillance and labelling practices. In the words of Freidson (1988 : 252), medicine acts as a “moral entrepreneur” to the extent that illness is viewed negatively and as something to be “eradicated or contained.” Even cancer, he states, is a social valuation by the profession, a moral rather than an objective judgement of the body, even if it is one “on which most people happen to agree” (Freidson 1988: 252). Taking a Marxist approach to medicine includes recognising the policing function of the health professions to label and “medicalise” social deviance as illness, as well as reinforce the ideological prerogatives of capitalism as natural and common sense (for instance, through biomedical interventions focused on the individual rather than the wider social environment).
The social control function within psy-professional work practices and knowledge claims is reasonably easy to identify and has been a major focus of critical scholars—Marxist and otherwise—since the 1960s (see, e.g., Conrad 1975; Goffman 1961; Rosenhan 1973 ; Scheff 1966 ). The moral judgements that mental health experts make of people’s behaviour under the claims of scientific neutrality and objectivity allow them to sanction forms of deviance which run contrary to the prevailing social order. For example, Szasz (cited in Freidson 1988: 249) stated in 1964 that “agoraphobia is illness because one should not be afraid of open spaces. Homosexuality is an illness because heterosexuality is the social norm. Divorce is illness because it signals failure of marriage.” Specifically, Marxist contentions of the psy-professions as agents of social control focus on the ways in which these experts contribute to the alienation of people from their own creative abilities. These experts utilise their knowledge claims on human behaviour to depoliticise attempts at social transformation at the group and community level, in turn acknowledging only individual solutions as possible. Consequently, states Parker (2007 : 2), this “psychologisation of social life” performed by mental health workers “encourages people to think that the only possible change they could ever make would be in the way they dress and present themselves to others.”
Ultimately, however, a Marxist critique of political economy needs to consider the ideological function in the context of the underlying economic prerogatives of capitalism. The social control of populations considered as deviant and labelled as “mentally ill” by the psy-professions serves specific requirements of the market, whether this is through the profiteering from individual treatments, the expansion of professional services, or the reinforcement of work and family regimes in the name of appropriate treatment outcomes. In his critical work on the history of psychiatry, Scull (1993: 10) argues that the emergence of the psychiatric profession can be explained as a result of the changes in the social organisation of deviance brought about by new market relations. He asserts that the rise of industrial society required a more complex response to social deviance; there was especially a need to adequately control such groups—who were no longer tied to the land, but instead “free” to sell their labour to the emerging bourgeois—and separate the non-able bodied (e.g., the sick, disabled, poor, alcoholic, vagrant, and elderly) from the “healthy” population. Thus, the growth of the asylums for “the mad” is understood as an economically efficient means by which groups of deviants could be physically separated from the rest of society and kept under close surveillance by new professional authorities (Scull 1993: 33). In Scull’s (1993 : 29) words,
the main driving force behind the rise of a segregative response to madness (and to other forms of deviance) can ... be asserted to lie in the effects of a mature capitalist market economy and the associated ever more thoroughgoing commercialization of existence.
Therefore, it is ultimately the goals of capitalism which directs industrial society’s response to social deviance and, in this way, brings about the formation of the medical attendants/mad doctors/alienists who would in time become the psychiatric profession.
A Marxist approach to understanding the mental health system necessarily has to analyse professional organisation, discourse, and practice, at both the economic and ideological levels. As Brown (1974 : 17–18, emphases original) remarks, a Marxist approach to the psy-professions helps us make sense of “the manifestation, on a huge, technological basis, of capitalist economic relations,” so we can then “understand the role of psychology and psychiatry as mediating the economic-class structure and the personal emotional structure.” Psychiatry’s claims to “scientific practice,” remarks Scull (1993: 392–393), means it has “great potential value in legitimizing and depoliticizing efforts to regulate social life and to keep the recalcitrant and socially disruptive in line.” However, this medicalisation of deviance by the mental health experts should not be treated as fundamentally distinct and separate from the economic base that 34 Psychiatric Hegemony determines the specific form—as well as the groups—who are regulated under such regimes of power. As Parker (2014: 167) states of psychotherapy, a Marxist analysis allows us to understand the profession within capitalism “as an apparatus that not only participates in the production of value but also ... [becomes] more important to the production, circulation and management, in both the State and civil society, of subjectivity.” In this manner, the following section will analyse a range of examples from the history of psychiatry, highlighting both their specific techniques for managing subjectivity as agents of social control and the production of economic value from their operations.
Industrialisation and the Mad Doctors
Official historians of psychiatry see Philippe Pinel’s unchaining of the mad in Paris in 1793 as a highly symbolic moment when the insane were, for the first time, recognised as human beings in need of therapeutic intervention rather than imprisonment and mistreatment (see, e.g., Lieberman 2015: 35–36). It is the formal beginning of the psychiatric profession, a new group of medical experts whose vocation will be to care for and treat the mentally ill as opposed to punish them. Pinel’s traitement moral (known in the Anglo-American world as “moral treatment” or “moral therapy”) was hailed as a truly humanitarian approach to the management of the mad which reflected the rationalism of the new industrial world. Rather than forwarding an organic aetiology for madness, patient case studies suggested to Pinel that particular life events or trauma was at the root of their disturbed behaviour. It was felt that “moral” means could correct the actions of the insane through a more understanding response involving listening to patient complaints, reasoning with them, and showing kindness (Porter 2002: 104). Pinel’s philosophy placed an emphasis on the humane care of the insane with the goal of returning them to “rationality” and good health through respectful, therapeutic discourse. His own commentaries on moral treatment, however, cautioned that “successful treatment depended on the employment of psychological terror and fear to gain the compliance of the insane” (Kirk et al. 2013: 45). This importance placed on threats, compliance, and the reform of character found at the very birth of psychiatric practice is something that we continue to see in the “therapeutic” setting today. Fundamental here is the emergence of new understandings of madness which closely align with the changing forces of production and the management of social deviance. Psychiatry’s success is dependent on the profession’s usefulness in serving the industrial order, including the demands of the bourgeoisie for a highly regulated and compliant workforce. It is more than coincidence that the profession remains—without any trace of irony—insistent on aligning their earliest developments with the appropriately named system of “moral treatment.”
Following Pinel, William Tuke and his fellow Quakers implemented the principles of moral treatment at their York Retreat in England. At this rural residence patients were to be treated humanely and with dignity; a minimum of physical restraint was utilised, instead the custodians encouraged various forms of behavioural adjustment. However, transgressions from acceptable standards of “normal” and proper conduct would not be tolerated. Rather than be idle, patients were expected to take up work and hobbies, adhere to good manners at all times, to dress appropriately, and be considerate in social interactions with staff, other patients, and visitors to the Retreat (Foucault 1988a: 241–278). With a ratio of one staff member to every three patients, Tuke claimed a 70 per cent recovery rate among patients at the establishment (Whitaker 2010b: 24).
Contemporary commentators continue to see moral treatment and the practices at the York Retreat as examples of what good mental health care should be (see, e.g., Borthwick et al. 2001). Its underlying philosophy, however, reflected wider puritanical responses of Victorian society to the socially deviant. A reform of character under industrial capitalism was not only desirable but also necessary; by force of will, the irrational citizen would now be made rational again. As Foucault (1988a: 241–278) has discussed, moral treatment was a shift in the management of those labelled as “mad” in as much as the new disciplinary apparatus enforced a closer surveillance of personal conduct, so as to instil obedience to authority in a new set of societal relations. Kirk et al. (2013: 45) have noted of the Retreat that it was still an institution that confined people against their will and utilised a system of rewards and punishments to enforce “psychological and physical conformity.” Making progress in this system of moral treatment, state Kirk et al. (2013: 45),
required obedience and proper behavior by the patients. Failure to follow the rules dramatically undermined the patient’s social status, institutional privileges, and personal wellbeing by the forced transfer to more remote and less respectable and comfortable wards. Total control by the alienists/ moral managers over the physical and social environment of the inmates was the mechanism that imposed discipline.
This moral management of social deviance was appropriated and replicated by the medical attendants/mad doctors in the larger asylum system over the course of the nineteenth century. Mass incarceration in such facilities effectively facilitated, “sweeping from the streets the poor, the indigent, the mad and the homeless, [and] unsightly beggars” (Breggin 1993: 145), yet at the same time offered a philosophy of care and treatment which emphasised humanitarianism and the potential for recovery. Effectively, the mad doctors succeeded in gaining jurisdiction over the mentally ill through a convincing medical rhetoric on mental disease, even though, as Abbott (cited in Kirk et al. 2013: 9) notes, “[o]f its treatments, only incarceration had any effect, and that made the psychiatrists little different from the jailers they had replaced, despite their reference to the medical model of science, treatment and cure.”
The custodians of the emerging asylum system offered a more sophisticated form of social control consistent with the complexities of the industrial order. It is interesting in this respect that the early proponents of moral treatment were religious orders from whom the mad doctors/alienists appropriated their methods—a move from religion to psychiatry as the moral authority for the scientific age. As Abbott (1988: 298) further comments, the early success of the profession is based on its promise to adjust individuals to the new social order. “From its first interest in prevention and indeed from the moral therapy era,” he writes (Abbott 1988: 298, emphasis added),
psychiatry had been fascinated by the relation of the individual to society. The psychiatric concept of prevention attributed nervous and mental disease to failure of adjustment between individual and society, and assumed successful adjustment would prevent disease. Adjustment underlay every application of psychiatry to social control; young people must be adjusted to the orderly world, soldiers must be adjusted to trench warfare, workers must be adjusted to factories.
Foucault (1988b: 180) reiterates Abbott’s point when he states that “[f ] rom the outset, psychiatry has had as its project to be a function of social order.” The mad doctors’ control of jurisdiction over those labelled as “insane” was only possible through constructing a medical narrative which reflected and responded to the social and economic concerns of the ruling elites. This is further stressed by Foucault (1988b : 180–181, emphasis original) when he puts himself in the shoes of the alienist/psychiatric profession as they emerge in the nineteenth century;
everywhere society is meeting a mass of problems, in the street, at work, in the family, etc. – and we psychiatrists are the functionaries of social order. It is up to us to make good these disorders. We have a function in public hygiene. That is the true vocation of psychiatry. And that is its true context, its destiny.
A useful example of psychiatry’s expanding moral role with industrial society can be seen in Fig. 2.1 which shows an original record of incarceration for the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum (in the city of Weston, West Virginia), from when it opened in 1864 until 1889. Reasons for admission include “bad whiskey,” “desertion by husband,” “immoral life,” “laziness,” “novel reading,” “politics,” and “uterine derangement”.
Fig. 2.1 Reasons for Admission to the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum,
1864–1889
In the name of “public hygiene,” behaviour considered as deviant or threatening to the industrial elites was pathologised by the mad doctors. This included what Szasz (2000: 35) refers to as one of “the most commonly diagnosed and most enthusiastically treated mental disease[s] in the history of medicine,” namely masturbatory insanity. As the label suggests, the profession theorised that masturbation was not only an unhygienic and deviant behaviour but one which led to insanity and even suicide (Szasz 2000: 36). Still being offered for the “sufferer” as late as the 1930s, treatment options included “restraining devices and mechanical appliances, circumcision, cautery of the genitals, clitoridectomy, and castration” (Szasz 2000: 36). Widely recognised as the founder of British psychiatry, Henry Maudsley was particularly vocal in his disdain for those engaging in such behaviour; “[t]he sooner [the masturbator] sinks to his degraded rest,” opined Maudsley (cited in Szasz 2000: 36), “the better for the world which is well rid of him.” This example allows us to identify specific economic and ideological concerns of the ruling classes embedded in the construction of the mental illness. As Szasz (2000: 35) has noted, masturbation was useful to psychiatric expansionism insofar as the “disorder” could be potentially applied to the entire population. Children and adults, males and females could all be caught in the masturbatory insanity net; the classification was a clear case of the mad doctors medicalising deviant behaviour. It was also a good example of the expansion of psychiatric jurisdiction through the medicalisation of sex and sexualities.
Further, it is possible to discern here more specific needs to reinforce the family unit as well as productivity within the labour force. As White (2009: 20–21) has outlined, the claimed physical manifestations of masturbatory insanity (including baldness, stammering, blindness, and skin disease) were used as “a means of social control over the activities of men” (White 2009: 21). Sexual activity was to be confined to reproduction; masturbation was associated with an idleness that would not be tolerated in industrial society. Additionally, the burgeoning of ideas on eugenics—avidly taken up by psychiatry (Chap. 7)—suggested that the alleged greater susceptibility of the working classes to insanity was the result of an evolutionary trend which would continue unless abated by compulsory sterilisation of the “mad.” Castration for masturbatory insanity was therefore theorised as “hygienic” in halting the reproduction of “inferior stock.” For example, the well-known Pennsylvanian gynaecologist, William Goodell, was of the opinion in 1882 that “sound policy” in the future would be “to stamp out insanity by castrating all the insane men and spaying all the insane women,” a view shared by the editor of the Texas Medical Journal who also believed that the “treatment” would have the additional benefit of stopping insane men from masturbating (cited in Whitaker 2010b: 57–58).
Women who deviated from their primary roles as wives, mothers, and homemakers were a particular target for the masturbatory insanity label. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the profession began specialising in female “mental illnesses” such as hysteria and nymphomania. The prerogatives of industrial capitalism dictated that a woman’s place was in the home, and psychiatry reinforced these patriarchal norms through the social control of women who deviated from the prescribed gender role (Chap. 5). Isaac Baker Brown of the Obstetrical Society of London, for example, was a firm believer that female madness was primary caused by masturbation, suggesting that symptoms could be detected in those women who desired work and were indifferent to their domestic obligations (Showalter 1980: 176–177). From 1859, he performed clitoridectomies on women and girls (as young as ten years old) for a variety of deviations including a 20-year old who disobeyed her mother and was a serious reader, a woman who was “forward and open” with men and had never had an offer of marriage, and a unmarried dressmaker with digestive problems (Showalter 1980: 177). Brown’s surgical mutilations were particularly recommended for uncooperative wives, with Showalter (1980: 177) noting that he “urged clitoridectomy for women seeking divorce and believed that the operation would make them more contented, and certainly more manageable, wives.” It is recorded that this specific surgical intervention did not vanish from asylums until the 1950s (Whitaker 2010b : 79).
In another ironic twist in the history of mental illness, at the same time as psychiatry was utilising radical interventions to stop disobedient women from masturbating and gaining sexual pleasure outside of the confines of heterosexual marriage, there were colleagues in private practice who—in the name of psychiatric treatment and advances in medicine—were masturbating their “frigid” and matrimonially unsatisfied “hysterical” patients to orgasm. As Maines (1999 ) has outlined, the “treatment” of middle-class women labelled as “hysterical” was highly profitable for the profession and one which was assisted at the end of the nineteenth century by the introduction of a new “medical aid” and future sex toy, the vibrator. Though seemingly contradictory, both practices can be understood as part of the various attempts by psychiatry to pathologise and control the female body through preserving the status quo of family, marriage, and the industrial division of labour (Chap. 6).
Biological Theory and Physical Treatments
As with prisons and workhouses, institutions for those labelled as “mentally ill” expanded considerably over the course of the nineteenth century in the United Kingdom and the United States. Private clinics and practices for middle-class clients grew and diversified as the century progressed, while large publically funded asylums were built and filled with the working classes. In 1850, there were only 7140 people (4.03 per 10,000 of population) in public asylums in the UK, yet by 1954 there were 148,000 (33.45 per 10,000 of population) (Scull 1984: 67). Similar increases were witnessed in the United States, with over 550,000 people incarcerated in psychiatric institutions by 1955 (Lieberman 2015 : 154). In the mid-nineteenth century, the poor for the first time outnumbered 2 Marxist Theory and Mental Illness: A Critique of Political... 41 the rich as psychiatric patients (Burstow 2015: 38). Private practice individualised social problems of industrial society as various forms of “neuroses”—especially useful in reinforcing the restricted roles of middle-class women. In contrast, the asylum system utilised various physical “treatments” on groups considered as deviant, problematic, or “unfit” to be let loose in wider society. As Scull (1989: 243) notes, with the introduction of state provision, lower-class families were particularly prone to committing troublesome and decrepit family members to the asylum due to the lack of “resources for coping with the dependant and economically unproductive.” Thus, as industrial society progressed in the nineteenth century, so business and prestige for the emerging mental health profession flourished.
However, then as now, there remained problems for the alienists/psychiatrists in constructing a valid knowledge base with which to legitimate and justify such expansion to other branches of medicine (as well as the general public). Another major paradox from the history of psychiatry, highlighted by Scull (1989: 239–249), is that as the numbers of the “insane”—measured by the rates of psychiatric incarceration— increased throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, “curability” rates—measured by the numbers discharged from such facilitates—declined. Between the 1870s and the 1920s, the “recovery” rate in England dropped from 40 to 31 per cent (Shorter 1997: 191). Many inmates were incarcerated in such facilities for the entirety of their lives, with Scull (1989) acknowledging that, by the 1950s, the average stay in a US state psychiatric hospital was over 20 years. During the hundred years of growth in the business of private and public psychiatry between 1850 and 1950, colleagues in other branches of medicine had made considerable advances in their knowledge base. In comparison, the mental health experts had made no noticeable progress. This was in spite of psychiatry developing a wide range of biomedical, physically based treatments for mental disorder, some of which will now be discussed.
From the end of the eighteenth century, western medicine made specific advances in their activities due to the appropriation of the language and techniques of scientific enquiry. Impressionistic theories of disease that had been based on the idea of “humoral balance” (Scull 2015 : 28) were no longer acceptable in a society built on rationalism and science. This was encapsulated in Rudolf Virchow’s development of the medical “gold standard” for discovering and accurately classifying disease. As Burstow (2015 : 36, emphasis original) outlines,
According to this new understanding, pain or discomfort per se no longer sufficed for something to qualify as a disease. Real lesion, real cellular pathology observable directly or by tests was to be the standard. While disease might be hypothesized and temporarily entertained in the absence of pathology, to be clear, it was discoveries of pathology alone which confirmed them.
Attempts by the alienist/psychiatric professionals to similarly legitimise their ideas and practices following Virchow’s gold standard of medicine are encapsulated in the observational and classificatory work of the German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin—considered as the “father of modern psychiatry” (Cohen 2014a: 440)—in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Kraepelin’s close observations and recording of life histories of over a thousand incarcerated asylum patients led him to theorise that mental disease was caused by discrete, physical entities that incapacitated the normal working of the brain. He developed successive editions of the Textbook of Psychiatry (Lehrbuch der Psychiatrie) which outlined his findings and delineated different varieties of mental disorder, including his original descriptions of praecox (later relabelled as schizophrenia) and manic-depression (Cohen 2014a: 440–441). Thus, Kraepelin’s work was a successful attempt to promote the idea of a “scientific psychiatry”—that is, a branch of medicine which followed the scientific method and biological theory of their colleagues in other sub-disciplines. As a result of his work, mental disease was firmly established as a disease of the brain, and various treatments aimed at this human organ were progressed under a scientific ethos of hypothesis testing, experimentation, and evaluation. Only one omission from Virchow’s gold standard continued to haunt the psychiatric profession, and that was the absence of the discovery of any definite physical pathology. Theories could be entertained, according to Virchow, but not confirmed without real evidence of mental disease. As with those who followed him, Burstow (2015: 43) notes that Kraepelin’s ideas on mental pathology hung on assumptions—rather than definite proof—of linkage “between symptoms, etiology, and prognosis.” This did not, however, stop psychiatry experimenting on the bodies of those incarcerated in the hope of, retrospectively, proving aetiology.
The physician Benjamin Rush (a signatory to the US Declaration of Independence) was an early believer in the physical aetiology of mental illness. In the 1890s, the man who would become known as “the father of American psychiatry” (his face still appears on the APA emblem) announced his latest cure for madness, the “tranquilizer chair.” Whitaker (2010b: 16) explains the workings of this invention,
Once strapped into the chair, lunatics could not move at all—their arms were bound, their wrists immobilized, their feet clamped together—and their sight was blocked by a wooden contraption confining the head. A bucket was placed beneath the seat for defecation, as patients would be restrained for long periods at a time.
Rush was a man of science, he believed that insanity was caused by the irregular flow of blood vessels in the brain. Thus, he argued that the tranquilizer chair calmed and steadied the blood supply of the insane. The device “binds and confines every part of the body,” stated Rush (cited in Whitaker 2010b : 16),
By keeping the trunk erect, it lessens the impetus of blood toward the brain ... [the tranquilizer chair’s] effects have been truly delightful to me. It acts as a sedative to the tongue and temper as well as to the blood vessels.
Along with the bloodletting, cold baths and spinning devices that were then popular in “calming” and “curing” the mad (see Whitaker 2010b: 1–38), Rush’s new invention was popular back in the asylums of Europe where the attendants were particularly impressed at how the tranquilizer chair could make the most stubborn of inmates “gentle and submissive” following only one or two days of chair therapy (Whitaker 2010b: 16). These early examples of torture disguised as “treatment” by psychiatry developed further in the early part of the twentieth century as they appropriated physically invasive techniques from other branches of medicine.
As the “curability” rates continued to drop and scientific psychiatry faced mounting challenges from Freud’s “dynamic psychiatry”—which appeared to offer more potential for positive mental health outcomes (see Shorter 1997: 145–189)—the desire of the public mental health system for credibility intensified in the first few decades of the twentieth century. At this time, public psychiatry adopted the veneer of general medicine by strategic name changing (“asylums” became “hospitals,” “alienists” became “psychiatrists”, and so on) as well as appropriating physical apparatus (e.g., ambulances and morgues) and interventions (such as drugs and surgery) from other parts of medicine. As Whitaker (2010b: 73–74) has noted, the new psychiatric treatments were different from previous alienist interventions in that they actually “worked”—through permanently damaging the brain. Indeed, Walter Freeman who popularized the transorbital lobotomy in the United States advocated for the procedure as a part of what he called “brain-damaging therapeutics” (Burstow 2015: 52).
Before thorazine appeared on the market in the 1950s (see discussion below), biomedical psychiatry experimented on the socially deviant with a variety of dangerous drug “treatments.” These included various poisons such as camphor and metrazol, as well as insulin administered at very high dosages to invoke seizures and comas in the patient (Whitaker 2010b: 91–96). Purposely taking the patient “to the doors of death” (as one physician put it (Whitaker 2010b: 91)), such treatments were considered a success and carried out widely in the psychiatric institutions of the 1930s and 1940s. The hospital staff observed that the inmates became quieter and more obedient following such “treatment,” while the patients themselves lived in palpable terror of further interventions of this nature (Whitaker 2010b: 91). The “treatments” remained dangerous, causing not only brain damage for many but also occasionally death. Meanwhile, some psychiatrists remained concerned that these interventions were less than permanent and did not signify a long-term cure for chronic mental illness.
Two forms of “physical therapy” on the brain that tended to produce more permanent effects (we might say damage) were ECT (more commonly known as “electroshock treatment”) and lobotomy. Along with drug treatments, both of these interventions in modified forms are still in use today. Crucial here in understanding the perceived “effectiveness” 2 Marxist Theory and Mental Illness: A Critique of Political... 45 of these treatments—despite a lack of any evidence for the biological aetiology of mental disease—is to highlight the ways in which they successfully adjusted the behaviour of the socially deviant in a way which allowed for discharge back to the family and even a return to work. The treatments are not an advance in psychiatric medicine, but nevertheless useful in modifying inappropriate behaviour in a more permanent manner, in turn aiding capitalist prerogatives for productivity in the family and the labour force. Both “treatments” would eventually take a back seat to “antipsychotic” drugs, which some scholars argue perform essentially the same task as ECT and psychosurgery in damaging the brain, yet do so in a cheaper and seemingly more effective manner (see, e.g., Breggin 1991; Breggin and Cohen 1999 ; Moncrieff 2009; Whitaker 2010a).
To understand these physical interventions as forms of social control of deviant groups, it is useful to consider those who were first forced to have the treatments, and the groups who have been subsequently prioritised for them. ECT was first performed in 1938 on an Italian homeless man rounded up by the police in Rome. The inspiration for placing electrodes on the forehead of psychiatric inmates and giving them electric shocks was Italian psychiatrist Ugo Cerletti’s visit to a local slaughterhouse where he observed pigs being stunned with electric jolts, making them more manageable for butchers to kill. After being shocked with 110 volts through the brain, Cerletti’s first human guinea pig experienced a seizure and subsequently pleaded with the psychiatrist not to inflict the “treatment” on him again (by this point the vagrant was under the—not too surprising—impression that the psychiatrist was going to kill him); Cerletti announced ECT a triumph (Whitaker 2010b: 96–98). Then as now, the procedure produces a convulsion or grand mal seizure (van Daalen-Smith et al. 2014: 206) which appears to “calm” the patient and inhibit the behaviour conceptualised by mental health workers as various forms of “psychoses” or “autism.” The psychiatric profession remains baffled as to how ECT works on the body, yet a recent review of the available evidence stated that the only known effects are permanent brain dysfunction and a higher risk of death (Read and Bentall 2010 ).
As with the drug treatments that preceded it, ECT has been a nonetoo-subtle method of psychiatric torture which demands conformity from psychiatric inmates, either by threat or as a result of the intervention itself; as Burstow (2015: 55) reminds us, the Nazi doctors were early adopters of ECT for use on concentration camp inmates. From the earliest experimentations with ECT, it appears that psychiatry was quite aware that electroshock resulted in brain trauma, generally feeling that this was no bad thing. ECT-inflicted patients were observed as experiencing amnesia, being disorientated, lethargic, and apathetic; some noted that their whole intellect was lowered by the “treatment” (Whitaker 2010b: 98). This was all seen as helpful for the patient, for as one physician (cited in Whitaker 2010b: 99) noted, “the greater the damage [to the brain], the more likely the remission of psychotic symptoms.”
It was the perceived intellect of the inmate population that particularly marked them out for ECT. Noted pioneer, Dr Abraham Myerson (cited in Burstow 2015 : 55), bluntly stated of candidates for ECT that
[t]hese people have ... more intelligence than they can handle, and the reduction of intelligence is an important factor in the curative process. I say this without cynicism. The fact is that some of the very best cures that one gets are in those individuals whom one reduces almost to amentia [simple-mindedness].
ECT has experienced a recent resurgence, with psychiatrists now keen to target deviant young people labelled as “depressed” or “autistic” for shock treatment if they “fail to respond” to drug interventions (Breggin and Breggin 1998: 195; see also Tomazin 2015 ; van Daalen-Smith et al. 2014). Leonard Roy Frank (cited in Mills 2014: 93), a survivor of ECT, rhetorically asks, “[w]hy is it that 10 volts of electricity applied to a political prisoner’s private parts [genitalia] is seen as torture while 10 or 15 times that amount applied to the brain is called ‘treatment’?” Because, I would argue, the threat of ECT is effective in policing those who fail to perform their family, school, work, or consumer roles in western society. Yet, even for some of those in the profession, the treatment remained imprecise as a biomedical intervention and it soon appeared that ECT would be superseded by Egas Moniz’s Nobel Prize-winning “miracle cure” of the lobotomy (Whitaker 2010b : 107–108).
Inspired by observations of World War I veterans who had suffered prefrontal brain damage, neurosurgeons suggested that operating on the brains of those labelled as mentally ill could dull the emotions and reduce the intellectual capacity in a more permanent and specific way than ECT had been able to. Egas Moniz theorised that pathological thoughts were “fixed” in the “celluloconnective systems” in the prefrontal lobes of the brain, thus the “cure” for mental disorder was to “destroy” these connections through psychosurgical interventions (Whitaker 2010b : 107–108). Like the majority of subsequent lobotomies, Moniz’s first procedure was carried out on a woman (in this case, a former prostitute). As Whitaker (2010b: 113) describes the operation, Moniz “drilled holes into her skull, used a syringe to squirt absolute alcohol onto the exposed white fibers, which killed tissue through dehydration, and then sewed her back up.” The woman was subsequently returned to the asylum, where the psychiatrists reported that she remained in a calm state. Following this “successful” operation, further prefrontal operations on the incarcerated population were performed, and by 1936, Moniz was advertising his drilling procedure as demonstrating marked improvements in all of the operated patients (including the observation that post-operative manicdepressives had become “less emotional”) (Whitaker 2010b : 114).
During the 1940s and 1950s, Moniz’s psychosurgery was made popular in America through the refinements made by Walter Freeman and his neurosurgeon assistant James Watts. Their first patient was again female—a 63-year-old woman who Freeman felt dominated her husband and who he described as a “master of bitching” (cited in Whitaker 2010b : 115). Freeman and Watts were pleased with the results of the operation, writing in the Southern Medical Journal that the woman was now able to carry out household chores and appeared to her husband, “more normal than she had ever been” (cited in Whitaker 2010b: 116). By the end of 1936, the physicians had operated on a further 16 women and 3 men (Whitaker 2010b: 116). Post-operative evaluations of patient behaviour were almost exclusively carried out by staff at the psychiatric facilities where the procedures had been performed, focusing on the social norms of “appearance, work, and activity levels” (Getz 2009: 145). Not surprisingly, the results were considered overwhelming positive. Freeman (cited in Getz 2009: 145) himself was especially proud that, as with ECT, intellect and creative functioning was permanently curtailed by the surgical procedure, declaring that “[n]one of our patients has written a book, designed a house, composed a piece of music or invented a salable gadget.” The particular targets for lobotomy were the black community as well as uncooperative women. This issue is highlighted in Freeman’s own recollections (cited in Burstow 2015: 53–54) of lobotomising a black woman who had been confined in a padded cell at the psychiatric hospital for some years: “when it came time to transfer her ... for operation,” he recalls,
five attendants had to restrain her while the nurse gave her the hypodermic [injection]. The operation was successful in that there were no further outbreaks ... From that day after ... (and we demonstrated this repeatedly to the ward personnel), we could grab [the patient] by the throat, twist her arm, tickle her in the ribs and slap her behind without eliciting anything more than a wide grin and hoarse chuckle
As with all of psychiatry’s physical interventions, the lobotomy “worked” for capitalism in as far as they pacified troublesome groups for good. The left-wing filmmaker and actor Frances Farmer was but one of many political victims of Freeman’s psychosurgery. As Ussher (2011: 71; see also Getz 2009 : 146) has recounted, Farmer was originally committed to Washington State Hospital by her mother in 1944 for “drinking, smoking, swearing and having sex with men,” she was eventually lobotomised and returned home in 1950. The same fate was visited on John F. Kennedy’s older sister, Rosemary Kennedy, by her father in 1941, following his concerns for her aggressive behaviour and the fear that she might become pregnant (Getz: 2009 : 146; see also Burstow 2015 : 54).
Whitaker (2010b: 123) notes that the majority of lobotomised patients were able to leave the hospital, leading to the phrase “lobotomy gets ‘em home” becoming popular in the media as news of the “miracle cure” spread. The surgery was increasingly argued to be useful for not only psychotic conditions such as schizophrenia and manic-depression but an ever-widening variety of mental disorders (including anxiety and depression) as well as for dealing with “criminals, psychopaths, and sexual perverts” (Valenstein 1980: 96). The operation was even recommended to American housewives who were finding the tedium of homemaking and childrearing too boring to cope with. As late as 1980, Valenstein (1980 : 2 Marxist Theory and Mental Illness: A Critique of Political... 49 90) was suggesting that such women remained appropriate cases for psychosurgery. He states of one typical case for the procedure:
Household chores such as washing-up or polishing a table were completely impossible for her, as they took so long and caused her such distress. Her husband and mother were, therefore, forced into running her home and, on medical advice, her two children were at boarding school.
ECT, antidepressants, and psychotherapy all had a limited effect on this woman’s behaviour—each time she “relapsed” after a few weeks—and Valenstein (1980: 90–91) suggested that in such “hard to reach” cases, psychosurgery would still make sense as a part of modern psychiatric treatment. Here we see the continuation of physical therapies as forms of social control; the appropriate gender role for women as mothers and wives being reinforced through the “scientific” psychiatric discourse and “treatment” technologies of the mental health system (Chap. 6).
Freeman eventually became frustrated with the amount of time the Moniz-designed brain-drilling operations took and his reliance on an assistant to anesthetise the patient. Instead he devised a simpler, cheaper and less time-consuming operation which he boasted could be done in 20 minutes (Whitaker 2010b: 133). The procedure required no anaesthetic—instead he used three successive shocks of ECT to pacify the patient—and could be administered by any psychiatrist after only a few hours of training. Freeman’s infamous “transorbital lobotomy” innovation has been described by Whitaker (2010b : 133) as follows:
Freeman attacked the frontal lobes through the eye sockets. He would use an ice pick to poke a hole in the bony orbit above each eye and then insert it seven centimeters deep into the brain. At that point, he would move behind the patient’s head and pull up on the ice pick to destroy the frontal lobe nerve fibers.
Freeman (cited in Whitaker 2010b: 133) even felt it unnecessary to sterilise the ice pick and thereby “waste time with that ‘germ crap.’”
Consequently, Burstow (2015: 53) notes that Freeman’s innovation further increased medical interest in the procedure, due to its ability to maximise “doctor’s profits, [reduce] hospital expenses, and dramatically 50 Psychiatric Hegemony [increase] the number ‘served.’” Thanks to the claims of high “curability” attributed to the transorbital lobotomy by the media and medical journals at the time, over 20,000 social deviants in America alone were lobotomised in the 1950s (Whitaker 2010b: 132). Research articles followed the lobotomists’ claims in suggesting that the procedure was a painless, minor, low-risk operation which brought about significant improvement in the patient’s behaviour. Over time, however, it became clear that what this implied was that the lobotomy made the inmate more manageable for hospital staff. As Burstow (2015: 52) comments on the subjective judgements made of the lobotomised victim, “behaviour presenting less problems for staff [qualified] as ‘improvement.’ Indeed, people who could once write poetry and now could do little but giggle were being declared better.” Whitaker (2010b: 131) agrees, stating that “any change in behavior [of the lobotomised inmate] that resulted in the patients’ becoming more manageable (or less of a bother), could be judged as an improvement.” It is unsurprising then that, as Getz (2009: 145) remarks, under such conditions the procedure was increasingly used as a form of punishment by psychiatric staff for unruly behaviour or for those who had not been appropriately pacified by doses of ECT. In fact, Freeman was personally convinced that the more the patient resisted his ice-pick therapy, the more necessary it was that they should receive it (Whitaker 2010b: 133).
Similar to the current expansion of drug treatments for ever-younger groups of deviant, Freeman’s evangelical zeal for the lobotomy led him to operate on 11 young people in the 1950s, including one just four years old (Whitaker 2010b: 135). Explaining his rational for lobotomising children, he admitted it was simply an easier and more efficient method of behaviour modification. “It is easier,” Freeman (cited in Whitaker 2010b: 136) argued, “to smash the world of fantasy, to cut down upon the emotional interest that the child pays to his inner experiences, than it is to redirect his behavior into socially acceptable channels.” It was by this point a typical statement of psychiatric arrogance that subsequently left 2 of the 11 lobotomised young people dead (Whitaker 2010b : 136). Eventually, Freeman—a psychiatrist with no formal surgical training or qualifications—had killed too many patients for the medical establishment to accept and was banned from performing any further lobotomies in the late 1960s. It is estimated that over 40,000 psychiatric patients were victims of psychosurgery while it was fashionable in mid-twentiethcentury America (Getz 2009: 147). Subsequently, the “curability” claims made by psychiatry were, once again, found to be groundless. An example is offered by Whitaker (2010b: 135) in describing the reasons for the popularity of the procedure at the Stockton State Hospital in California; the lobotomy could turn “resistive, destructive” inmates into “passive” ones (Braslow, cited in Whitaker 2010b: 135). While a useful method of social control, it was no miracle cure for mental illness; it is estimated that 12 per cent of those lobotomised at the hospital died from the procedure (usually through bleeding in the brain), many more were left severely and permanently disabled, and only 23 per cent ever left the hospital (Whitaker 2010b: 135).
As with ECT, the brutality of the lobotomy has not stopped subsequent attempts by the profession to make it popular again. In the political turmoil of the 1970s, psychiatrists suggested that black people should be targeted for psychosurgery (Burstow 2015 : 54), while practitioners in the 1980s considered that the intervention might be of benefit for those suffering from anorexia nervosa, ADHD, and autism (Getz 2009 : 148). The latest version of psychosurgery is called “neuromodulation” or “deep brain stimulation,” and is recommended for those labelled with depression or obsessive-compulsive disorder (Getz 2009 : 147).
While the physical treatments outlined above attempted to offer psychiatry a veneer of biomedical progress to legitimate their activities, they can be more accurately understood as instruments of torture and oppression to more efficiently control those considered as problematic and troublesome to capitalist society. Yet Whitaker (2010b: 127–130) also notes that there were important economic motives for the state and the psychiatric profession to continue experimenting on inmates in search of a more efficient way of managing deviant populations. This included the need for a cheaper form of “care” that could be performed outside the hospital system—an intervention which would address the mounting fiscal crisis caused by the continued funding of large psychiatric hospitals. Mythologised as yet another miracle cure for those labelled as “mentally ill,” this would eventuate in the popular promotion of drugs (or “psychopharmaceuticals”) within the mental health system, which will be discussed in the next section.
The Drugs “Revolution”
Through the maximisation of profits for pharmaceutical corporations, the contemporary popularity for prescribing drugs is perhaps the most obvious and salient example of psychiatry serving the economic base of capitalism. However, this phenomenon can also be understood as the profession performing its ideological role as a part of the superstructure of capitalism, through the continued individualisation of political discontent and management of the population through chemical agents. The past few decades have witnessed a substantial increase in the consumption of psychiatric drugs across western society. For example, in America, the number of children medicated with ADHD-related drugs (chiefly Ritalin) grew from 150,000 at the end of the 1970s to 3.5 million in 2012 (Whitaker and Cosgrove 2015: 91–92). Similarly in the UK, Moncrieff (2009: 3) notes that the prescriptions for antidepressants increased “by 243 % in the ten years up to 2002.” The explosion in profits for pharmaceutical companies over this period has been summated by Whitaker (2010a: 320–321):
In 1985, outpatient sales of antidepressants and antipsychotics in the United States amounted to $503 million. Twenty-three years later, U.S. sales of antidepressants and antipsychotics reached $24.2 billion, nearly a fiftyfold increase. Antipsychotics—a class of drugs previously seen as extremely problematic in kind, useful only in severely ill patients—were the top revenue-producing class of drugs in 2008, ahead even of the cholesterol-lowering agents. Total sales of all psychotropic drugs in 2008 topped $40 billion. Today—and this shows how crowded the drugstore has become—one in every eight Americans takes a psychiatric drug on a regular basis.
As a result of what Burstow (2015: 167) has termed psychiatry’s “march to Pharmageddon,” there have been concerns from scholars both inside and outside the psy-professions that drug prescribing is getting out of hand. Specific critiques have suggested that mental health experts may be medicalising evermore aspects of our everyday behaviour as mental illnesses (e.g., our “hoarding,” drinking, gaming, grieving, gambling, and so on) so as to prescribe us more drugs; that the professional bodies are far too cosy with pharmaceutical companies and have consequently lost sight of their duty of care to their clients; that the potential health harms of long-term drug taking have been neglected in the hype around the latest “miracle pill” appearing on the market (e.g., Whitaker (2010a: 354) notes that those labelled as “mentally ill” are “now dying twenty-five years earlier than their peers”); and that other therapies are being ignored in favour of the quick-fix chemical cure.
This section demythologises the idea of the “chemical cure” for mental illness by concentrating on the changing economic and political goals of capitalism since the mid-twentieth century. This analysis demonstrates that there can never be a “magic bullet” for mental disorder when aetiology has not been established, thus we have to understand drug treatments as a continuation of the biomedical technologies of control I have discussed so far in this chapter. As with other physical interventions, psychopharmaceuticals can also be understood as a further attempt to legitimise the psychiatric profession as a relevant branch of medicine. A critical evaluation of psychotropic interventions then should not focus on their effectiveness in “treating” or “curing” mental disorders, but rather analyse how this metaphorical placebo aids the survival and expansion of the psychiatric profession beyond the asylum walls. This discussion will break with much of the previous scholarship in the area by arguing that the profit-making ventures of biomedical psychiatry—as reflected in the growth of the new psycho-drugs culture—are in fact secondary to capitalism’s desire for the closer surveillance, monitoring, and moral management of the general population in neoliberal society, a function that the psy-professions are most suited for.
Official historians of psychiatry view the introduction of the drug chlorpromazine (marketed as thorazine in America) in the 1950s as a turning point of revolutionary proportions in the treatment and care of the mentally ill. Shorter (1997: 246) calls it “the first drug that worked,” while in a chapter titled—in the now familiar irony-free fashion of such writers—“Mother’s Little Helper: Medicine At Last,” Lieberman (2015 : 175, emphasis original) argues that chlorpromazine was “the first psychopharmaceutical ... a drug providing true therapeutic benefits for a troubled mind.” According to such scholars, this is a breakthrough in psychiatric medicine which can be equated “to the introduction of penicillin in general medicine” (Shorter 1997 : 255). It is the beginning of “the era of psychopharmacology” (Shorter 1997: 255) which, as biomedical knowledge on the workings of the brain has progressed, we continue to reap the rewards of today. For Lieberman (2015: 178), chlorpromazine is the first drug to specially target and reduce the symptoms of psychoses (such as hallucinations and disorganised thinking). As he explains, the effect of the drug on institutionalised patients was dramatic and lasting: “[n]ow they could return home,” he states, “and incredibly, begin to live stable and even purposeful lives. They had a chance to work, to love, and—possibly—to have a family” (Lieberman 2015 : 180). Chlorpromazine was also a significant improvement on previous physical therapies (such as ECT and lobotomy) in terms of being “much less dangerous, and easily tolerated by the patients.” Just over a year after the drug was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1954, Scull (2015: 367) notes that two million people were taking chlorpromazine in America alone. On this basis, the official history of psychiatry suggests that the introduction of chlorpromazine leads to the slow but inevitable end of the asylum era. In the words of Lieberman (2015 : 180), “[i]t is no coincidence that the asylum population began to decline from its peak in the United States in the same year Thorazine was released.” For Shorter (1997), the triumph of chlorpromazine as the first “antipsychotic” drug represents a breakthrough for the psychiatric profession as important as Pinel unchaining the mad 150 years before—it was proof of the biological causation of mental disease and, just as importantly, a safe treatment modularity with which to control, if not cure, the symptoms of severe mental disorder.
Unfortunately, the above picture of the psychopharmaceutical “revolution” does not stand up to closer scrutiny. The available evidence demonstrates that the drugs were—and continue to be—no more useful than previous physical treatments, either in the sense of proving an underlying biological aetiology for mental illness or in terms of the potential harm posed to patients (see, e.g., Breggin and Cohen 1999 ; Burstow 2015; Davies 2013; Kirsch 2009 ; Moncrieff 2009 ; Whitaker 2010a). As Moncrieff (2009 : 1) has outlined,
there is no real demarcation between previous eras’ psychiatric treatments, and the theories that justified them, and our own; that the need to believe in a cure for psychiatric conditions that drove and sustained people’s faith in insulin coma therapy, ECT, radical surgery, sex hormone therapy and many other bizarre interventions is the strongest impetus behind the use of modern-day psychiatric drugs.
I argue here that the drugs revolution can be understood as a significant success for welfare capitalism, where institutional costs are transformed into profits for pharmaceutical corporations. At the same time, the decline of the welfare state and rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s eventuate in chemical forms of social control largely replacing the institution and other forms of physical constraint as the more subtle and preferred technology for managing deviance in capitalist society. Initially suspicious of drug therapy, the evidence also suggests that psychiatric professionals in fact remained for some time wedded to the institution as their traditional power base and only belatedly turned to drugs as a technique of legitimating their expansion beyond the asylum walls. Thus, the idea of a “drugs revolution” in the twentieth century can be understood as a myth used to retrospectively legitimate the current, dominant treatment modality within the mental health system and the continuance of the psychiatric profession as the dominant group of experts responsible for defining and “treating” mental illness.
Contrary to psychiatric mythology, the introduction of chlorpromazine to the mental health system happened by accident rather than design, the term “antipsychotic” being later added by pharmaceutical companies to more effectively market the drug to institutional psychiatry and state authorities. Hypothesised as a beneficial anaesthetic for major operations, the drug was originally used by Henri Laborit, a French naval surgeon, for its antihistaminic properties in 1949. The surgeon (cited in Whitaker 2010a: 48) noted that the results of the drug appeared positive in that the patient “felt no pain, no anxiety, and often did not remember his operation.” Thus, Laborit felt chlorpromazine offered a potential improvement on barbiturates and morphine, popularly used as pre-operation anaesthetics at the time. At a medical conference in 1951, he further stated that the drug appeared to produce “a veritable medicinal lobotomy,” and for this reason might also be of use to psychiatry (Laborit, cited in Whitaker 2010a: 49). The following year, Jean Delay and Pierre Deniker, two prominent French psychiatrists, put the drug to the test on patients they had labelled as “psychotic” at St. Anne’s Hospital in Paris (Whitaker 2010a: 49–50). The first patient to be given the drug was a 57-year-old male labourer who had been admitted for “making improvised political speeches in cafes, becoming involved in fights with strangers, and for ... walking around the street with a pot of flowers on his head preaching his love of liberty” (Delay, cited in Shorter 1997: 250). After three weeks of chlorpromazine the psychiatrists discharged the patient, observing a new calmness within him. The authorities were impressed with the results of the drug on the asylum population; while still conscious and responsive to the ward staff, the inmates were much more subdued and quiet. As with ECT and pre-frontal lobotomy, the drug produced a more manageable and compliant patient. The psychiatrists wrote triumphantly of the chlorpromazine-drugged patient in 1952 that “he rarely takes the initiative of asking a question” and, further, “does not express his preoccupations, desires, or preference” (Delay and Deniker, cited in Whitaker 2010a: 50).
As a quick and cheap substitute for lobotomy, the drug quickly became popular across asylums in Europe. Hans Lehmann, the physician who is often cited as responsible for the introduction of chlorpromazine to North America, admitted he was intrigued by the claim of the research papers and drugs marketing literature that the drug acted “like a chemical lobotomy” (Shorter 1997 : 252). After the implementation of the drug regimen at his Verdun Hospital in Montreal, Lehmann felt chlorpromazine achieved roughly the same results as insulin treatment and ECT but was an improvement on psychosurgery (of which he was an avid supporter) (Moncrieff 2009 : 45). The drug, announced Lehmann, was most useful in managing the psychiatric patient in that it produced an “emotional indifference” in the inmate (cited in Breggin 1991: 55). As Breggin (1991: 55) notes, chlorpromazine was not conceptualised by the profession and business promoters as a cure for mental illness or even an alleviator of symptoms, but rather a pacifier of one’s character. “We have to remember,” stated the psychiatrist E. H. Parsons (cited in Whitaker 2010a: 50–51) in 1955, “that we are not treating diseases with this drug ... We are using a neuropharmacologic agent to produce a specific effect.” That effect has been summated by Breggin (1991: 55, emphasis original) as, “[p]atient’s don’t lose their symptoms, they lose interest in them.”
Thus, chlorpromazine’s success in sedating patients on the ward was hardly a “revolution” in psychiatric practice. Prior to the 1950s, notes Moncrieff (2009 : 41), other psychotropics were used extensively by the profession both inside and outside the institution; “[i]npatients were frequently prescribed several different drugs simultaneously,” she comments, “and outpatients were also frequently prescribed drugs, mostly barbiturates and stimulants.” Unlike today, this drugging of patients was viewed by the profession as something of an embarrassment; psychiatry was all too aware that such chemical interventions were a form of physical control rather than anything that could be considered as “therapeutic” (Moncrieff 2009: 41). At the time, drugs were not seen by the majority of psychiatrists as central to the future of their practice. For this reason, psychiatrists in America remained, for a time, reticent to use chlorpromazine in their institutions for the simple reason that they already had other physical and chemical treatments which acted in roughly the same manner. Further proof that the drug was no “miracle” pill for mental disorder (as the New York Times would go on to describe it in the mid1950s) (Whitaker 2010a: 58) is provided by Scull (2015: 367–368), who observes both that the numbers of patients in asylums were falling in many parts of America prior to the introduction of chlorpromazine in the 1950s and that many European countries witnessed no such reductions in patient numbers until the 1970s—many years after the drug had been introduced there. The impreciseness of the correlation between chlorpromazine and deinstitutionalisation has led Scull and other commentators (see, e.g., Whitaker 2010a: 206–207) to a different conclusion—that fiscal considerations of state legislatures took precedent over any claims to effective treatment or the “curability” of those labelled as mentally disordered. The psychiatric institution was no longer economically viable as a holding place for problematic populations, so the hype created around new “neuroleptic” drugs such as chlorpromazine and the possibility of returning patients to “the community” were used in a way which “allowed governments to save money while simultaneously giving their policy a humanitarian gloss” (Scull 1984: 139). As Lieberman (2015: 179) notes, the American success of chlorpromazine was achieved by the pharmaceutical company Smith, Kline & French, who focused their efforts on state governments through the fiscal arguments of “health economics” and “cost-cutting,” rather than promising psychiatry a miraculous cure for mental illness. Together with a successful media campaign (see Whitaker 2010a: 58–61) claiming that chlorpromazine symbolised a “new era of psychiatry,” this tactic worked; within a year of launching the drug, Smith, Kline & French’s total sales increased by over a third (Moncrieff 2009 : 42).
The success of chlorpromazine was therefore not the result of scientific endeavour and the development of ever-more sophisticated psychiatric practice, but instead social and economic forces beyond the profession— namely, institutions as economically unviable forms of social control, the marketing of drugs by pharmaceutical companies, and the eventual need for the expansion of psychiatry as moral managers of the general population. The success was economic not therapeutic; while no disease had been identified or treated with chlorpromazine, pharmaceutical companies recognised that, with deinstitutionalisation, there was now substantial rewards to be made from the business of community-based mental health care. Meanwhile, governments could justify cuts and closures of the asylums and instead fund outpatients and drug treatments as both cheaper and more “effective” public health interventions. In time, the crisis of deinstitutionalisation facilitated the psychiatric profession’s increased commitment to the biomedical model and the use of drugs as a primary source of medical legitimation for their continued practice and expansion into other arenas of economic and social life. Drugs aided the professional legitimation of mental health work outside the institution (Moncrieff 2009: 49), and a revised history of the “drugs revolution” was constructed to suggest the natural progression of psychiatry as a branch of scientific medicine.
At first, the post-war expansion of outpatient clinics and community-based mental health teams (often comprising of a variety of social and medical practitioners) appeared to threaten psychiatry’s natural position as the ultimate authority on mental illness. Yet the post-institutional turn to biomedicine and drugs became a useful justification for reinforcing the power of the psychiatrists in these new settings. Only the psychiatrist had the power to prescribe and alter the medications of the patient, and with the growing mythology that the drugs were actually effective, it meant that all other treatment options were given secondary importance, subservient to chemical interventions in the community (for an example of this dynamic, see Samson 1995 ). Thus, Moncrieff (2009: 44) suggests that by the mid-twentieth century psychiatry had become a “sitting duck” for a new treatment with which they could legitimately justify a disengagement from the asylum and an expansion into the world outside. Drugs provided that justification and fitted well with the popular view from other branches of medicine. As Breggin (1991: 55) states of the benefits of drug interventions for psychiatrists,
the dose could be “titrated”—that is, it could be raised and lowered to obtain the desired effect. As an ostensibly more humane intervention, drug therapy both salved the consciences of psychiatrists and made them feel more like legitimate doctors.
With the development of successive generations of neuroleptics and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) such as Prozac, Zoloft, and Paxil, sales have skyrocketed as psychiatric practice has expanded into new arenas of public and private life. The evidence, however, has repeatedly shown that the drugs do not work. For example, an extensive review of both the published and unpublished clinical trials of the “wonder drug” Prozac by the clinical psychologist Irving Kirsch (2009 ) concluded that it was no more effective than placebo (i.e., dummy pills with no active ingredients) (see also Whitaker 2010a; Whitaker and Cosgrove 2015). Similar findings have been outlined by Moncrieff (2009) in a review of research on various antidepressants and stimulants. “[P]sychiatric drug treatment,” she concludes, “is currently administered on the basis of a huge collective myth; the myth that psychiatric drugs act by correcting the biological basis of psychiatric symptoms or diseases” (Moncrieff 2009: 237). It is therefore an impressive success for biomedical psychiatry that, despite the lack of evidence, the idea of “chemical imbalances” in the brains of those diagnosed as “mentally ill”—and psychopharmaceuticals as the “chemical cure”—has gained such traction in both popular and scientific discourse. In the words of Breggin and Cohen (1999 : 35), “[n]o psychiatric drug has ever been tailored to a known biochemical derangement,” and, “no biochemical imbalances have ever been documented with certainty in association with any psychiatric diagnosis.” This is something that psychiatrists have only recently owned up to, with Ronald Pies (cited in Whitaker and Cosgrove 2015: 186), editor-in-chief of the Psychiatric Times, admitting in 2011 that “[i]n truth, the ‘chemical imbalance’ notion was always a kind of urban legend—never a theory seriously propounded by well-informed psychiatrists.” An urban legend may be, but nevertheless a biomedical rhetoric that can justify psychiatric intervention and drug treatment as valid medical practice. The psychiatrist Daniel Carlat has freely acknowledged that using the language of “chemical imbalances” at least suggests to patients that psychiatrists know what they are doing. In 2010, Carlat (cited in Whitaker and Cosgrove 2015: 187, emphasis added) declared,
I say that [“chemical imbalances in the brain”] not because I really believe it, because I know that the evidence isn’t really there for us to understand the mechanism. I think I say that because patients want to know something, and they want to know that we as physicians have some basic understanding of what we’re doing when we’re prescribing medications. And they certainly don’t want to hear that a psychiatrist essentially has no idea how these medications work.
Whitaker and Cosgrove (2015: 87) have discussed the significant benefits for both big pharma and the psychiatric profession in promoting drug use in the current mental health system. For the drug companies, psychiatry can medically legitimate their products as well as facilitate the expansion of the potential population for their products. In turn, the drug companies legitimate the institution of psychiatry as a “real” (meaning biomedically-based) part of medicine and facilitate the expansion of its areas of research and expertise through various funding and revenue streams. The outcome of this relationship has been fairly predictable—both parties have benefited enormously over time. Pharmaceutical companies continue to maximise their profits while psychiatry’s (and, by extension, other psy-professionals’) power—as signified by the proliferation of its discourse among the general population—has significantly expanded over the past 35 years.
That said, the expansion of the psy-professions in general and the proliferation of the psychiatric discourse to hegemonic status in neoliberal society cannot be explained by the success of the drug industry alone. This requires further analysis of the ideological role of psy-disciplines, which will be outlined in the next chapter. Suffice here to say that a Marxist analysis of psychiatric power always needs to consider the benefits to capitalism inferred by their changing discourse and practices. And while every part of civil society can serve the economic base, it is the value of such institutions as part of the superstructure which distinguishes them as ultimately relevant and useful to the ruling classes. So whereas we may think of the drugs issue only in terms of the economic prerogatives of capitalism, it is in fact their value as a means of social and ideological control of the population which should be given particular importance here. As Moncrieff (2009: 238) has rightly stated of the dominant biomedical view of psychopharmaceutical interventions as effective treatment for mental illnesses,
this knowledge has itself become an instrument of psychiatric power. It has facilitated the particular form of social control that is embodied in psychiatric practice, by construing psychiatric constraint as the medical cure of mental disease. It has helped to disperse psychiatric power throughout the population by concealing the moral nature of psychiatric judgements
From moral treatment to drug treatment, psychiatry’s project remains unchanged: their goal is the moral management and behavioural adjustment of populations considered socially deviant, whether unemployed, underproductive, or politically suspect. The intervention of pharmaceutical companies in the process of psychiatric medicalisation needs to be understood as a rather insignificant factor in the general production of the psychiatric discourse. As Horwitz and Wakefield (2007: 182, emphasis original) have commented on biomedical psychiatry’s takeover of the DSM in the 1970s, “[t]here is no evidence that pharmaceutical companies had a role in developing DSM-III diagnostic criteria.” While this statement might be challenged by the DSM-III research of Lane (2007 ) and others, it is still accurate to conclude that pharmaceutical companies have never been the originators of diagnostic categories; this has remained the responsibility of psychiatry (regardless of how far the profession may sometimes appear to be in big pharma’s pockets). Thus, while SSRIs and other contemporary psychoactive drugs can be seen as interventions of social control performed by mental health workers, “to restrain individuals from behavior and experience that are not complementary to the requirements of the dominant value system” (Lennard, cited in Conrad 1975: 19), the specific form of behaviour and experience which is considered in need of reform or restraint is still dictated by the psychiatric profession.