Ένα ενδιαφέρον απόσπασμα για τη γέννηση του συστήματος διαγνώσεων στην Ψυχιατρική από το ντοκυμαντερ του Adam Curtis “The Trap: What happened to our dreams of freedom” το οποίο σε 3 ωριαία επεισόδια διαπραγματεύεται τις έννοιες της ατομικότητας και της ελευθερίας και το πως αυτές έχουν διαμορφώσει τις κοινωνίες μας:
– στο 1ο επισόδιο κοιτάει τα αποτελέσματα από την προσπάθεια πολιτικών (δεξιών και αριστερών) τη δεκαετία του 90 να επεκτείνουν στο δημόσιο βίο μια ιδέα ελευθερίας βασισμένη στο Game Theory, ενός συστήματος το οποίο αφαιρετικά βλέπει τους ανθρώπους σαν ρομπότ που υπολογίζουν το ιδιωτικό τους συμφέρον και οδηγούνται από κίνητρα παρά την ιδέα του δημοσιου καθήκοντος
– στο 2ο επισόδιο κοιτάει το πως ο εθισμός στα νούμερα και τη στατιστική άλλαξε την κοινωνία εξαρτώντας την από τα ψυχοφάρμακα
– στο 3ο επισόδιο κοιτάει την διαδικασία αναζήτησης της ελευθερίας: τι διαφοροποιεί τον καταπιεστή από τον καταπιεζόμενο; Είναι δυνατόν κάποιος που με τις καλύτερες των προθέσεων πάει να ελευθερώσει ένα λαό να γίνεται δια μέσου της δράσης του αυτής τύραννος; Κι αν ναι, με ποιο τρόπο γίνεται αυτό;
Σε τέσσερα You Tube βιντεάκια αποσπάσματα από το 2ο επεισόδιο:
και ένα γραπτό απόσπασμα απο το τέταρτο βιντεάκι:
With the development of psychopharmaka) people imagined that they might live in a world where there would never be a worry, not even a grief, where there would never be conflict, concern or worry over alternatives that make possible the kinds of progress that we’ve seen in the past.
But then the man who had created the check list [DSM] (Robert Spitzer) admitted that it might be leading millions of people to believe that they were disordered when they were not. The check list added up only observable symptoms. They deliberately excluded any understanding of the patients’ life. Because of this, he said, it confused genuine psychological disorder with normal human feelings of sadness and anxiety, and that this was happening on a wide scale. All this was being said by one of America’s most powerful psychiatrists Dr. Robert Spitzer.
Robert Spitzer: “What happened is that we made estimates of prevalence of mental disorders totally descriptively without considering that many of these conditions might be normal reactions which are not disorders, that’s the problem, because we were not looking at the context in which those conditions developed.”
Adam Curtis: “So you have effectively medicallized much of ordinary human sadness, fear, ordinary experiences.”
Robert Spitzer: “I think we have to some extent. How serious a problem it is is not known. I don’t know if it’s 20%, 30% I don’t know but that’s a considerable amount if it’s 20 or 30%.” What was happening was that large part of normal human experience, grief, disappointment, loneliness where all being re-classified as medical disorders. In the process a new system of management was emerging. The drugs took away those complex and difficult feelings and made the individuals happier but they also made them simpler beings. More easy to predict and manage, and closer to the machine-like creatures at the heart of economic models.
Jerome Wakefield: “By using check lists of symptoms about emotions you have gone out and confused normal human responses to life with mental disorder and therefore created an illusion of a vast epidemic, a medicalized illusion. And obviously a situation where you medicalize is a situation where your focus will not be on social change it will be on controlling individual to fit in properly. That’s the subtle and overall danger here. That it could serve our kind of social-economic systems’ needs in a way in which we become more efficient but less human.”
What the psychiatrists had discovered was that an objective system based on numbers had led them into a trap. The numbers had imposed their own narrow logic on how we thought and felt about ourselves. And the politicians were about to find their attempts to manage society by using numbers would also have the strangest consequences. Far from helping them achieve their progressive vision they would actually make society more rigid and even harder to change.