I found the above image online yesterday, at the site The Things We Say.
Mental illness is also man-made. It is the invention of psychiatry – their spurious medicalization of all significant problems of thinking, feeling, and/or behaving. Its purpose is to legitimize the prescription of dangerous psychotropic drugs to as many people as possible. It benefits psychiatrists and drug companies, but damages, stigmatizes, and disempowers its victims.
It was made, promoted, and expanded by venal, unscrupulous people. It is justified by psychiatric leaders in the same way that slavery and apartheid were justified by their proponents in their respective eras.
Mental illness is a man-made concept that has no objective reference – it corresponds to nothing real. An artifactual tribute to human self-deception, ambition, and greed, it is a wrong turning in the history of human development. Every day thousands of people die prematurely on the altar of this gilded idol.
But like all spurious bigotry, it withers when exposed to the light of critical scrutiny.
If you’re not already doing so, please speak out. Pass the word. Just a few years ago, those of us who challenged psychiatric orthodoxy were marginalized as cranks and eccentrics. The protests of psychiatric survivors were condescendingly dismissed as symptoms of their putative illnesses. Today we are a worldwide movement, gaining daily in numbers and momentum. Each one of us alone and isolated can achieve little or nothing. But united, we can close once and for all this sordid chapter of human history.