From Counter Punch. Despite increased spending on mental health treatment, mental illness disability and suicide rates have skyrocketed. “Perhaps more disturbingly,” notes clinical psychologist Noël Hunter, “recent evidence has demonstrated that as contact with psychiatric intervention increases, so too does completed suicide, suggesting the possibility that the current mental health system may be creating the very problems it purports to aid.” In Hunter’s recently published Trauma and Madness in Mental Health Services (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), she asks, “Are we continuing to funnel money into a fundamentally broken system?”
Great article. Reminds me of Franco Basaglia again who cracked the atom of this problem if you ask me. At the root is something identical to racism and anti-Semitism. In 1950’s deep south USA racists lynched black men. In psychiatry the psychiatrists lynches people for the bigots in society. He’s a middle man or go between. A proxy. This is what Basaglia found and he states it brilliantly in his papers – https://michaelzfreeman.org/a-problem-of-institutional-psychiatry-exclusion-as-a-social-and-psychiatric-category-franco-basaglia-franca-basaglia-ongaro/ … Also see https://michaelzfreeman.org/breaking-through-the-british-psychiatric-information-blockade-the-real-dope-on-basaglia/