My motive for writing this book is to alert people that psychiatric thought is illogical, deceptive and harmful. The concept of mental illness is seriously flawed. Yet it is used to justify the expenditure of millions of dollars searching for the causes of it in the brain, thus obstructing the development of other paradigms for understanding and relieving human suffering. The concept of mental illness is also used to define what is abnormal and, hence, what is normal behavior. It is a serious error to allow a flawed institution like psychiatry to define the ideals of behavior and the standards of deviance. The flawed concept of mental illness is also used to justify the labelling and drugging of significant numbers of people, including children. More serious is the use of the flawed concept of mental illness to define people and to deprive certain people of freedom by confining them to institutions called mental hospitals, a practice that makes a mockery of our claim that, as a society, we value human freedom and have the obligation to defend freedom around the world.
I do not expect the ideas in this book to be happily accepted either by psychiatrists or by the general public. Psychiatrists will be unhappy with it and, indeed, either repress it or ignore it because it challenges their identity as medical physicians. In my view, psychiatry is more like a branch of homeland security or a kind of secular religion than it is a branch of medicine, but the claim that mental illnesses are brain diseases is a rhetorical deception that prevents us from seeing psychiatry in these ways. The general public will be unhappy with this critique of psychiatry because it relies on psychiatry to protect them against school shooters, terrorists and other dangerous or scary people. We consider ourselves to be a nation ruled by law, but law is not enough. The public demands preventive detention as well as legal detention.
The author, Ron Leifer, MD, MA, is a psychiatrist with over fifty years' experience as a non-medical, non-coercive psychotherapist. In 2001, Ron was awarded the "Thomas Szasz Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Cause of Civil Liberties"
Excerpt:
The Behemoth is a large and powerful mythical monster mentioned in the Old Testament, Book of Job, along with the Leviathan. The Behemoth was a land monster, pictured as a hippopotamus or an elephant who lived in the desert East of Eden. The Leviathan was a monster of the sea, imagined as a whale or a dragon. Both monsters were deployed by God at creation as adversaries with whom humans had to contend. At the end of days they would fight each other and be destroyed by God. Thomas Hobbes used them as metaphors for the state in the English civil war (1640-1651) which was a conflict between Protestants and Catholics, as well as between parliamentarians and monarchists. Hobbes used the Leviathan as a metaphor for the oppressive state to whom citizens transferred their power and autonomy in return for protection as a social contract. The Leviathan is a metaphor for the weak short parliament that shared power with the limited monarchy of Charles I.
Hobbes also wrote a shorter, less known book called “the Behemoth,” which is a metaphor for the more oppressive combination of the long parliament and the absolute monarch, Charles I—who was executed because of his tyranny and corruption and because his wife was Catholic. Other authors also used the Leviathan and the Behemoth as metaphors in their work. Franz Neuman published a book in 1941 called “Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933-1944” (Nazism). Interesting in this connection, the word “Gestapo” is an acronym for “Geheime Staatspolizei.” Geheime means “secret” and staatspolizei means “state police.”
The Gestapo were the perfectly legal but immoral state police of the Nazis. Psychiatry is an agent of social control disguised as a medical practice and, therefore, secret. Psychiatry is also a secret state police, a Behemoth. A large, powerful entity that is licensed by the state. I apologize for this comparison of psychiatry to the Nazi Gestapo. Psychiatrists don’t commit genocide or execute people as the Gestapo did. Nevertheless, the comparison is valid to the degree that both psychiatry and the Gestapo functioned as big and powerful agents of social control on behalf of the Behemoth state.
This essay is a critique of psychiatry but I am not motivated by antagonism or disrespect for particular psychiatrists, although, I must disclose that I have occasionally had these feelings. Many psychiatrists are decent people whose motivations are to reduce human suffering. As a group, however, I have found psychiatrists to be uneducated and unaware of C.S. Lewis’ view that of all the tyrannies the sincere effort to help those who don’t want it is the most oppressive of all.
My motive for writing this critique is to alert people that psychiatric thought is illogical, deceptive and harmful. The concept of mental illness is seriously flawed. Yet it is used to justify the expenditure of millions of dollars searching for the causes of it in the brain, thus obstructing the development of other paradims for understanding and relieving human suffering. The concept of mental illness is also used to define what is abnormal and, hence, what is normal behavior. It is a serious error to allow a flawed institution like psychiatry to define the ideals of behavior and the standards of deviance. The flawed concept of mental illness is also used to justify the labelling and drugging of significant numbers of people, including children. More serious is the use of the flawed concept of mental illness to define people and to deprive certain people of freedom by confining them to institutions called mental hospitals, a practice that makes a mockery of our claim that, as a society, we value human freedom and have the obligation to defend freedom around the world.
I do not expect the ideas in this book to be happily accepted either by psychiatrists or by the general public. Psychiatrists will be unhappy with it and, indeed, either repress it or ignore it because it challenges their identity as medical physicians. In my view, psychiatry is more like a branch of homeland security or a kind of secular religion than it is a branch of medicine, but the claim that mental illnesses are brain diseases is a rhetorical deception that prevents us from seeing psychiatry in these ways. The general public will be unhappy with this critique of psychiatry because it relies on psychiatry to protect them against school shooters, terrorists and other dangerous or scary people. We consider ourselves to be a nation ruled by law, but law is not enough. The public demands preventive detention as well as legal detention.
